An anti-kink device for a novel high tech cable

     Well, its been a long since the last post. I apologize about that. I had a little life twist and ended up married in Switzerland. I've spent the lasts months adapting myself to the new life. So far, a great time. I'm currently working at nanoleq,  a Zürich based startup trying to make a novel high tech cable. Up to now we are a 3 man company, but the energy around is great, such a cool team. 

     Going to the point of the post, It's about a anti-kink device for our novel cable. The idea was to make an cable prototype, that would be something to show other people our tech, something that you could hold in your hands, put to use, etc. In my opinion much cooler than just talking about our idea in the business meeting with the companies we visit to try to raise interest in the our technology.

      My approach was to make a 3d print mold of an anti-kink device and then fill it with silicone, so we should end with a cool transparent part. Been a big fan of open-source software, I used Freecad+Cadquery to achieve my goals. Cadquery is a great software. It's very convenient when you don't know exactly the parameters of your design, so you can do a second iteration very quickly. The next image shows my design. 

The cadquery code to obtain this model is the following.

     I know that there's a lot of room for code improvement to make the design really parametric. In the middle of the development of this prototype the other folks at nanoleq decided to put this project aside, as other priorities appeared. So I stopped working on this, but at this point I already had some results, the ones I'm showing in this post. Still, to have a refined results, other iteration would be necessary. After making the first cable I saw that I should made the riser channel bigger, so you have a silicone reservoir in case of leaking or shrinkage. Other thing I would make different is this sphere cavities. This was my idea to have some indexing between the two sides of the mold, but only two spheres is not enough, you still have some play when you try to put the mold together. Not a big deal, as you sense the misalignment with your finger and correct it. Anyway, if I would do it again  I would try to put another sphere on the upper side of the mold to see if I get better results. 

     Here is the 3d printed part with the ball bearing balls epoxy glued in place.

     The three cables twisted (ground, left and right) and with the headphone jack soldered.

     Here is the final result. A little rough, but I'm sure that with more time to finish the mold, a smooth finish could be achieved.


Well, thats it! Thanks for reading.

Edi