Update May Week 2
May 21, 2013 | Comments
This week was pizza night, but we were pretty distracted by all the action.
First off, DanW very kindly got stuck in with his PAT testing kit. First for the chop was my donated angle grinder, which was great because I actually needed to use it.
Thanks to DanW and his handy PAT checker and some sticky labels we’re now a little bit safer.
Paul, Si and Tom were all getting stuck in to getting Sarah’s 3D printer up and running, which isn’t far off now. Just a case of connecting the hot end and reconfiguring the firmware and we’re ready to go…
What would you print? Let us know in the comments!
Ben and Finn were getting stuck in with their robot project. It looks complicated! I’m glad they know what they are doing! 🙂
Let’s just hope the three laws of robotics are applied!
Keep an eye out here as I’ll be posting it’s progress here.
This looks technical. There’s a multimeter involved and everything.
Turns out it was a software issue. I think they needed to reverse the polarities.
Everyone knows you always reverse the polarities…
Thanks for fixing my angle grinder Dan.
This plug dates back to before british standards were actually a thing.
Life saver, possibly literally.
This angle grinder can now go into the log for approval as it passed the PAT check after the plug was swapped for a good one.
Dan managed to do about 30 items before running out of sticky labels.
I’d say it was a thankless job, only I do remember thanking him many times, but another one won’t go amiss, so thanks Dan!
Charlotte was practicing her cup song, she even wrote a little tutorial for it.
Maybe we’ll have a few more tutorials heading our way soon…
Sorry guys, no videos this week, maybe next.
Speaking of next week…
Will we get Sarah’s 3D printer actually printing? Will we get the Raspberry Pi connected to our 3D printer with a screen? Will more people turn up with interesting gadgets? Will there be videos!?
Find out in next weeks post!
PS. Sorry for no pizza photos, we scoffed it all down before I had thought to take any.
Update May Week 1
May 13, 2013 | Comments
Hi all,
Last week was a bit of an odd one.
I knew a few of our regular members were away including two of our core members Tom and Si. So with the weather as fantastic as it was, I made a decision to make the most of the weather following on from the the bank holiday and pass on.
This should be the exception, not the rule, and we’ll be back as normal again tomorrow night (Tuesday 14th May).
Cheers!
Update April Week 5
May 13, 2013 | Comments
I ran out of time to do an update, so I’ll play a little catch up.
We were mostly working on the 3D Printer, so here’s some videos of that in action:
Oh and thanks to Dave for bringing down this huge desk puzzle…
Next meeting was meant to be Tuesday 7th May, but due to the good weather (which was too good to miss out on), it was abandoned. We’ll be open as normal on Tuesday 14th May.
Update April Week 4
Apr 24, 2013 | Comments
This is our tap, there are many taps like it but this one is ours…
The first hack of the session was thanks to DanW who brought down a hose pipe connector kit. Adding this was essential to making the water flow better for our coffee and tea making facilities. I know, I know, the excitement is overwhelming!
Moving very swiftly back on to our 3D printer, we reconnected everything back up from last week to see where we were up to.
Only this time we thought we’d give it a go on Linux, after all the eventual plan would be to use a Raspberry Pi to interface with the RAMPS kit.
DanR got his laptop out and started hammering away at the keys in an attempt to get the “printrun” software we’d tried before to run on Linux.
However, through no fault of his own an error was returned. “ImportError: No module named printcore”, apparently this is a known issue on Debian based Linux systems.
Oddly enough, printrun works perfectly on Windows, so we went back to that until the issue on Linux is resolved with the developers.
Through this software we were able to figure a few bits out, set the dimensions in the configuration and recompile, then upload the updated firmware to the Arduino.
We did successfully manage, with some accuracy to get the bed to go up and down the threaded bars, especially since we’d correctly configured the work area dimensions however there was a bit of a wobble.
Discussion quickly turned to how we were going to solve this problem. We talked about the possibility of moving the existing threaded rods to the corners and adding two additional ones which would be belt driven. Another idea after confirming against the Ultimaker was to use a larger drive nut, or indeed use two drive nuts, simply adding an additional one above the bed, opposite the one below.
Meanwhile, John was getting on with his on-bike sound system. The previous wooden lid had rotted away so he took the opportunity to replace it with an all weather plastic solution.
We also discussed (re)assembling the vacformer into a fixed position, however we’re in need of a heater unit.
Anyone got one of those portable halogen heaters spare?
Better check the attic…
Update: These are the missing videos footage that I forgot to publish.
Update April Week 3
Apr 17, 2013 | Comments
Success!
Mark this as the day we officially got our 3D printer actually working. OK, so it’s not printing yet, but everything is moving.
With thanks to Si for his soldering skills and getting things connected, DanR for overseeing the firmware, Tom for completing the chassis we were able to to hook it up to the power and start getting things moving.
As soon as we attached it to the mains we had a little movement, this was good, but not quite what we wanted yet. We hooked up a terminal on the USB virtual port COM4 at 250000 baud and discovered an error.
The first thing we needed to do was re-configure the Arduino Marlin firmware, we set the motherboard as “RAMPS 1.3 / 1.4 (Power outputs: Extruder, Bed, Fan)” and TEMP_SENSOR_0 as “100k thermistor – best choice for EPCOS 100k (4.7k pullup)”.
Using the Arduino software we were able to compile and upload the updated Marlin firmware to the Arduino. This was exciting.
As we are using the Marlin firmware we needed the Python based printrun on a windows machine to actually interface with it.
As we had only attached the extruder so far we decided to test that first, however we couldn’t seem to make it do anything. We realised that it wouldn’t do anything until the thermistor had reached temperature, so we set the temperature.
First the reading went to room temperature and we were all a bit downhearted by this, but a second request for it to increase temperature seemed to do the trick. We watched as the software reported the temperature increase in a nice little graph.
It was time. The thermistor had reached temperature and now we could tell the extruder to move.
Success! Cheers went around the room as we saw the motor whir and the cogs turn. The excitement was all too much. I had to sit down… I did take some videos though…
That’s not all!
In the midst of all this, while while we were up to our eyeballs in wires and code for the 3D printer, we had a few visitors down to come and check out the place. Si kindly introduced himself and showed them around. Thanks for coming down and we hope you’ll come back soon, hopefully we’ll have a finished product by then!
Not only that but John had brought down his battery powered EL wire, so he got to work putting that into a board, which flashes “Hack” in blue and “Space” in orange. A sort of beacon to say: “We’re here!”.
Also, Steve very kindly brought down a spare graphics card (or GPU). We thought it might be fun to get a mining rig setup, sure we’re a bit late in the game, but it would still be a fun project as there’s a few ideas that may give us an edge against competitors. Focusing less on the revenue and more the challenge.
Thanks everyone, see you next week!