I had a great idea for a new, drastically simplified extruder design for RepRap. I decided to spend a day on it, and if it proved fruitful, then I’d pursue it more. Thank god for the laser cutter at NYCR, because I had a working prototype made up in an hour. After that, it was fairly simple to design a nice layered housing for it and make it into a reliable little beast.
There is a much more detailed post on the RepRap blog, you can look at my flickr set, or check out the design on Thingiverse.
The road to ham radio is paved with free stuff...
Four of the Resistors made it out to the Ham Radio University 2009 in Bethpage, NY last Sunday.
HRU is a day long convention of amateur radio operators holding forums on various topics of interest to radio operators, including digital modes, best practices, long distance (DX) communications strategies, emergency services developments, and ham radio license exams.
Diana and Bill successfully passed the General Class license upgrade, giving them access to frequencies below 30 MHz on the amateur bands. 30MHz represents the common denominator between the shorter range bands open to the basic class amateur, and the lower frequency bands that typically traverse continents and oceans.
We came away with an appreciation for tiny world-capable antennas, new digital voice gear from Icom, and piqued interest in DX contesting – the art of individuals to wrangle radio waves to reach out to specific parts of the world and communicate with others without relying on anything more than the ether to carry their signal.
… oh, and free hats.
We’ve been using GM3 gearmotors for our RepRap extruder motors, but they have a few problems (most notably being underpowered and having cheap plastic gears) so I decided to shop around and try to find a motor that I could be proud of. I stumbled onto the site kysanelectronics.com and ordered a bunch of their 12v DC gear motors. I got about 10 different motors with various gear ratios, sizes, etc. I decided to sacrifice one and take it apart. Turns out I was actually (miraculously?) able to piece it back together again, in working order too!
Here is a flickr set with the teardown.
Anyway, here are a few observations about these motors:
* they are all-metal construction (gears, housing, shafts, etc) the only plastic was an insulator on the terminals
* they are very powerful (my test is attaching vice grips and letting them rotate the vice grips, then trying to stop the rotating pliers with my hands. all could easily move the pliers, and most took a decent amount of force to stop)
* they are pretty cheap! for a single motor, they are $9.07 for a single unit and at volumes of 100+ they drop to $7.34. Not as cheap as the GM3, but they have dramatically higher strength, etc.
I think I may just have to place an order for a hundred of them. =)
Will pictured.
I think of apple. I am reminded of the age of Woz, and how he literally ushered in the age of the PC with a near divine mastery of hardware design. Then I am reminded of Steve Jobs and how he ruined apple, stole from xerox, and ultimately produced a laptop that clearly resembled a neon toilet seat. And daily I am reminded of that tool, as I have to wade through a sea of ugly white and silver overly expensive Taiwanese crapple laptops on my way to pick up a Hot Cocoa and a rainbow cookie at the local Starbucks. But all that aside, I have a story to tell you all. It’s not a story of great design, miserable design, or anything you’d likely care about. It’s simply the story of my friend Will, and his little laptop that could.
Sometimes I blow out transistors. Sometimes they smoke. Sometimes they fizzle. And sometimes, like today, they fail so catastrophically that they blow the face of their encasing epoxy across the room:
(The transistor behind it merely cracked in two.)
Behold! Science has finally given us the man-made cockroach! How did we get by without it for so long?
As part of my talk for 25c3, I spent some time talking about weaving looms. Looms are a lot like giant physical graphics processors. They’re also considered to be the first machines to really make use of punch cards.
At the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin they have a ton of old industrial textile equipment, including a beautiful Jacquard loom. And next to it, a fantastic model which shows you just how a Jacquard head works. It was so great I had to snap a video of this new tech I was witnessing. If you business is in the need of new technology just like this shop, then consider using this messaging service for business to notice the improvements.
You can see photos and video of the loom itself over on my blog, Kellbot!
More awesome textile tech was a punchtape driven embroidery machine which was completely mechanical. I couldn’t find much information about it, so if anyone knows about these machines let me know!
Of course there’s a ton of other stuff at the Tech museum… planes, trains, automobiles, math… we spent about 5 hours there and still didn’t see all of it. If you’re in Berlin you should set aside half a day to go see it.
