Bat House Project

[reality_boy]

It has gotten up to 109 F here, very hot indeed! However my test house is holding up well. There are no signs of warping and there is only a slight discoloration on the plastic.


I did notice that at the hottest time of the day the metal pole is heating up hotter than ambient temperature and radiating heat into the house. I suspect painting the pole white would help. On the flip side in a cold environment painting the pole black probably helps get heat into the house, even on a wooden rocket box. I did not measure this but it was quite warm to the touch, I estimate it was 8 degrees hotter than ambient.


I have my temp sensors all set up, and I made a mount for my test houses. I just need to put the whole thing up and let it run. One problem is that we are only days away from the monsoons kicking in so we now have heavy cloud cover and should be seeing quite a bit or rain for the next few weeks. I really should have put this all up two weeks ago to catch the high point of summer heat...

[reality_boy]

Life got in the way of this project and I have not been able to post here for a while. However I did manage to get some more work done on it. In particular I finished up my experiments using different colors of PLA. I have found that using black PLA and painting the outside white (or brown, as needed for your environment) provides the greatest light blockage. In addition I printed out some sample tubes using different color PLA and painted as needed. Below is a shot of the samples after spending a month in Arizona summer heat (over 115 F at times). You can see that the black PLA deformed just a bit, while the rest remained stable. I also checked by hand to see that the PLA was not softening up and it always felt solid to me. I'm confident that this material will survive the summer in Arizona, and therefor would make a good material for any region.





I have been turning my attention to new ways to add texture to the interior of the bat house. I experimented with a lattus pattern and was able to optimize this to print in a continuous loop with no infill. However while it is very strong it feels very clunky to me. Next I experimented with the 'fuzzy skin' option in Cura, that adds random offsets to your print to create a rough texture on the wall. That produced a very interesting texture that while not quite rough enough to use without any sort of additional structure is still very promising. I started to go down the path of learning to code macro scripts in Fusion 360 with the idea of being able to selectively apply a fuzzy skin type effect.