Exploring Concepts from Soft Robotics — Professor Kari Love

Slime Form Visualizer

Our first assignment in Soft Robotics is to investigate softness as a material property. While discussing material properties to examine through play, a long list of qualities emerged, but missing among them, refractivity. I created slime form visualizer to investigate how light interacts with soft, hand moldable lensing material.

Slime stood out to me because of the folky nature of its creation. Slime is home made and tactile. I also see it as an easy precursor to more difficult soft materials like silicone. I love clearness, translucent materials really excite me. When I saw a youtuber playing with clear slime, I was hooked

Always consult an expert. I reached out to a friend of mine with childish tendencies to see if he was ever a slime head. He came back to me, "no, but our other friend zaid makes slime all the time." Zaid works autistic children. It was all coming together.

He strongly encouraged me to make my own slime, so I could control the opacity. This was the weekend before the big storm was coming, about to dump a foot of snow on the city. Zaid said I should go to the chinese store immediately. It would take a week for my clear slime to become clear.

I made the slime according to the recipe I found online. "A good beginner slime recipe" they called it, 1 cup of water, 1 cup of clear glue, and a teaspoon of borax dissolved in a cup of warm water. Mix the glue and water first, then slowly add the borax solution until it starts to clump. Knead it with your hands until it becomes less sticky. Store in an airtight container. Its such a manual process, all by feel. The slime comes together into form while in your hands. A really unique feeling. Making it was the best part.

About a 5 days later, as my slime cleared up, I modeled the base of the visualizer and experimented a little bit with my laserbeams, mostly to calibrate their amperage. I printed two of the base overnight, spending the morning before class assembling my device. My goal this semester is to work faster, so cut as many corners on the electronics inside as possible, simply wiring up a logarithmic scale potentiometer to a 5v power supply and wire wrapping all my connections before heat shrinking themselves.

If I were to do it again, I would put the laserbeams closer together so they could optically climb up through a drip of slime. Something to look forward to.