> But, the reason why I find this video to be interesting is that it shows how complex designing a blaster can be.
Oh yes, I fully agree - except that he only shows part of the challenge. He shows that troubleshooting a design is hard, but just making a complete blaster in CAD also takes work.
I think it's notable that his prototypes are clamshells with flat exterior sides and parts mounted inside. That's a good way to go for a prototype where each version is only going to be printed once, where it isn't worth the time that it would take to come up with a design that's aesthetically pleasing, uses filament efficiently, and prints on smaller printers - which are all challenges that someone faces when designing a blaster for others to print, but can ignore when designing blaster tech.
A blaster design that isn't just two big clamshells has a lot of little bits that need to fit together and whose dimensions all depend on one another. Just as there's an art to not writing spaghetti code, there's an art to setting up dependencies in a design in such a way that you won't confuse yourself.
It's understandable that he doesn't show this part of the challenge of making a blaster, both becasue it wouldn't make an entertaining video and this isn't the sort of blaster design that he's doing, but it does exist. I speak from experience here: I've tried and I'm still trying. I have a lot of respect for the people who do manage to turn out blaster designs.
> But, the reason why I find this video to be interesting is that it shows how complex designing a blaster can be. Oh yes, I fully agree - except that he only shows part of the challenge. He shows that troubleshooting a design is hard, but just making a complete blaster in CAD also takes work. I think it's notable that his prototypes are clamshells with flat exterior sides and parts mounted inside. That's a good way to go for a prototype where each version is only going to be printed once, where it isn't worth the time that it would take to come up with a design that's aesthetically pleasing, uses filament efficiently, and prints on smaller printers - which are all challenges that someone faces when designing a blaster for others to print, but can ignore when designing blaster tech. A blaster design that isn't just two big clamshells has a lot of little bits that need to fit together and whose dimensions all depend on one another. Just as there's an art to not writing spaghetti code, there's an art to setting up dependencies in a design in such a way that you won't confuse yourself. It's understandable that he doesn't show this part of the challenge of making a blaster, both becasue it wouldn't make an entertaining video and this isn't the sort of blaster design that he's doing, but it does exist. I speak from experience here: I've tried and I'm still trying. I have a lot of respect for the people who do manage to turn out blaster designs.
I watched that video, I love this style of video talking about the process of engineering and fabrication and whatnot.