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Sheet Metal Orders In… and Official at Burning Man!

This weekend was epic from any number of perspectives. First and foremost, a most amazing birthday celebration for my wife – we had an awesome time eating crepes in the morning and spoiling ourselves at the Six Seven this evening – nothing beats that awesome day! Yet we did make a critical milestone for the VIXToscope — ordering sheet metal. And that tops off a week that had our official acceptance at Burning Man when I spoke with my art liason. Such wow, so many grateful.

The sheet metal order was no joke – over $5k of non-refundable twisted pieces of hole-filled aluminum, let’s hope that not only is the master CAD drawing right, but the multi-layered complexity of exporting in a way that my sheet metal vendor could understand with their automated system made for a real beast of a production order. Multiple attempts at converting things only to have half of them fail for what at the time was inscrutable reasons that I now have a somewhat better ability to scrute, so that was exciting. Finger’s crossed, this last way of converting was mostly straightforward most of the time so yeah, I hope that works. We’ll find out in about 10 days.

I used oshcut.com based primarily on their ability to brake press pieces >48″, couple with their online interface. Very easy to upload stuff and have them say yes, here’s your piece or “No, we can’t make this and here’s a video showing you why”. This latter part was crucial in identifying problems with the Triangle sheet metal piece. Originally, this had 90 degree flanges just like on the Endcaps. Those, however, could be manufactured whereas it didn’t work on the Triangle. I changed it to be 45 degree flanges, which solved the manufacturability problem but at the expense of fewer LEDs on a smaller surface. Still, reality is pretty awesome, and I’m glad that this was so easy to catch and ultimately correct — although the revamp of the Triangle took about 12 hours for this newb to figure out and hand-tweak a bunch of settings. Still, I have confidence that the final design, no matter how I got there, is going to work as rendered.

So… sheet metal is off for manufacturing. Yes!! That’s a huge milestone. I now need to switch over instantly to “complete TSlot”. That’s been pretty static for the past month, but I have to add in some complexity on interior vinyl mounting and the actual kaleidoscope mirror mounts. Heads down the first couple of days this week in every spare moment to complete the TSlot order…. after which will come a sprint with the vinyl order, having to finalize the fractal designs… then figure out how to control the LEDs from Resolume, that’ll be fun, and oh yeah, the music and midi controller… yep, no problem. Yikes, that’s a lot for the next four weeks until APOG….

In parallel news, we are NOW OFFICIAL!!! at Burning Man, yayyy!!! I am thrilled to have spoken with Bliss, my art liason. Wonderful, easy conversation that just tracked through the basics of the application. I was super careful to have everything together for the submission, so this was easy. I can imagine that less well prepared projects might yield deeper questioning.

The biggest point they questioned was my assertion that this was designed to be set up by a single person in 1.5 days, and I’ve allotted 3 days from 2 people at Burning Man to address the additional complexity and difficulty of assembling things on the open, windswept sunburnt playa. They were like, “Some projects have 13 people assembling something that is truly trivial. Yet here you are, with a crew of two and claiming radical self sufficiency… why do you think you’ll be ok with that?” APOG. “Oh, nice, that’ll help. You go!” I did so much engineering to make this easy to assemble on playa even though its difficult to get to the point of being able to produce it…. this really WILL be the acid test. Just how easy IS this to set up on playa? Well, the first test is how easy is it to assemble in normal conditions? Starting with my driveway…

Thank goodness we have a shakedown cruise at APOG in a month. This is going to be HARD to achieve, but will be much easier than setting up on the playa. Boy, did I learn that last year…. that desert is no joke. Everything is MUCH harder. Setting up in Darrington is going to be noticeably easier… or at least, so I hope.

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