Logo Prototypes

I was toying with the idea of opening an Etsy shop for stickers, keychains, and some of my art. This sparked the thought that I would like to have a nice logo and name for the shop. I started with some sketchbook and whiteboard brainstorming and started to circle around the idea of a lightbulb with a signature as a filament. I liked how it was hand drawn as a nod towards my art, but a lightbulb to indicate my engineering background.

The first names were "gregomatic" and "Greg's Lab" so I was using those letters at first. Eventually for the pen drawings in my sketchbook I ended up going for something more like "gkstudio" with my actual initials.

I made the final version in Procreate on my iPad and even made a gif of some little light markings! Then I went to Inkscape for vectorization so it was nice and clean for a larger pixel size export.

Electroluminescent Wire

Someone a long time ago mentioned EL Wire to me as something I might enjoy playing with. I ended up buying a few samples on Amazon and got excited about the idea of putting the wire in the shape of my logo. I whipped up a prototype on a piece of cardboard with some tape and that was when I got super excited about the idea. It looked great even with such a sub-bar tape job!

Prototyping and Problem Solving

So I got started in OnShape using the vector I generated to set a spline path. Tolerancing the sweep which cut a channel for the wire took a couple tries. The channel is slightly more than a half-circle cross section, which holds the flexible casing of the EL wire once you push it in from the top. The idea is to weave the EL Wire in and out of the print to get the neon sign effect I'm going for.

The next problem was splitting the model to fit on my print bed and bonding those pieces together. My brother suggested that I make the model look like a kumiko pattern to save on print time and material, based on this great YouTube video by Paper View. I went with a thinner size than him and split the model into 6 pie slices, so it was challenging to bond the pieces together. By heat-setting small washers into slots I printed into the back of the frame, the bond was good enough as long as I was careful.

This let me print and bond the whole sign for a first test of the whole look:

A coworker then suggested I use rice paper or something similarly translucent as a back layer, so I tested out tracing paper glued with bookbinding adhesive which looked fantastic!

Next came the rim and battery pack mount which turned out to be the hardest part. I needed a slot for the sign itself, slots for the inverter packs, buttons to make sure I can turn it on and off, but also concealed and not so large that the print takes forever. The buttons work by having some slop in the fit allowing them to be clicked inwards.

I then printed the whole rim for a final assembly. I first used Bamboo infused PLA and dowel rods to join each piece, but the tolerances on the part, plus the whole construction technique, was flawed.

The better rim I ended up with used more standard white filament and a slanted cross section to make sure that I could insert the excess white EL wire all the way around the circumference. Assembly was a lot simpler without extra parts as well thanks to the T-slot approach from Slant 3D.

While I was redesigning the rim, I figured out my mounting solution using some 3D printable command-strip-compatible pieces. I even got around to designing kumiko-style inserts for the triangle sections!

Tada!

Improvements

I think the wire management and length calculations could be a little more predictable with careful measurements.
I think that the wire slot needed post processing that I would like to avoid next time.
I think that the overall logo disappears in normal lighting conditions. It was designed for glowing in the dark, but I should have spent more time making sure that it would look the way I want during the day, too!
One of the battery packs makes a pretty annoying 1000Hz buzzing noise. I need to find it and mute it.