DrawBot – The Assembly, Part I

I assembled most of the Adafruit Motor/Stepper/Servo Shield for Arduino kit – v1.0 last night.  Since I don’t have an Arduino yet,1 I didn’t want to solder in the connector pins.  Other than those four connectors, it is all soldered up.

FYI, don’t try to put the L293D into the 16-pin sockets before you solder the socket into place.  I tried to do that and it was a mistake.  I bent some of the leads to the socket and stabbed myself in the finger with the L293D chip.

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  1. It’s on its way!!! []

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. []

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!

DrawBot – Giant Unicorn?

As you may know, I’ve got a MakerBot Cupcake named “Bender” and a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic named “Flexo“.  There’s really no doubt in my mind I’ll be springing for a Replicator with dual extrusion1  Thankfully, I think there’s a way for me to make use of each of my robots, in its own special way.  I figure I can keep the Cupcake rocking a Unicorn Pen Plotter, use my Automated Build Platform in my Thing-O-Matic for mass production of smaller parts, and put a Replicator to work printing new, wacky, and/or large designs.

But, why am I talking about giant unicorns?!  Sandy Noble, the creator of the Polargraph,2 just posted about how he has created a vector graphics importer for the Polargraph software.  This is some pretty amazing stuff.  The MakerBot Unicorn has several software toolpaths that take vector graphics to GCode for printing through ReplicatorG.  The end result is that a Polargraph rocking a vector graphic importer should be able to draw arbitrary shapes, without the need to draw scribbly bits.

I think it would be particularly awesome to have a DrawBot draw a frame/border and then fill it with a scribbly/pixelated drawing.  Or, perhaps, draw the outline of an object and then fill it in with scribbly/pixelated shadings.

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  1. Will my extravagance know no bounds?! []
  2. Which is probably the best documented DrawBot on the internet []

DrawBot – The Hacks

Sandy Noble's modifications to Adafruit's Motor Shield

Sandy Noble's modifications to Adafruit's Motor Shield

Chatting with Sandy Noble over at the Polargraph website has been extremely helpful1  It looks like he’s added three changes to the Adafruit Motor Shield:

  • Heatsink added23
  • Breakout boards to connect the terminals to the clips for the motor leads.  However, it looks like there’s a small little component of a circular purple variety also on that board.
  • Extra pins for hooking up a cooling fan.  Sandy says he doesn’t use them any more, but it really wouldn’t be a bad idea given that it would take hours for even a simple print.
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  1. The photo is from Sandy Noble’s photo stream.  It says All Rights Reserved and I will happily take it down if he asks and says this is not a fair use.  Given that all of his stuff has been very open source, I’m guessing this was just a default setting. []
  2. To the H-Bridges? []
  3. Also…  Where does one get a heatsink?  How do you attach it? []

DrawBot – The Plan!

What’s next?

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  1. Printing, for sure! []
  2. I don’t fish, but I have a bunch left over from a prior project []