3D-Modeling/Printing.

I designed and printed camera cases and mounts for a home security system that I also wrote the software for.

I was mostly motivated to make something useful for myself while also expanding my engineering skill set. It was a very practical project that required a different variety of engineering skills from what I was accustomed to. I had never worked with any 3D-modeling or CAD software before and although I had plenty of software engineering experience, the programming domain was also different. Let's take a look!

The software aspect of a home security system is fairly simple and the essential features can be summed up as,

1. Make "cameras" take pictures
2. Send these pictures to a "monitor"
3. Display these pictures as a "feed"
4. Save these pictures for video playback

For my system, the "cameras" are Rasperry Pi's.

The "monitor" is any computer. Here is a quick look at the video playback view.

A couple of minutes later,

All of the folders at the top left, are organized by time and contain the images sent from the cameras. The UI software is vanilla, but much more importantly; the software is very robust. A Camera feed will reconnect if a connection is lost and hard-disk space is monitored and freed as necessary. I learned quickly that recording images 24/7 will eat up hundreds of Gigabytes in a very short amount of time. Altogether, the software was fairly simple for me to make, so let's look at the new skills that I learned.

I always thought that 3D-printing was cool, and was specifically intrigued by the idea of making a three dimensional object as effortlessly as printing a paper document. When I discovered how affordable they had become, I bought my first, $200 3D-printer.

I quickly verified that the printing process is mostly effortless! After a few adjustments and covering the printing platform with painters type, it was just about as simple as clicking "File Print" for a paper document!

The modeling is the part that I knew I would enjoy the most; it also was the bulk of the work. I used the free and open-source OpenSCAD software for the 3D-modeling, which is listed as "The Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller". Checkout the rendering of my camera-case design in OpenSCAD,

As expected, it looks just like the final result although I had a different prototype design initially.

Altogether, designing and realizing my home security system was fun. As I find the time, I plan to keep adding more capabilities to my system. For practically minded people with engineering abilities, I highly recommend navigating multi-faceted projects like this. The fundamentals are timeless, the designs are practically timeless (syntactical translation at the worst), and the actual printing technology is likely to keep improving! I also highly recommend the 3D-modeling for children to accompany a math/science course. If they have played with legos and get a little bit of help, it should be off to the races!