Earlier this year I created a circuit board called the “anthropomorphEYES“!
It’s a 12-segment display of LEDs that I’ve provided a special 3D printable lens for that once added to the front of the board, allows them to appear more expressive. The idea is that you can add this set of boards to any of your favorite household appliances and elevate them from thing, to friend!
The .stl files for the lens is available on my GitHub, along with the eye code sketch. I’ve written a blog post all about how you can edit my code to create your own custom expressions, and animate them into more complex displays of emotionality!
I’ve made these because I personally believe it’s an important human quality that we share our empathy with the inanimate objects that fill our lives!
Over the summer I’ve take the design of the lens a step further and created a goggle adaptor for the board that turns them into a wearable! So, if putting eyes on your toaster isn’t something you’re interested in, maybe you’d like to have a set of programable goggles that can express how you really feel.
I have designed four different fixtures which act as adaptors for the Athropomorph-EYES boards, and named them after the inanimate objects that inspired their design! You can find the .stl files on my GitHub!
CREATING GOGGLE FIXTURES IN CAD
The challenge in making a custom goggle adaptor for the Anthropomorph-EYES board was creating a fixture that fit to the contour of the eye/face at one end, while housing the footprint of the circuit board at the other. In order to pull this off, I learned about a new feature in my CAD software that I hadn’t used yet.
This week I taught myself how to use the “loft” feature in Fusion360! What does this mean? The software allows you to select two surfaces of different sizes and shape and bridge them together with a generated transition from one to the other.
Once I wrapped my head around this order of operations, the sky was the limit. From here I had but to make something that looked cool (and was also 3D printable).
Luckily, our new fancy pants PRUSA printer was able to pull off the sizable spans I designed for the vents on the side of the goggle:
This is something that our older Makerbot just couldn’t manage. Here is an idea of the quality difference from printer to printer:
If you plan on printing out a set of goggles, I suggest using the best printer you have access to. Otherwise the quality make suffer a bit.
The next step was giving the surface some character. If you are interested in painting your goggles in order to give them a weathered effect, or any other custom quality, I suggest coating them in a base of gesso first!
Gesso is the stuff artists use to prime their canvases. It gives the painting surface a bit of a tooth, which helps the paint transfer better, and also prevents it from chipping or flaking off once it dries.
Here are the flavors I came up with so far! I hope they give you some inspiration should you decide to print out my goggle adaptor and give this a go for your own set of anthropomorphEYES!
THE POLITZ-EYE GOGGLES
In my heart, through this whole process, I was chasing the aesthetic of traffic indicators; both the cross-walk variety, and the stop light sort. As I made progress on this first pair however, it continuously looked more and more like a police vehicle (especially after I added the CYAN details). So I embraced it.
**Note that there is an extra hinge piece included in the .stl folder. You should add one of these to the two mounting holes on the side of the goggle to give it some extra strength! Do this to both left and right eye-pieces!
THE FLIPPY CROSS WALK EYES
This set is slightly different than the “politzEYE” set above in that the lenses that house the circuit board are on hinges to that you can flip them up and out of the way, should you decide to wear them on your face… for some reason. =P
The pin of the hinge is a raw piece of your 1.75mm 3D printing filament, and the hardware is M3 8mm.
**Note that there is an extra hinge piece included in the .stl folder. You should add one of these to the two mounting holes on the side of the goggle to give it some extra strength! Do this to both left and right eye-pieces!
CONSTRUCTION GOGGLES
This set is slightly more robust and chunky. Like a containment box for electric fixtures.
There are a lot of nice flat surfaces on these. I also added some mounting holes on the top of either. I encourage anyone add something here if you feel inspired =P
TRAFFIC LIGHT GOGGLES
Finally, after two iterations, I nailed it. What I was groping at in my minds eye were the traffic lights in Tokyo. After my trip there this Spring, I saw some in the wild. I returned and designed these:
Miniature versions of the real majestic beauties I saw in the city:
This set uses a slightly modified lens. It doesn’t have the 12-segments blocked out, rather, some conical dots that produce something closer to the effect above.
Similarly, it fits into the goggle adaptor from the inside.
WHAT IS NEXT?
If you’re interested in making a set of these for yourself, you can pick up a set of the anthropomorphEYES on my Tindie store in a variety of colors!
I’m sure you’ve noticed these aren’t faceted with straps of any sort yet. If you’re interested in making a meaty custom buckle from leather and elastic band, I suggest checking out my build logs from some of the other pairs of goggles I’ve made in the past!
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