The store was down for a few hours today as we made some changes to it. Some of these you’ll notice, some you won’t. They will make life easier for everyone though. Here’s a quick list of the new changes:
* Its now on its own server which is much faster! (Previously it shared a server with the makerbot site, thingiverse, blogs, and a few other random sites)
* We now have SSL and all your account information is now encrypted and secured.
* We now accept credit cards directly! No more using Paypal. Good for those of you that work at universities or in large corps and want to buy a MakerBot
* Magento now uses memcached on the backend for caching sessions and such. Should result in a speed boost.
* We found and installed a new order status module which will result in more informative order statuses (eg: ‘On Hold’ is now ‘In Production’.)
* We found a module that will serve as a start for UPS WorldShip integration which means we’ll be switching to UPS soon.
PS. We use Magento, which is awesome, open source ecommerce software.
PPS. DNS may still be propogating, so you may still see a ’site is down’ message. It will be back ASAP.
From the MakerBot Flickr Pool, Dawning.ca made his own USB2TTL adapter!
I didn’t have a USB2TTL cable laying around and so I looked in to what one entails. Turns out the magic in those cables I already had in a break-out board.. I just soldered on a header and used a little breadboard to pull over the pins I needed. But alas, it didn’t matter. All the magic was gone from that FTDI chip anyway. Though I’ve ordered another one of those rather than paying more for a whole cable that doesn’t give me the same flexibility.
The Poor-mans USB2TTL adapter on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.
MakerBot needs you to make pulleys! We’ve done this before, but now we need your help again!
The 50 boxes for batch 7 are filling up and getting ready to be shipped out. Batch 8 is going to be 100 machines, our biggest batch yet. We need even more pulleys to support the community with MakerBots. The parts that go out in batch 8, could be your parts. If you’ve been looking for a way to make some money with your machine, this is it.
All you need to do is download the production file, test it with a bearing, and then crank them out and we’ll give you a for each one! You’ll be printing money! Besides making money, you’ll also be giving new MakerBot operators their first thrill when they open up their boxes and they find that they can make something just like the pulley you printed for them!
If you’re in, read this post, check out the production code and please email zach@makerbot.com to let him know you are going to be on Team Pulley and we’ll hook you up.
MakerBot will be a guest on the “Ask An Engineer Chat” tonight!
Our weekly “Ask an engineer chat” is tonight 9/26/2009 – 10pm ET and we will have some special guests – EMSL (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories) and Makerbot! We will be experimenting with doing our chat “LIVE” and mobile again!
You know what to do, but just in case!
* Visit our new “chat” section on Adafruit at 10pm ET – 9/26/2009
* Or visit our Ustream page
* For old schoolers, you can use IRC, you’ll need a Ustream log/pass, check out the Ustream IRC how-tos here and here
* We are #adafruit-industries6796 on IRC server chat1.ustream.tv
* There will be a trivia question at the end of the night as always!
* Lastly, if anyone can save a log we’d appreciate it
This is how you do it!
How did you spend your weekend? Really that is cool… We spent our weekend building a 3D printer, you know the usual. It took a total of three days to put together and to do some minor troubleshooting, but all the hardware is finished! The song is Plastic Bertrand “Ca Plane Pour Moi” for all you copyright fiends out there…
A few weeks ago, we picked up some old Zebra LP 2844 thermal printers in hopes of using them to print barcodes, packing slips, stickers, and all sorts of other fun stuff. Well, since most of us around here use Ubuntu, we figured it would be awesome to be able to use it with Linux.
Okay, sounds easy… well, how do you do it? First off, the printer we have only has serial and parallel ports. Crap. Undaunted, I order a USB to Serial cable that uses the good old FTDI chip. I manage to add it as a printer in Ubuntu, and go to print a test page. Ugh. Super slow. Its also pretty buggy and half the prints die. Fail. Twitter to the rescue, and @adafruit recommends a USB to Parallel adaptor.
Fast forward two days, and the Sabrent USB to Parallel cable has arrived. Things got busy, but tonight I was able to get out the cable and give it a shot. Parallel may be old, but the cable looks nice and plugging things in are easy. I remember order of operations being important from the ‘old days’, so I tried this combination and it worked. Remember, this is on a standard Ubuntu 9.04 install, YMMV.
1. Plug Parallel end into Zebra
2. Turn on Zebra
3. Plug USB into computer
Okay, now I have it plugged in. A quick ‘dmesg’ in the terminal confirms that it found SOMETHING that looks like a printer. Rock.
[996085.966096] usblp2: USB Bidirectional printer dev 4 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0×1A86 pid 0×7584
Alright, and now the tricky part: How do I get the computer to talk to it? Actually it was ridiculously easy!
1. Go to System -> Administration -> Printers
2. That brings up the printer management dialog, where you click the New button.
3. It doesn’t find the printer automatically, so go with the Unknown device option and click Forward.
4. It searched for a bit and brought up the Choose Driver screen. Scroll all the way down to Zebra and click Forward.
5. The Zebra LP 2844 uses the EPL2 language, so select EPL2 Label Printer model and the recommended driver.
6. Name it. I called mine ZEBRAR.
7. Print a test page. You know you want to.
Bingo! If everything went okay, you now have a working label printer. Now, what do you do with it?
Well, the easiest way I could figure out how to make things to print on it was to use the GIMP. Here are a few tips:
* The printer is 203dpi. When you create your images, make sure they use this DPI setting (its under advanced settings) Then make the size of the document the size of your stickers in inches. That will make things work great for you.
* Make sure you adjust the page setup! Go to File -> Page Setup. Make sure you select Format for: Zebra as well as your paper (label) size. This will ensure that your prints are exactly what you see.
* For some reason, from GIMP the print copies stuff doesn’t work. Bizarre for sure, but I found a workaround: Use the Print to File option to print a PDF and set the desired number of copies. This will create a PDF with a page for every copy you want. When you print that, it will print out the number of copies you want. Make sure you set the page properties in your PDF viewer before printing!!!
Anyway, thats how you get a Zebra LP 2844 thermal label printer working under linux. Now to get the right kind of stickers and print out hundreds of MakerBot QR code stickers.
The liquidware gang stopped by to do some co-hacking at the BotCave on Saturday. They make extremely beautiful electronics. If anyone has said that electronics are sexy it’s probably because they have seen the liquidware boards.
