Hard at work programming
Today we received a partial shipment of electronics at the BotCave! Unfortunately, we only received the extruder controllers so we’re still waiting on the RepRap motherboards. Widget and Matt are seen here programming the extruders to be ready to ship as soon as we receive the motherboards. Ahhh, the sweet smell of progress!
James Husum writes:
NASA is currently taking ideas from the public for about the next week or so at http://opennasa.ideascale.com. People can submit their ideas and vote on the ideas of others.
I submitted an idea for NASA to get involved with the desktop manufacturing / 3d printing movement. It can be seen here.
Desktop manufacturing and 3D printers are beginning to emerge as a growing industry. See RepRap – http://www.reprap.org/ and Cupcake CNC – http://www.makerbot.com/ for two examples. The technology allows you to design a model and have it manufactured in a device about the size of a large inkjet / laser printer. Instead of ink it extrudes plastic onto a platform. By layering the plastic objects can be created.
NASA could work with the desktop manufacturing community to design models for use in 3D printers. There are any number of items that could be modeled – rockets, satellites, the Shuttles, the International Space Station. The designs could be released into the public domain for anyone to use.
NASA engineers could also look into helping to develop the technology behind the 3D printers to make them better.
Nose to the Grinding Wheel
Many of our MakerBot users aren’t aware of all the hard work that goes in to producing a CupCake CNC. This is Part I of The Unsung Heros of the 3D Printing Revolution Miniseries. In this Miniseries, we will explore some of the processes that transform raw materials into your CupCakes, right here in Brooklyn, NY, USA.
CupCake’s aren’t all electronics and motors. We put a lot of hard work and elbow grease into making your robot. In this photo we see Widget, MakerBot Employee #2, preparing Z-Rods for the batch 11 shipment of your CupCakes. The Z-rod controls the height of the plastruder head during printing operations and four rods are required per CupCake. Widget carefully shapes each rod by hand, taking care afterward to inspect each one according to our rigid quality standards. Each rod is then carefully packaged, sealed and labeled. This is just one of the hundreds of labor-intensive processes we take to ship your bots.
In the next part of our Miniseries, The Unsung Hero’s of the 3D Printing Revolution, we will take a look at the people who assemble and build your CupCake CNC’s.
OMG. Gorgeous. 3D scanning is awesome.
Just a friendly reminder from Makerbot Industries that plastic filament and water don’t mix well. We subjected some plastic samples some very humid conditions, i.e. submerging them in water for 48 hours. Then the samples were used in a plastruder, and checked against a control group. Turns out, the drenched plastic’s performance was awful, the extruded filament being more brittle and even “popping” during prints.
Turns out, the RepRap folks already know all about it:
-from VikOlliver at reprap.org
So now as an added precaution, Makerbot is now shipping all of our plastic in sealed bags with a silica gel packet to keep away humidity. Happy Printing!
I want one of these robot hands to load and unload my CupCake!
It’s a dangerous and highly skilled job, but soon bomb disposal experts serving in Afghanistan could be helped by a robot created in north London.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8527000/8527911.stm
The latest version of ReplicatorG, 0013, is now available for download. This release adds a bit of functionality to the firmware uploader:
If you’re new to the firmware updater, don’t worry; we’ve written all-new documentation describing how to get firmware on to your boards from ReplicatorG.
Hopefully this functionality allow us to get firmware fixes to you as quickly as possible, and make it easier than ever for you to get the latest firmware on your bots. Happy hacking!
Some folks have been having difficulty changing the lookup table the extruder uses to interpret the temperature data generated by the thermistor. Tweaking the settings has traditionally been a laborious, multi-step process. I’ve whipped up a new version of ReplicatorG and the extruder firmware to simplify thermistor tuning.
There’s a new page on the wiki that discusses how to adjust the thermistor settings, and gives some reasonable values to start with.
As always, you can find links to the latest version at: http://replicat.org/download
Remember to leave a comment or open an issue in GitHub if you run into any problems!
Martijn Elserman and Widget independently came across a very, very, very nasty bug in ReplicatorG that can lead to data loss. I’ve put up a new release of ReplicatorG that corrects the problem. You can find releases for all platforms here:
http://replicat.org/download
Please update asap, and as usual open an issue on github or leave a comment if you encounter any problems.
Microlathe is a Makerbot printable Lathe that uses a Dremel for rotary power. Cathal Garvey made it and it’s his second brush with the power of high speed rotoational power tools after his Dremelfuge!
I spent a day and a half designing the first draft of it in OpenSCAD, another evening printing the parts, and the minutes I could grab over the last few evenings testing it. The result? It’s fairly hazardous, requires careful balancing, and it works just fine on wood dowelling. So on the whole, a big success!
One of the reasons I designed and made Microlathe was because I wanted a free lathe. Another reason was to contribute to a pattern of accelerating returns I’ve become aware of and excited about recently, in the sphere of rapid prototyping.
Via Microlathe and Accelerating Returns in Rapid Prototyping