Wesley's Tool-Box

Indoor uses of thermographic imaging camera include finding leaks of heat or water, owing to the fact that people doing repairs may have the budget and the repeated usage that justify owning such a device. But as the cost to buy one goes down and the size becomes small enough to carry in a pocket, more uses come up. The one I found useful in raising kids is cooking and food safety. As you can see here, a bowl of spaghetti straight out of an oven didn't look particularly dangerous at first...


But with FLIR ONE Pro, you could see that the handle was quite hot. The spaghetti itself was also sizzling at over 70C. This image served as a good way to teach my kids why they should be careful with a bowl that came out of an oven.

It's safe to say at this point that Disney's feature-length animation "Frozen" is a big success. Even my daughters have become big fans - watching both the subtitled and dubbed versions, reading the story book, memorizing the theme song "Let It Go", and so on. So when I was looking around for something to print in 3D, a version of Elsa's tiara crown immediataly caught my eyes. Although short-lived, this was one of the most memorable items in the movie.

Unlike most of the 3D-printed objects I made so far, the printing was only the first step for making the crown. It would have to be worn on the head, needing more work. To find out how it went, read on.

I've been downloading and 3D printing a lot of interesting stuff so far. But eventually, I had to tackle the art of using a 3D modeling program to create custom designs. For my first attempt, I decided to make a coin with a logo on its face. Specifically, the logo was that of KPX, which is where I work. As far as I am aware, the company never issued a commemorative coin before, so it seemed to be a good choice.

A few weeks ago, I had installed Autodesk's 123D Design software to make 3D models. I was originally thinking of TinkerCAD, but that had been bought by Autodesk, so I thought I might as well just use Autodesk's original software. Apart from being slow to load on my Mac, it was thankfully not too difficult to make some shapes and move things around.


After a couple of practice, I started drawing the KPX logo. Sadly, there wasn't a way of importing an image file to trace over. As a workaround, I put a grid over an image of the logo and drew the lines as closely resembling as possible on the grid within 123D Design. It came out fairly well.

My kids wanted bigger cars from the 3D printer because the ones I made were too small. So I wanted a design that maxes out the print dimensions, while being somewhat special. That's why picked this balloon-powered car. I initially tried the design that uses snap-on wheels, but seeing that the wheels may not turn smoothly, I went ahead with the one that needed separate wires that held the wheels. To see how this went, read on.

One of the fun things about 3D printing is that, with a clever design, you can have movable parts already inside the printed object. One fine example is having captive wheels inside toy cars, like the ones you see here. No assembly is required - they are already inside the main body and can freely turn after scraping off some excess materials unintentionally introduced during the print. Here is the video of them in action.