I tend to lean towards projects of a mechanical nature, but ever since I declared I would be majoring in electrical engineering as well, I have been doing more and more electrical work (which I haven’t really posted here… yet). So for my next project I am leaving my comfortable domain of mechanical projects, shooting way past low level, semi familiar electrical projects, and landing in the foreign world of computer programming. I like many many thousands before me am attempting to develop an iPhone application.

The application is still in its infant stages of planning, and I am currently brushing up on my Objective-C programming skills, but I will be posting more info and screen shots, as well as giving a rundown of the development once I finish. Stay tuned!

What have I been up to this semester that has been keeping me so busy that I haven’t posted ANYTHING? The frame of it can be seen above. The lovely partial machine above is for a design class that is sort of like that expanding foam that you fill cracks in your walls with – it does a fantastic job of filling any gap in my time so completely that I quite literally haven’t done anything but work and school and design that this semester. Things are starting to go down hill now though. Full write-ups of working rapid prototype machines and the above thing and many other exciting things will be produced soon.

Wait until you see the electronics for it.

If you really like to make things and you are going to be proposing sometime in the future, why not use your skills of making things to craft a one of a kind engagement ring? The prospect of making an engagement ring seems daunting, and the lack of information on the subject can be a big deterrent. Hopefully this article will help shed some light on the subject; it is a lot easier to do than you might think! You can check out the complete build of my ring here.

For the past week my missing roll of kapton tape has been the bane of my existence, preventing me from trying out the new extruder that I built for my RepRap. Today all of that changed when I found the roll tucked away in a toolbox full of spare RepRap parts I forgot I had underneath my bed. This past week has reminded me why I don’t organize things. Whenever I say I am going to organize my stuff, I’m basically saying “I’m going to go hide all my stuff in places where I’ll never be able to find it!” Anyhow, I’ll be assembling the RepRap today and hopefully taking it for a test drive this afternoon evening. Stay tuned!

*Update* I have since tested the extruder – it works very nicely when I’m not actually printing. There seems to be a problem with the host preventing the extruder from extruding during a print. I’m out of time for now but I will try to sort it out ASAP.

I have been building a RepRap in my spare time from instructions you will find if you follow the link. The instructions detail an extrusion mechanism which uses a direct drive from a stepper motor. It turns out that no matter what I do I cannot get enough torque to operate the RepRap in that configuration. I made a quick fix out of erector set gears, but it was bulky and didn’t perform very well.

With an insane amount of work and school leading up to Christmas, and having invested about 20 extra hours just trying to get it to work I had to put the RepRap project on hold. Fortunately I had some free time this past week so I designed and machined a new extruder which utilized some old brass worm gears I had lying around (actually they were extremely old – off some 50+ year old model trains I have, I choose not to think about their potential value). The bad news is that I had to take the heater off to make the upgrades and to reinstall the heater I will be needing some kapton tape – which I seemed to have misplaced. I’m looking hard though! I will give an update once I get it working. I’ll also post the plans – I don’t know how useful they will be though, as I used what is most likely non standard gears. The design borrows its geometry liberally from a design I saw once here.

*Update* I have since tested the extruder – it works very nicely when I’m not actually printing. There seems to be a problem with the host preventing the extruder from extruding during a print. I’m out of time for now but I will try to sort it out ASAP.

You might have noticed some changes to the site and blog yesterday/today. I decided that I was tired of the crummy looking pages I had before, especially the homepage with the tantalizing scrolling images advertising projects that couldn’t be clicked. So dark blues and greys are the new site colors. Let me know if you find any dead links or if something doesn’t seem to work properly – I’ll fix it! If you haven’t ever seen the site that this blog belongs to, its definitely worth a look. Check it out here.

PS – If you don’t understand my silly picture, it represents my old website a bland old white square being revamped into a much better, much more attractive cube. Micro-evolution at its finest.

For me the few days off work and school before Christmas were spent making a wooden iPhone case for my fiance. The curves that make the iPhone look so exquisite are a double edge sword because they make it exquisitely difficult to carve an accurately fitting case. Ultimately I had to turn a custom router bit on a lathe to get it made correctly. It sports some fancy wooden buttons on the volume and lock button. Look for a a terse build article within a day or two! Build article here.

Baby steps must come before awesome big boy steps and today I took my first of most likely many. The quality of the parts are very poor which due to a mixture of poor calibration of the machine and an extruder that doesn’t work particularly well (due to a lamely implemented hack to the extruder in order to get it to work)

My first attempt was on a button stylized as an owl. As you can see from the pictures it is a very sad owl, and really a very sad button. The height the system raised the extrusion head for each layer was set too low so it smeared everything around.

The second attempt was on what is called the minimug. It is the standard RepRap test part and is intended to be used to toast your machine with an object that it printed. My glass wont be holding any liquids but it is heartening to see something that resembles an object!

I will be machining a proper gear driven extruder in the coming week and tweaking the settings of the machine to achieve highest possible print quality. Together those changes should give me much higher print quality. It will be interesting to see how it turns out!

You can download them here

I have the RepRap completely wired up and everything – but I’m having loads of trouble getting the extruder to work. Since I am an extremely early adopter of the new RepRap design there appears to be an unfixed bug with the code/hardware that prevents the extruder stepper motor from getting the current that it requires. I hacked together a quick fix that *seems* to work (pictured below) but haven’t had time to really test it. Hopefully I’ll have some time over the thanksgiving holiday.

Mechanically the RepRap is done! Unfortunately I have to do some homework so I can’t wire it up and take it for a spin. I still have to figure out how to run the stepper motor on the extruder from the extruder controller board (via two H-Bridges), and put the nichrome wire and thermister on the barrel. I’m lovin it so far!