Heres the first of many timelapses of my RepRap machine printing. I’ll be working on the quality and lighting. If anyone wants to give me a hand, let me know!

RepRap Print Timelapse from Zach ‘Iowa’ Hoeken on Vimeo.

I moved all my robots into the space this previous weekend, and it took much less time than I thought. This was great because it left me with 2 more days to code and work on my robot. You see, I’ve been participating in the RepRap open source project to create a self-copying 3D printer for quite a while. I finally found enough time to fix some bugs that were preventing me from printing.

If you’re interested, read more on the RepRap Builders blog entry.

I have an idea I want to try out involving sintering (melting) powdered plastic with a laser as an alternative to extruding plastic from a nozzle.  To do this, I need some sort of plastic, ideally ABS plastic that is powdered and will absorb the laser light.  I’m guessing it will be an IR laser, but I figure black plastic would be a good bet for this.

Any ideas?

Laser Cutting Parts from Zach ‘Iowa’ Hoeken on Vimeo.

A couple nights ago, Bre and I went to go get some parts lasercut. Here is Phil explaining how it works. Thank you so much Phil!

We now have a subversion repository setup.  Check it out here:  svn.nycresistor.com  It’s publically readable, and you need a username to commit changes.  Since it’s publically readable, you’ll probably only want to put things in here that are GPL, CC, or otherwise free.  If you have something proprietary and/or secret, it doesn’t really belong.  It seems like most of our projects will be open source though which is awesome.

If you don’t know what subversion is, read more here.  If enough people are interested, I can also give a quick tutorial on how to use it at a meeting or whenever really.

I’ve set it up initially to have 3 different areas:

/projects.  this is where we store projects like the led cube stuff, the binary watch, etc.  consider this the trunk.

/releases.  when we get to a milestone in a project, we should copy all the files for that project to here to make an easy to reference ‘tag’

/users.  create your own directory in here to play around with.  your very own sandbox!

If you want an account to be able to make changes to it,  please email me at [email protected] with your desired username and password.  I’ll add you to the system and you can do whatever you feel like.  Please be courteous of other people’s files though.

Viva la resistance.