Drafts Zero – The Lost Blog Posts – Page 5

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

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

The Lost Blog Posts

A sign in front of a desolate wasteland says "YOU ARE LOST" — But at least you’re here

I’ve got a lot of unpublished draft blog posts here. Like a lot. At the time I’m writing this post, I’ve got 1,134 published posts and 329 drafts. This isn’t versions of drafts. It’s posts that I’ve started and then didn’t publish for some reason or another. On probably 300 different topics. Some are, admittedly, little more than a collection of links and indecipherable shorthand texts from a madman. However, others are filled with research, links, images, code, and were so close to publishing that I can only imagine that something distracted me before I could… squirrel!

The oldest of these dates back to December 2009 and relates to the cutting edge, new to market, MakerBot Cupcake CNC’s plastic extruder, the “plastruder.” I don’t know that anyone would be interested in this kind of content any more, but I kinda like the idea of “Drafts Zero” and spending about 5-15 minutes dusting off an old draft and just publishing it.¹

Let’s see how this goes.

Update:

In just the first few posts, I discovered that I wanted to add some additional comments. Look for these at the top, in italics and in brackets to provide context.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

A take on the “Inbox Zero” productivity / organization strategy [↩]

Misnamer [11/28/2010]

[Just a little bit about my villain origin story.]

I chose the website name “MakerBlock” because I thought it would be interesting to design and print interconnecting building blocks. ¹² As a kid these were my favorite kinds of toys – I would work at building things for hours. Playing with my MakerBot I discovered I’m actually far less interested in printing building blocks than I am interested in directly designing and printing the toys I would have made with those building blocks.

It’s quite funny to me that it has taken me nearly a year of owning a 3D printer to come to this epiphany. All this time I was thinking about building blocks when what I really wanted was the ability to make any toy imaginable when that power already lay before me the entire time.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Yes, I know. I misspelled that on purpose. [↩]
I also chose the name “MakerBlock” because I thought it was a clever play on the MakerBot name. [↩]