MakerBlock – Page 4

MY robot [Draft 02/18/2010]

There really is something special about having built this robot for myself. I know it pretty well how it works and why certain design and engineering decisions were made.

I’ve also modified and customized this robot as I’ve used it. I’ve moved the extruder board, rotated the motherboard to give me better access to the SD card, drilled a few holes in the sides, yanked out the opto-endstops, extended the wires running to the extruder motor, thermistor, and nichrome. I’ve even designed a few minor printable upgrades.

When my extruder stopped working (twice) I just took it apart. I know I’m not going to break it as I do so. And, hell, if I do break it I’ll just fix it.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Magic [Draft 02/03/2010]

[Reflecting back on this post is a little bittersweet. 2010 was an incredible time to be someone with a 3D printer at home. I remember Forrest Higgs’ detailed website about how he built his mostly wooden 3D printer. By my recollection, it was slow but accurate enough to make useable parts. Back then it was possible to read literally every single word published on the topic of 3D printers in about 30 minutes once a week – and I did. I read, and re-read, so many of Forrest’s posts leading up to and well after the purchase of my Cupcake. While Forrest’s site is no more, it lives on at Archive.org.]

Since I know basically nothing about how the actual electrical components of my MakerBot work, the entire thing is essentially magic to me. (OOooooh! Shiny lights!)

One of the things that kept me from buying a MakerBot in the beginning was the thought of trying to solder surface mount components. Admittedly, I wasn’t exactly a pro at soldering through hole components either, but the idea of soldering super tiny parts using a hot plate was certainly off-putting. I know the MakerBot guys said it is pretty easy, but I certainly had my doubts.

One of my favorite projects to monitor is Forrest Higgs progress on his Tommelise. His goal, as I understand from his blog, is to design/build a machine that could be built cheaply by a reasonably clever and motivated 12 year old. While the suggested cost of building a RepRap Darwin/Mendel is somewhere in the $500-$750 range, Forrest suggests a Tommelise could be built for as little as $150.

The trade off is that the Tommelise uses a lot of wood in its construction (cheap, but not RepRappable “vitamin” part), uses linear stepper motors, uses through-hole components so it doesn’t benefit from the nifty wizbang bits you can get in surface mount components, and prints slower than a RepRap. But, I keep thinking back to the breadboard prototypes Forrest puts up on site.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Plastic Screw Anchor [Draft 02/02/2010]

[This draft consisted of nothing more than these two links to plastic drywall anchors. Enjoy!]

http://images.google.com/images?q=plastic%20drywall%20anchor&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi

http://www.plastic-anchors.com/plastic_screw_anchor.htm

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

MakerBot tuning [Draft 01/20/2010]

There’s a fair amount of tuning involved in getting a MakerBot running. Once assembled there may be some plastruder, Skeinforge, replicatorG troubleshooting before you get your first print. Once that’s done you’ll want to print up some upgrades and replacement parts, experimenting along the way. I figure there’s two parallel tracks to tuning a MakerBot – the hardware and the software.

Hardware tuning

Leveling the print platform
Adjusting belt tension
Adjusting plastruder idler wheel tension
Adjusting the stepper motor potentiometers

Software tuning

Skeinforge settings
ReplicatorG settings

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Prototype Pricing [Draft 01/19/2010]

This is something I’ve thought about as well – what’s a fair way of pricing printed objects? I figure the potential costs associated with a build can be split into those build dependent costs and those costs which are uniform to every build.

Build dependent costs: (1) plastic (2) electricity (3) waste
Uniform costs: (1) set-up time (2) operator time

I’m not sure how to take into account the cost of the machine. You could incorporate it by including a cost for “machine time.” Then again, you could just tack on a set pro-rated cost of the machine to each build. Obviously, there’s a small amount of set-up – converting to gcode, then to the s3g code, moving the stages into position.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

More prints [Draft 01/04/2010]

Over the last two days I’ve printed a MakerBot coin, two chess pieces (both knights), two replacement Scrabble pieces (one printed vertically, one printed horizontally), two different tries at printing a dummy SD card, and a very loud whistle.

I’ve had difficulty re-printing the whistle once I changed some of my Skeinforge settings. (Dang.) I’ve also ended up with a plank of plastic instead of a Darth Vader head. It was being printed out with these really wild spikey bit sticking straight out of the head – several centimeters beyond where the raft ended. Non-optimal.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Preparing to print [Draft 12/27/2009]

Unfortunately my MakerBot did not come with a print button. I’m (slowly) going through the MakerBot tutorial on how to print. For those of you with a Windows box, the first time process should be as follows:

Learn!
Get ready!
- Calibrate your MakerBot
  - Check the endstops, axes, plastruder,
  - Test extrusions
- Do you have a 1mm thermistor from MakerBot batch 9?
  - Well, you’re going to have to compensate for the variation in its readings.
Get the software!
- Download and install ReplicatorG
  - You can actually download Skeinforge from the same page
- Download Skeinforge
  - Make sure to install it where no parent directory has a space in its name
- Download and install Python 2.6.X
Get a model!
- The mini-mug from Thingiverse is traditional

Well, I’m still getting the hang of this… I’ve frisbee’d two mini-mugs so far. :)

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

UNTITLED [Draft 12/25/2009]

[I have no idea why I jotted down the below. At the time these pages were all easily accessible from the MakerBot website and wiki. These days, you need Archive.org to see what these items are. I think this is a snapshot of what I was doing on Christmas Day 2009?]

http://sanguino.cc/softwareforwindows
http://wiki.makerbot.com/plastruder-mk4
http://wiki.makerbot.com/plastruder-mk4-assembly#toc75
http://wiki.makerbot.com/cupcake-motherboard-firmware-update
http://wiki.makerbot.com/cupcake-calibration

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Plastruder! [Draft 12/25/2009]

Last night I started work on the Plastruder Mark IV. Superglued the dino-bases, bolted those bits together, sourced some bits of wire from an ethernet cable, soldered together the nichrome wire, soldered together the thermisistor, and bolted the plastruder housing together with the motor.

Apparently there are two varieties of thermisistors – one small and one REALLY small. I got the REALLY small one. It was easily the most demanding part. It’s such a tiny part that I was constantly afraid of snapping, crushing, or losing it.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Combining Multiple Video Files

Rather than send me a single set of video files, my client’s vendor sent me… 149 separate MP4 files, ranging from a few seconds to about 11 minutes long. I have no interest in sorting through dozens of video files, cataloging them individually, and then trying to review them in order.

While I would have thought VLC would have been a good drag-n’-drop way to stitch them all together, the version I had and the newest version available both weren’t letting me save multiple files into a single file.

A bit of googling and I stumbled across an old friend – ffmpeg! I hadn’t used this program to transcode video since the early days of DIVX, backing up DVD’s back in the late 1990’s / early aughts.

Here’s the process I settled on for my Windows machine:

Created a batch file to create a list of the video files (which included spaces, commas, and all kinds of nonsense command line tools hate). The entire contents of the batch file was:
- dir *.mp4 /b > list.txt
Since I’m using Notepad++, I used the find/replace function to search / replace on “list.txt”:
- /r/n
- ‘/r/nfile ‘
Even using some find/replace magic, I still needed to adjust the first and last lines, but that wasn’t so bad.
Then, the videos which had been named in semi-logical pattern, were not in strictly alphanumeric order. I re-ordered them in the text list to the order I’d wanted to view them in.
I dropped the FFMPEG executable, downloaded from this mirror, into the folder with the video files and list.txt, then made a new batchfile which contained the following:
- ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i list.txt -c copy combinedfilename.mp4
Now, I could have typed this into the command line, but since I wanted to batch certain files together, it was just easier for my purposes to have the batch file. Plus, now I have the executable and the batch file for future use.

Anyhow, I hope this helps save someone, perhaps even myself, a few minutes of hair pulling and searching. :)