-- GregKatz? - 12 Aug 2008

Tuesday, July 15

• Nickel doped, electrically conductive PDMS came in today. Spent a while trying to clean with mold for making DPS. Hope to make electrically conductive DPS stalks for testing with stickybot 2. Also need to make a bottom plate for the mold. Using solidworks for that.
• Had microwedge meeting. Discussed ways to make the nested spoon scaling prototype protrude out of plane. First idea is to use thermoform plastic and then form with either a mold or using electrostatic force or magnet. Second idea is to just mechanically kink them if they are metal.
• Talked to Aaron about ideas from meeting on Friday about scaling on glass by using lots of small patches instead of flaps because we don't know if structureless, backless flaps will really work well. But it is likely that many independent, self-leveling, microwedge samples could work together for high strength
• Tried molding electrically conductive pdms on D5 for first time.
• Sanjay taught me how to use the vinyl cutter.

Wednesday, July 16

• Worked with Barret on machining the bottom part of the dps mold. Stalled because unigraphics is down. Learned how to do a cavity in solidworks.
• Discovered that electrically conductive pdms molded into a wafer is hard to get out of the mold because it is brittle and rips at edges. Once I did get it out I realized that it has a rough grain that is too big to make the small features of the microwedges.
• Made a couple of sketches of the nested spoons on solidworks.
• Did first few cuts of nested spoon shape with the vinyl cutter using the basic sticker material that came with the machine. It had no problem with the size of the geometry. It was able to make spoons much smaller than we would probably want. It wasn't particularly smooth at cutting, however. This may be because of dullness in the cutter, too much force from the cutter, or wrinkles in the material.
• Poured tap blue into dps mold for cleaning. Barret taught me the rest of the details on pouring the dps mold.
• Sat in on meeting with DRAPER about microadhesives and spines for zman.
• Ordered several different types and thicknesses of thermoform plastic from Mcmaster.

Thursday, July 17

• Poured more tap blue to continue cleaning dps mold. Also tested to see if tap blue bonds with conductive pdms. Found out that tap blue will cure in the presence of the pdms but the pdms does not cure in the presence of tap blue. That means the pdms is tin-cured and we already knew the tap blue is platinum cured.
• Learned from Dan about how to use unigraphics to make a tool path on Haas for the wax piece of the dps mold.
• Continued working on vinyl cutter to make smoother better nested spoons.
• Finalized DXF files for laser CAMM of frames for electroadhesion testing.

Friday, July 18

• Group Meeting
• Received thermoplastics
• Made electroadhesion tests on frames with conductive mylar. Cut samples. Made conductive silicone epoxy. Made gap in mylar. Glued sample to mylar. Glued mylar to frame. Put on leads. Tried putting them on glass with voltage hooked up.
• Used haas to mill bottom piece for dps mold
• Helped Mandy with her mold.
• BBQ!
• Tried carbon doping sylgard

Saturday, July 19

• Poured conductive PDMS into DPS mold. It is a 48 hour cure.
• Worked on electroadhesive frame stuff.