Chip off the old ‘bot

Chip off the old 'bot

A handsome family portrait

Okay, I’m liking the MakerBot and it’s RepRap child.  But, check out that work area!

(I have the same 3-in-1 oil for my MakerBot.  :)  )

Got my groove back

It just wasn’t the same without my old theme.

Of the several WordPress websites I have, this was the first one I moved to WordPress 3.0 when it came out.  Unfortunately, 3.0 totally broke the hell out of my theme.  I suspect it happened when the database was upgraded and it nuked the theme options.  But, an upgrade to the theme1 and a little CSS spit and polish…  and I’m back!

Edit: One unfortunate side effect of upgrading the theme was that it nuked my logo image.  I found the original on Flickr, resized it, and dropped it back in.  However, as you can tell from the nasty pixelation – I used “Paint” to resize.  Blech.  I’m going to have to redo that.

  1. the super flexible and customizeable Constructor [↩]

Documenting Skeinforge settings

Uncool tower, cool tower

Uncool tower, cool tower

BotHacker recently documented his adventures in cooling fans and Skeinforge options – to amazing effect. 1  You should read the entire post, because there’s a lot of good info in there.  However, to summarize:

  1. Numerous permutations of cooling fan sizes and speeds offered some improvement.
  2. Using no cooling fans and putting the Skeinforge Cool setting at a minimum layer time of 10 seconds offered a dramatic improvement.

BotHacker’s post is what Skeinforge documentation should look like.

Update: Per BotHacker’s comment below, “Skeinforge must be told to ‘Slow Down’ for this to work. The other option is ‘Orbit’, and may lead to poorer results.”

  1. BotHacker – your photo to the right on Flickr says “all rights reserved” but I thought you might not mind me discussing your post and photos favorably.  If you don’t want me to link or post a copy of your photo, let me know and I’ll take it down. – MakerBlock [↩]

MakerBot Maintenance

In terms of maintenance, there’s not much a MakerBot needs to stay happy:

  1. Check/floss the extruder (may need to disassemble)
  2. Check/oil 2X, 2Y, and 4Z axis rods
  3. Check/tighten nuts/bolts
  4. Check/replace build platform
  5. Check/tighten belts

What did I miss?  How often do you do these things?

Sketchup STL Importer Plugins

As I’ve mentioned before, I do all of my 3D modeling in Sketchup.  It’s not open source, but it is free.1

Well, I’ve been monitoring the Capolight Electronics Blog lately – and it’s a good thing too.  Besides having some seriously amazing information about the thermal properties of plastic, he’s just posted about some useful importing/exporting plugins for Sketchup.  As easy as Sketchup is to use, it’s just not very good at exporting to STL.  I haven’t tried these plugins out – but I’m hopeful they will do the job.

If you try them out, please let me know how it goes!

  1. I suppose it’s really a “freemium” business model… [↩]