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Phenomenal week! I got a bit sick after visiting family in SF over the weekend, but we were able to isolate that we had a faulty gauge last week, and we did in fact pass the Armstrong limit. We definitely hit 2.5 psia last week, then blew past it and likely got in the ballpark of 0.5 psia, but it's…

This week was incredibly important - we might have passed the Armstrong limit, which is the pressure where moisture on the surface of the skin phase transitions to a gas, but we also think there is something wrong with our rig, as it currently reads that we are only getting to about 2.5 psia, but the Armstrong limit is about…

Very exciting week! We got back a well-fitting glove, which required setting the undersizing to 0 (which I think means there's more to understand from a materials perspective than we currently do), but it fits really well. We were excited to test it out in our vacuum chamber glovebox, and tested out our bladder-based sealing system, but found that it…

Very good progress this week. Two new gloves printed this week, which we tested. Didn't to do the vacuum chamber testing that we were hoping to do (learned more about the gloves case that needs tweaking from what works well with stockings), but everything is in place to handle that early next week. While processing those gloves, we tested out…

This has been my favorite week in recent memory! We manufactured our glovebox vacuum chamber - it lacks some ergonomic features which will be good to have in mind for the next version, but on the whole works well. We ordered new prints, which we'll receive early next week: a glove (had to make a few extra changes to the…

This week pushed a lot of different fronts forward, but in a way that still felt pretty focused. - We worked on design for the glovebox vaccum chamber we're building, to allow us to get some low-pressure tests running, which I'm very excited about. - We completed work on how metrics are reported back to HPC's in an easy-to-interpret manner…

Very busy week last week! The two high level things were an overhaul to how optimal packings/linkings are found for chainmeshes given a link minor rad and gap spacing, and a lot of work going into a cleaner integration of how an older module of code integrates with the newer process for managing scan jobs. On the packing front, it…

This was a busy week! A lot of movement that is taking us in the right direction, but also felt a bit like a two-steps-forward-one-step-back situation. Highlights: - We worked extensively on a refactor for Tapestry, allowing for all of the separate complexity of processing and cleaning meshes, analyzing meshes, and producing useful and data rich visualizations, then sending all…

Great week this week! We did some more extreme experimental testing of the Chainmesh application of counterpressure, and based on that testing, we think it should be able to withstand a fair bit more pressure than our original models predicted. We will still want to apply more pressure with the G suit compression elements, once those are in play, to…

We had quite a lot going on this week - We are now making the Starsocks offering (dovetailed with Zoa for metrics) more useful and easy to get information back out from, and uncovered a few bugs to squash along the way. I think going from bare bones to something sellable will take a bit, so I anticipate that being…

Very solid week! Massively, the Starsocks tech stack is now feature complete! Great push from Indigo on that. There are a few touch ups we will want to add before doing any kind of scale, but to be able to actually perform end to end demos now is really wonderful. Reconnecting with the hospital to get that ball rolling asap.…

We had quite a busy week! Got a version of the orchestrator for Starsocks working, but realized there's a simpler and more robust way to do it, so we are doing some light refactoring and it's looking like we'll have it by early next week. We also confirmed that multibody simulations work as expected, giving us much cheaper printing if…

Fantastic week this week! Some highlights: - Ran the extension coupon test, so we now have an undersizing for slack coeff that we trust. - Found a fixed width seam painting solution, need to iterate on a bit, but this saves us a bunch of time. I thought we were going to need to make our own, so this is…

Pretty solid week this week, possibly wrote the last line of code for geometry modification for at least a few weeks! One step of that involved fully removing and refactoring a part of the codebase that was really only intended to be a quick fix, so it felt great to tie that off. We are transitioning to pushing fully on…

Great week! We developed the most form-from-function hoop-tightening mechanism, which I feel really good about. It's funny - as soon as I drew it out, I saw examples of the fundamental principle being used out in the yard no fewer than 6 times. Will bang out a quick prototype asap. Also continued to work out a few bugs that contribute…

Started to work on a system to automatically manage uploaded scans and start running Zoa for scan metrics, and notify us when a new garment set is requested. Should be done in 2-3 weeks, we think, at which point we'll be able to do some demos of the MVP. A few changes will be needed for a HIPAA compliant version,…

Solid week on solid elements, automated scan processing from the phone, and some G-suit work! Finally finished on the in-mesh rigid elements with tags. Learned a lot about project planning and scoping - I really don't want to ever need to deal with this type of feature that drags on like this and rate-limits other work ever again, and I…

Big week for us! We said goodbye to Kikimora this week, as they prep for starting at MIT in a few weeks - they'll be missed, and we'll be staying in touch! We've been putting a lot more thought into a potential refocus towards anti-G suits. Our preliminary math and research is showing that provided we can make a tensioning…

Very big week this week! Printed in place tags are more messed up than we originally thought. I think a very large refactor of how link data is stored and accessed is going to be in order sometime soon. We are set up on the scan capture software, and it works incredibly well. For our testing purposes, and possibly into…

Really great high level and low level work this week. Planned out and started building the software that handles passing scan and provider info between all relevant parts of our software stack, bringing this from a bunch of disconnected, interesting projects, to a real product. We ran into a snag with the simulation of solid bodies, which will take a…

Great week! Efforts focused on improving reliability and speed of the leg identification algorithm, developing a limb orientation for simulation optimizing algorithm, which should eliminate some silent sim failures we've seen in the past, and fixing watertightness in the print-in-place device labeling features (which was really quite a sneaky bug!)…

Solid week this week: built a working mathematically defined leg identification (ensuring complete confidence that we are grabbing the lower leg after a scan is processed), continued to integrate this into the entire process. Had quite a few false ends on the QR front, as everything was just about working, but had some really nasty ways of silently failing which…

Super productive week this week! QR code plates that are integrated into the mesh are done! Running our first test print sometime mid-next week. Tailor pipeline is almost complete, just putting the finishing touches on a way to rigorously geometrically sort lower leg scans from everything else, but otherwise I think we'll be ready to start gluing together with the…

Excellent week this week. Lots of technical progress (in spite of the absurdly hot weather!) on code, softgoods, process automation, and FDA. We got solid bodies working within chainmesh - took longer than we were expecting, but ultimately a simpler solution ended up working better for us. Now we can focus on integrating it into the rest of the pipeline…

Great week all around. We got closure rigid elements in the mesh, following the underlying surface, so we can now attach our QR or other tagging elements into those quite easily. This took much more fancy footwork than we were originally anticipating, but opens a lot of doors for us product-wise. We also made strides on improving the closure stability…

Really excellent hardware week! We tested out the new zipper-based closures system using the final rivets that we'll actually use for the study, and it's working really well. I thought I wasn't going to be able to squeeze into the first print we got back, but turns out I can, and it leaves pretty interesting patterns on my feet where…

We got our first really tight print back! It was incredible seeing how tough it was to squeeze my foot into it, but ultimately it was possible. There are a few changes to how much we uniformly scale vs Radiozoa scale, but we can dial that over time. I think the rivets will work with this new eyelet geometry, but…

Really excellent week this week - here are some highlights: - Eyelet generation is done, we will have that print back first thing next week to test out the new generation system! We ran into quite a few speedbumps related to parts of our codebase that we haven't worked with in quite a while, and therefore need to make some…

Great week this week. We got a lot of work done on code, and we should be able to run a garment and some test articles over the weekend. Got back the print from the refactored chainmesh pipeline, which looks great. We also started testing the conductive paint - I think it will work, but we will need to polish…

Fantastic week this week. New closure systems are finished, which was a slog but will definitely be worth it. It lays the foundation for any new closure systems we want to test out, but the latest generation is already going to be so much better than what we had before. We will be running a test print with those closures…

Really great week this week. Here are some highlights: - QR based tagging is in the late stages of development, and in the process of making that, we've implemented a first pass at rigid elements integrated into Chainmesh, which could be huge. - We've finished integrating Zoa-based under sizing into our entire pipeline (which seems to work amazingly. I'm very…

We submitted our Chainmesh SBIR application! This took a huge amount of work, and nearly all of the credit belongs to Kiki. We continued working on the cleaner and validator, and made a substantial simplification by realizing that providers would need to set the height of the stocking in a robust way, and we could use this fact to go…

This week we welcomed an intern with an extensive ML background, who is working on a mesh cleaner and validator to ensure that all scans submitted by care providers are as good as they need to be, and that we can be certain that all radiozoa data is pre-processed in the same way. Additionally, we began to design and implement…

Pretty solid week last week. We are modernizing our web presence in advance of folks at the hospital needing to navigate it quickly, worked on sourcing and acquisition work for our comparator devices during the pilot trial, continuing to work on a new tracking system for individual garments, and have finalized the NIH submission for Chainmesh (the deadline was extended,…

Good week here. We tested out a new scanning solution, which is going to be a better fit for us. We also did a bunch of new math for better under-sizing, so we can start to do bench testing there to characterize that very soon. We continued to work on NIH SBIR writing, logistics for our pilot program with some…

Very solid week this week. We are exploring other options for scan capture, gathered great data about methods for increasing traction for the soles of the chainmesh stockings (fantastic idea from a doctor we chatted with), continued to wrap up the NIH grants (there was more to finish than we originally thought), and took care of some admin work. In…

Tech work this week was focused on integrating the centercurve algorithm from Radiozoa into Chainmesh to enable graduated undersizing. We also completed all of the writing for our NIH grant applications, and met with Brooklyn Hospital's podiatry chief, who had some very helpful insights around selecting a patient population, as well as some very good ideas regarding patient mobility and…

We had a very busy week this week! Hopefully we will be able to get some much deserved real downtime a few weeks from now. Until then, to borrow from Maya Angelou, nothing will work unless we do. We finished our SBIR submission writing, and have asked a connection at the NIH for a quick round of feedback. We also…

This was a big admin week - we decided late last week that we were going to submit two NIH SBIR grants (one for Chainmesh, one for Radiozoa) as soon as we could, so this week we put a lot of work into that. Nearly all of the writing is done, but unfortunately we are waiting more on the NIH…

We made enormous strides in refactoring the heart of our Chainmesh generation algorithm. I wrote it over the course of several years by building on it in-place while continuing to add complexity at all stages, and it was desperately in need of a general refactor. Being the one who wrote it all, it still took me about 20 hours to…

Went to an interesting DoD funding conference, where we learned more about USAF's and USSF's programs for corporate innovation partners. There may be room for collaboration around fighter pilot anti-G loading suits, but that isn't the priority at the moment. We also did a lot of security rebuilding for the authorization systems for Zoa and Mesh Collapse - this will…

This week pushed on three major fronts: updates to Zoa (quality assurance on model limitations and dockerizing the flow for integration down the line), downstream impacts of FDA meeting(IRB study proposal updates, updates for individuals at the hospital, updates for our study cost estimate and followup with the FDA), and admin work for things on the horizon (patent and mobile…

Super busy week this week: We had our Q-sub meeting with the FDA this week, which required a huge amount of prep work. First in responding to their initial feedback, restructuring some of our questions, presentation prep, and pivoting one of our claims - ultimately the feedback we got from them was incredibly helpful. We will have to slightly modify…

Worked on: a huge amount of beta testing for Radiozoa (providing data in forms that are easily usable for HCPs, but also that show the true depth of what we are able to capture), patent development, submitted IRB proposal, closure technique improvements.…

Getting back into the swing of things, but a lot of travel this week. We tried to take some time off over the end of December and early January, but continued rolling the ball as needed. A few angels are interested in doubling down, and some are interested in joining, so I'll be handling that next week.…

Out with family.…

Hope you had a great Solstice. We spent time chatting with the company that we are working with for the scanning and upload edge of the pipeline, which is how HCP's would actually interface with our tech, until it makes sense for us to roll our own. We also put a substantial amount of time into continuing to develop Zoa,…

New closures technique with adjustable width closures using sensitive-skin-safe velcro with zippers. We decided the lymphatic-patient-scan metrics software should be called Radiozoa (or Zoa for short), based on a type of Zooplankton of the same name, which produce incredibly beautiful mineral skeletons. We are also preparing to file a non-provisional for chainmesh and a provisional for Zoa, so I had…

Really great week this week! Our yet-to-be-named scan biometrics tool suite is nearly fully operational, and from our testing so far, works really well. Looking forward to putting it through its paces more thoroughly in the weeks to come. We also spent a while working on a new system for closures (moving away from elastic seams, and towards methods that…

Wrapped up some loose ends this week in advance of the holiday! Built version one of the part-depowdering tumbler, created some of the file-management infrastructure that we will need for handling all the offsite manufacturing, put a lot more work on the lymphedema biometrics from 3D scan pipeline, had a great planning meeting with many of the doctors that we'll…

Quite a bit happened this week! We fixed sizing code through lots of simulation work after confirming that some early data was less accurate than we needed it to be, fixed a mesh pre-processing bug that was halting the simulation, had a great meeting with another founder working in health hardware, investigated some new manufacturing opportunities, and took care of…

A few big moments this week: - Our briefing document for the Q-submission to the FDA has been submitted. - We received a part treated with the new post processing technique which showed enormous promise. Not a silver bullet, but we will be looking into it further. - We found that our sizing algorithm needs to have an additional parameter…

Rapid-fire week! We visited the podiatry clinic, where we found that the patient we had been working in an investigational capacity had recovered before we could deliver a garment to him, and found a new patient who was interested in giving us early feedback into the process and fit. We looked into a new manufacturing process which may be more…

Good progress this week. We put finishing touches on the Q-sub BD, visited the podiatry clinic and got some details worked out with them (but mostly agreed to meet for longer next week and work out even more details), and set up some new standards to ensure HIPAA compliance. On the technical front, we reworked some of our infrastructure used…

This week focused on prep for the Q-submission and meeting with the hospital's research team next week, in addition to light forays into where our work will be most productive while the study is in progress and we are waiting on results. This included looking into aesthetic applications of chainmesh in jewelry and fashion by printing in fine metals (very…

Our garments apply higher levels of even pressure than we anticipated, and the hospital is open to doing a study! This is a huge milestone. On Monday, we rigged up the human tissue simulant with our pressure sensor array and a compression strip sized to it, and applied a maximum of 60mmHg, and a minimum of 0mmHg. This upper bound…

This week felt like a fair bit of hurry-up-and-wait, but we still got a lot done. A lot of our chemicals and test rigs for metamaterial evaluation, biocompatibility, and safety to clean using common hospital cleaners (there's some conversation about >5% concentration peroxide will be a problem). We’ve had printable models since Tuesday, but unfortunately both of the manufacturing staff…

Another hectic week this week! We developed a pre-deformation compensation step for our mesh processing, ensuring that printed geometry fits desired surfaces while under tension, added support for a print-in-place tagging system, developed a quality control and risk management plan for chainmesh, and strengthened the closures and the area immediately connecting to them. We got back a bunch of coupon…

Busy week this week! We hired Kiki, they'll be working on the bioengineering, certification, and evaluation of the chainmesh product as it gets into the hands of care providers and patients. They bring a background in computational bio, ML, and cybersecurity. We planned all the materials-science based test campaigns for FDA/medical approval, both related to biocompatibility, and physical properties. In…

This week we focused on modernizing a lot of our oldest code in advance of coupon material testing: naive mesh surface offsets with reconstruction -> surface-aware and cleaner surfaces - torus scaling systems left over from using blender's physics engine -> easier-to-follow and updated systems based on our new packing algorithm -> imprecise and fussy closure generation -> closures that…

This week was a scramble on the ACVD implementation for production. There's more work to be done to optimize it, but it's currently yielding denser meshes with more regular structures, which we think will be stronger (think brick interlacing). We are targeting next week for a reprint of the chainmesh. We also met with some existing 3d printed orthotics providers;…

Since I started this project, our largest bottleneck on material performance has been a weighted centroidal voronoi diagram algorithm that works on arbitrary meshes. We relied on an algorithm developed several years ago for a long time, but it has been incredibly memory-hungry and slow. This week, we found a far-improved replacement (ACVD), which has almost completely replaced the old…

We got our first limb-scale linkmesh back this week! It fits June's right leg as a stocking up to the knee - there's a lot to learn from it, but in general it's incredibly satisfying to have a physical garment that is manufactured the same way that I (OZ) first dreamt of about 6 years ago. Outside of this accomplishment,…

Busy week this week - we demonstrated scalability of packing sims up to the size of a knee-high sock (our largest test yet!), it should be printing over the weekend. In order to automatically position linkmeshes in the build volume, we built a proxy simulation that finds optimal starting orientations without user intervention. In the course of doing more research…

We worked on developing the simulation architecture for larger (>10k links) linkmeshes - lo and behold, we also need large GPUs. Currently, faster GPUs give us faster sims, but we are also working on ways to balance compute load across multiple GPUs, while updating rough collisions in a shared memory, so that we can pack multiple linkmeshes into a single…

We printed two new test articles (a glove for one of our advisors, and a sphere), which validated that the printer we plan to use for production during the study does in fact maintain nominal quality below certified specs. In order to get there, we ran many sims and fine-tuned the parameters for this particular printer. We also architected and…

We continued to tune our new simulation system; we're now getting better results from it faster. We just ordered our first print from the new pipeline, and we're going to be fabricating a lot of test hardware next week. We had a super interesting meeting with one of the only spacesuit patternmakers in the world, who also has MCP experience.…

Our simulations now run ~10x faster and are more stable, but we uncovered a few challenges around the printability of our models. Most of the fixes were implemented, but some of the more fickle problems are still under development. We purchased the pressure sensor array, which we will use to be able to start getting quantified pressure data out of…

Closed out the refactor of the back side of the manufacturing pipeline. New advantages include standardized methods for control over link size, shape, simulation parameters, meshing parameters, and tracking location over time. This foundation can also now be trivially expanded for future mesh developments. We also did quite a bit of research into additional manufacturing methods that may allow us…

Worked on knowledge transfer over to our FDA consultant, as well as implementing our new rigid body techniques. Our benchmarking shows that models that previously took single-digit days to simulate could now be done in hours, opening the door to much faster manufacturing turnarounds than we previously thought possible. We are also looking at moving offices for more customizable space…

We unblocked quite a few things: rigid body physics on the GPU (developed an (as far as we are aware) novel system for doing broadphase collision detection on the GPU, which according to Nvidia devs, may make its way into their native collision engine), outsourcing of FDA device research and writing, and we found a great solution for rapid turnaround…

Worked on a few different fronts, but all towards creating software version 2, enabling hardware version 2. Translating between the computational geometry code of software 1 to the rest of the stack on version 2 has been a headache, but we have a great strategy now. A big part of hardware version 2 was sourcing the matrix pressure sensor, but…

Implemented the multicore rigid body physics sim, though we expect a few fine-tuning steps to take going forward. Went to an interesting startup science fair as part of NYC's tech week, where I met a lot of interesting people. I also got to try out a different type of flexible matrix pressure sensor array, though I'm not sure this one…

We made great strides on a transition over to a multicore rigid body simulation framework, which will allow for denser packing, faster. We also made good progress on a refactored computational geometry framework, which will increase our iteration speed going forward, but there’s still more to do on that front. We also chatted with a fantastic regulatory consultant who is…

Lot of progress on multiple fronts this week: we investigated high-resolution pressure sensor arrays for evaluating compression methods, found a new rigid body architecture that has historically handled incredibly good chainmail simulations, took our first steps on a refactor that will allow for more control over our prototyping and manufacturing in the future (and interfaces well with the new physics…

Automated the now-containerized computational geometry -> physics simulation -> manufacturability post-processing pipeline; iteration speed is now wildly improved and variables are isolated. We also started moving towards a new physics engine, which will require work up front, but will yield more accurate simulations, faster. I also took care of quite a few admin tasks following our raise.…

Closed our Angel II round! Big thanks to Boost VC and 1517, as well as all individual angels, all helping to make the next generation of spacesuits a reality! We also welcomed June Knauth to the team - she will be working on software engineering, computational geometry, and whatever else needs to happen! Since she started, she's restructured and containerized…

Did a lot of logistics and admin work around closing this round, and ultimately settled on raising a larger amount that will allow us to hire 1-2 more people, carry out at least one clinical study for the compression garments, and make spacesuit prototyping happen concurrently with medical development. I also had two great meetings with the astronaut, and with…

Did a massive amount of outreach this week - I connected with a NASA astronaut, one of the only living capital-E Experts on mechanical counter-pressure, a new mentor, and new investors. While I've been doing this administrative work, June has been working on restructuring (not completely refactoring just yet, though that will come) the codebase so that we can iterate…

Got two prints back this week - one is a fantastic test article, and highlights a few areas that we need to work on for physics sims. The other is pretty much hard as a rock. Crazy enough, both are MJF printed using the same model (different materials, but that shouldn't change it this much). Need to work on manufacturer…

Got a signed LOI from the hospital! They are going to help run the study, and become customers if all goes to plan. We also built an extension to the QBAC office so that we have room for anticipated team growth. In the second half of the week, I went on a team retreat with 1517, where I met some…

Through talking to one of my manufacturers, I found a geometry bug in the translation step between simulated geometry and printed geometry, and fixed that. I am getting ducks in a row for the study - evaluating manufacturing relationships, ensuring sure everyone at the hospital is on the same page about the composition of the study, finding additional advisors to…

Visited the clinic, and got great feedback and reception on the glove prototype I brought in. I've built relationships with a few key people at the hospital, and we have a meeting set to plan out a study. Also, fully implemented overpacking checks on both the statistical evaluations and the final generation, so I can now be almost entirely confident…

Provisional patent on inelastic compression garment fabric has been filed. On the manufacturing side, at least one of my prototypes may be nonfunctional, due to the specific machine having worse tolerances than anything I planned around. It's my fault for not confirming that, hopefully the other MJF and SLM prototypes will have better tolerances. If not, we’ll find a new…

Ordered three new models to test materials and the new manufacturing code - one MJF Polypropylene, one MJF Glass-Filled Nylon, and one SLM Aluminum. Solved a few problems in sim stability, which is now at an acceptable state for large scale integration. I also started a high level overview of the process to aid in refactoring (potentially by a good…

Wrapped up the computational geometry! My parallel processing algorithm is nearly completely functional and certainly helpful, but not perfect. As of right now, everything is in place to generate printable meshes with no/minimal manual fine-tuning. I think the optimal ratios between FOL min/maj and SOL packing haven't been settled on yet, so I'm going to continue revising that. I hope…

Visited a wound care clinic, and got a completely overwhelming amount of interest. Was entirely unprepared for people to just start asking when they could try it! Also had some fantastic meetings about what the next stage and seed raising will look like. One the code side, I worked on getting more predictable generation across multiple meshes to try to…

Busy week- I'm moving offices as the work transitions from digital to physical, and the need for space grows. A lot of this week was spent on setup logistics, leases, and insurance, but did get to have some great meetings additional medical applications for custom fit compression garments, and what expected turnarounds would be. I also started to get a…

Finished the complete end to end generation pipeline for this stage. Physics simulations are still manually started and ended, but there's still unknowns in terms of simulation iterations, so I'm comfortable with it. Should at least be good enough for small trial runs of treating lymphoma or venous stasis/ulcer patients, so I'm gearing up for that. If I get more…

Bulk of this stage of engineering work is over, I'm now starting work to move into implementation out in the world. I'm beginning with clinical trials for inelastic compression garments at Brooklyn Hospital, and spacesuit-based fashion/luxury goods. A few of the highlights from wrapping up engineering work included a 30% speed improvement across four different optimizations, on paper worked out…

Solved the closures location and joining problem. It wasn't quite as bad as I thought it would be, but working through the logic of how the closures should handle edge cases, and actually implementing that between py and blender was certainly challenging. Ultimately, getting both sides of my pipeline to agree on which SOL where which was the most tricky,…

Finished out programmable rigidity, and made some easy-to-communicate visualizations for it. Given that everything is paint-on, I'm starting to wonder how much of this I could conceivably automate if I had vascular scans (or some other input). I also started on the print-in-place closures at the end of the week. Based on the rate of progress I had starting out…

Did a lot this week - nearly finished out the programmable rigidity, and got to a local maxima with link generation that I'm very happy with. I also fought my battles against git, and won. Earlier in the week, (and more or less for the last few weeks) I've been struggling with some frustration and self-doubt in my abilities, but…

Fixed a bunch of overly fragile parts of generation, which are now pretty much across the board better. Lots of things that I thought I had adequate solutions for at the end of December ended up not working nearly as well as I needed them to, but now it's good to go. SOl scaling and shaping is much less unwieldy,…

Reframing SOL generation ended up being a headache, but one that I expect I will be thankful I took care of now, rather than later. SOL generation now takes the minor diameter of connected FOL into account when selecting the correct FOL from the lookup.…

Quite happy with where I got the closure locating logic to, and I did some early hardware prototyping on the sinching mechanism. In the process of reworking the closure locating technique, I wrote an extension of the remeshing algorithm I use that creates meshes that are much more uniform in triangle aspect ratio and edge length (given an input edge…

Working extensively on the logic and design for paint-on closures and paint-on rigidity, primarily focusing on closures. Made substantial progress, but nothing printable yet. Parametrization of this problem is non-trivial, and I wholly expect to revisit this down the road when I'm doing rapid wearable testing in conjunction with geometry processing. I also spent some time at the end of…

Early in the week, I worked out a hacky way to paint-on rigidity and closures, and did a bunch of research into using PhysX for parallelized physics. On the rigidity side, the approach I had used would make later iteration tricky, so I'll be revisiting this next week. PhysX is crazy powerful, but I'm going to need to dedicate quite…

Largely worked on the SOL orientation and scaling problem, so this was a linear algebra heavy week! Some lossy design and architecture were excised, leaving an algorithm that creates second order links that are scaled and rotated to perfection, even in very high curvature regions such as between fingers. To demonstrate how well this new approach can handle complex and…

Investigated different surface reconstruction algorithms (VCG from the is fantastic) and overhauled how I calculate curvature weights for Lloyd's algorithm. I was frustrated by how little control I felt that the current implementation gave me, so I'll likely make my own in the future. I also uncovered a pretty essential flaw in how my SOL placement worked, and started to…

Got an incredible scan of my right hand done by - full color with 5M polygons! I could probably pull my fingerprints off the model. This time, the scan is of a hand in a half-closed position, as most (all?) spacesuit gloves are manufactured. I primarily did infra work, cleaning up and processing the new test model, and getting remote…

Attended ASCEND 2023 in Las Vegas, met really great people and had interesting conversations! Implemented genuine version control for my work - looking forward to the ease of record keeping, shareability, and parity across devices. Figured out how to get insurance, and made a substantial breakthrough on increasing the predictability of computational geometry algorithms by continuing to refine the way…

Implemented the segmentation edges as weights for the surface packing algorithm, but it didn't work as well as I was hoping it would. I suspect that some of the techniques could be useful when working on in a few months. I also spent some time struggling with scale inconsistencies across filetypes, which was subtly messing with some of my algorithms…

Developed a 3D-mesh segmentation algorithm that identifies different segments of a mesh (eg. individual fingers, palm from wrist from back of hand), and made it run far faster than I thought was possible. I think this will allow me to bias the mesh surface packing algorithm with better precession around fine structures, such as between the fingers.…

Identified one of the primary areas of complexity in development as the non-uniformity of units across steps of my algorithm. This partially can't be helped because many 3d model file formats are Unitary Unit, and there aren't great existing libraries for handling 3MF files.…

Completed first wearable and fully articulating glove. Will work on characterizing the metamaterial, improving fit, and reducing areas of structural loss due to simulation instability.…

Found that through process of working on scaling and tuning other factors, the weighted voronoi for link size has become fragile. Added programmability to that factor, but this effected scaling in other parts of the pipeline, which now need to be brought back up to code. Placed order for new glove using current pipeline.…

Developed code to make variable size links that don't compromise simulation stability or printed flexibility, but it required some extreme workarounds for the physim program to behave properly. Working wih quaternions is tough, but ended up being the hail mary that made everything work due to the lack of gimbal-lock.…

After much testing, discovered that the root cause of all simulation stability issues was multi-body intersections in geometry. Due to the way that object generation is implemented in the physics simulation, this is non-trivial.…

Investigated alternative directions for rigid body processing - found working solutions, but I expect to restructure physim work from scratch down the line. Discovered an oversight with the incircle/mesh surface packing and projecting algorithm from last week, which got fixed and slightly improved simulation stability and mesh regularity, but simulation instability is still an issue. Also attended Professor Bonnie Dunbar's…

3D Voronoi incircle-based spacing math so that first-order tori to be centered as well as possible, and second-order tori can be smaller (thus decreasing metamaterial mesh thickness and increasing flexibility).…

Made a new 3D visualization workflow automation to minimize time spend on file-handling and possibility for false-positive errors due to humans doing a machine's work.…

Worked through a lot of geodesic distance problems and ultimately wrote my own greedy spacial/graph traversal algorithm because the pure graph-traversal algs (eg. bi-directional Dijkstra, A*) were too finicky to get working with 3D data in the way that I wanted. SOL are now better placed between FOL…

Did primarily admin-related work.…

Opensuit raised our angel round from 1517!…

Worked on model/metadata/config data handoffs between the python geometry processing environment and the blender geometry processing environment. At the time, this was non-trivial because I had completely outgrown my file-handling organization strategy without realizing it.…

Prototyped about a half dozen geodesic walk weighting schemes to try to force better placement of the SOL between FOL. This was always a trade-off between voro processing time (coarser mesh is faster, and anecdotally has better convergence) and SOL placement (finer mesh has more direct geodesics because there are more options for half-edges to traverse)…

Experimented within the remesh-density to lloyd relax iterations "phase space" (used very loosely here) to try to find better magic values.…

Worked on making the algorithm that defined and placed the plane more robust. As it turns out, simply running RANSAC on poorly structured data gives poorly structured results. Moved over to linear algebra rather than relying on statistical methods.…

Developed a plane projection algorithm to try to place the SOL better. Roughly, I was using a geodesic walk to get a point on the surface, but it would usually be skewed a few MM to the left or right of the Euclidian midpoint (if viewed antiparallel to the local surface norms, the euclidian mid wouldn't be attached to the…

Trying to get better midpoints by making more aspects of the geodesic path and SOL scaling process parametric to account for wide ranges in major diameters of FOL to be bridged.…

Continued working on refactoring all the code for the new simulation tolerancing paradigm, and ensuring that the interior "psudo-surface" of the maile is what actually aligns with the scanned model so that fitment is preserved. Some smart friends had raised good questions about this, but I was too in the weeds to think about how to solve this best. I'm…

Had some great introductions this week, but projects at BMCC took up a lot of my time…

Had a realization about tolerancing in simulation while I was in the shower, which dramatically shifted the goalpost in terms of simulation stability, but could hold the promise of prints with no required post-processing! Started work on all the adjustments I'd need to make in order for this to work.…

Began implementing all the physics settings parametrically, and ways to simulated rotation and location data out for printing upscaling and printing.…

Focused on parametrization more generally, and in making the SOL placement technique more nuanced.…

Leaned more into using weighted graph traversal, with more interconnects between the spacial representation of the mesh and the graph representation, particularly for identifying geodesic neighborhoods on a mesh (i.e. sections that an ant could walk along the surface to in equal time).…

Made some tools to identify where kinks with the geodesics / graph traversal were, and tried a few naive approaches to solving them. This stretched my 3D transformations and what basic linear algebra I have, so some time was spent simply learning what math existed to handle R3 projections and planes.…

Moved to lean more on graph traversal algorithms as geodesics for SOL placement information, which yielded a rapid improvement in maile quality.…

Following some advice I got from an investor friend, I worked on making my deck more data-backed and professional, including some hefty data analysis of every single usage of a spacesuit to date. Made money to continue supporting myself and this development.…

Frustrated with the quality of the Blender simulations and the general iteration speed of this project, I looked for low-hanging-fruit ways to increase iteration cadence, and discovered Pypy.…

Continued working on blender, with an emphasis on improving simulation stability.…

Blender generation comes with a lot of benefits but the growing pains are really tough, because blender doesn't give me as much flexibility to rapidly "hotswap" scaling or rotation code without restarting the application to clear all vertices out of memory, and is clearly built for just about every other use case. It feels like I'm trying to use a…

Did branding and outreach work, but mostly needed to focus on paying the bills and being with family.…

Investigated ways to increase the testing cadence of the lloyd algorithm, tested other sculptural applications for the mesh, and moved away from pure-python mesh generation and towards blender generation.…

Realized that I had been overfitting for the one model of my hand I was using, so I started testing out the mesh generation algorithm on various sculptures and other 3d models. I was, in fact, very overfit, so I took some steps towards generalizing. One of the ultimate goals was to start use cases beyond spacesuits, and at this…

Worked on some new visualization and tracking tools, worked on further optimizing the voro weighting algorithm, and ramped up work on the communication and public facing side.…

Began using surface weights tied to curvature in the lloyd relaxing step to get better placement and scale for the FOL. For whatever reason, this broke the voro cell adjacency technique I was using before, but I wrote a new adjacency-finding that I'm pretty proud of.…

Refined the SOL torus generation, employing a rudimentary approximation of a 3D quadratic Bézier curve for more accurate placement between FOL voro centers. This gave better, but far from perfect, alignment and orientation for the SOL. Also, made some run duration and readability improvements .…

Characterizing the SOL alignment problem, wrapping my head around the plethora of ways that this can be wrong. Took a stab at offsets for SOL in tight angles.…

Started working with graph algorithms, which allowed me to make the first voronoi-derived chainmail meshes.…

First passes at generating oriented tori that are aligned and sized to match patches (voro cells) on a surface, really just getting my feet wet with rotations of meshes in R3.…

Generating non-oriented torus meshes (all vertex matrices and face matrices), and writing a "flood fill" algorithm for voro cells on the mesh based on vertex adjacency.…

Code from this period is lost due to SSD failure. The zenbook pro duo does many things well - thermal regulation is not one of them. From this point forward, all code exists with three copies, is regularly backed up, and is never stored in the same physical location. However, regular pruning of old code (which in my case, was…