Day: January 13, 2012

DrawBot – The Delivery, Part III

So, I’ve figured it out.  Admittedly, it took until about 4:45pm today, but I figured it out.

Today was Friday the Thirteenth.  Duh.  That DEFINITELY explains my work day.

I was very happy to find the Adafruit Motor/Stepper/Servo Shield for Arduino kit – v1.0 had arrived from MakerBot.  When I opened1 the package I noticed that the kit really was a kit.  Which I already knew.  I knew this was a kit, but somehow I kinda forgot about it.

In a way, it’s irrelevant that I don’t have the other parts since I have to assemble this kit.  So, tonight I’ll assemble the motor shield and tomorrow, hopefully, I can assemble the rest of the DrawBot.

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  1. Read: shredded the USPS box [↩]

DrawBot – The Delivery?

I don’t think all of my parts are going to arrive in time for me to take a crack at assembling a DrawBot this weekend.  Per the USPS:

  • MakerBot shipment:  Your item departed our OAKLAND, CA 94615 sort facility on January 13, 2012.
  • Adafruit  shipment:  Your item departed our NEW YORK, NY 10199 sort facility on January 13, 2012.

I think the best I can hope for is getting my motor shield tomorrow.  That’s okay, there’s plenty to do in the meantime.  I must learn patience.

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DMCA dot com – I CANNOT believe I didn’t think of this…

I’m not going to actually link to DMCA dot com because I don’t want to send any Google juice their way. 1

This is just so freaking evil I cannot believe I didn’t think of it. 2  DMCA take-down services?  Are you kidding me?  They’ll charge you $10/month for the ability to send e-mails.  The only thing they really have going for them, from what I can see, is a really nice domain name and a snazzy website.  Watermarking images and little badges on your site does more to market them than it does to protect anyone.

Edit: Oh, yeah, thanks to Tbuser for the link!

  1. They’ve got their PageRank of 5 and I’m only a little jealous [↩]
  2. I have evil ideas from time to time, but I very rarely actually go through with any of them.  I try to use my powers for good. [↩]

This may be the worst SFW website anywhere on the internet

I came across this website as a result of something I was researching for work.

I merely thought the website was bad until I saw a rainbow armadillo shoot stars out of its butt.

Then I realized it was all so much worse.  It is perfectly safe-for-work.  It may send you into seizures, but it’s safe for work.

ProfileMaker update

I’ve made a few slight modifications to ProfileMaker.

First, after testing it seems that the apparent optimal W/T is approximately 1.67 or so.  Using this value for target W/T setting has lead to my cleanest and most sturdy prints.  Admittedly, I haven’t done proper science-testing to determine the optimal value – but I do not believe it could be far off.  Thus, I’ve removed this setting option and ProfileMaker will calculate the optimal thread width based upon a W/T value of 1.667 and whatever layer thickness you choose.

Secondly, I’ve removed the automated profile creation system.  Not many people seemed to be using this and this feature gets quickly outdated a new versions of ReplicatorG are released.  While the five critical settings provided by ProfileMaker have been unaffected by recent changes to ReplicatorG’s Skeinforge engine, lots of the other settings have been juggled around.  Skeinforge is too much of a moving target for me to try to keep up.  Ideally, you’ll find a good set of profile settings you like and will still be interested in using ProfileMaker to adjust the five critical settings.

It is my hope that by making these minor changes everyone will have an easier time using ProfileMaker and get better results.

Please let me know what you think!

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