Makin’ stuff with machines

Posted on June 26, 2010 by mahto

This is what I’ve been up to for the past few days. Making some stepper motor mounts to retrofit a manual xy table into a stepper motor version. It’s basically just some machined aluminum standoffs, with an aluminum mounting plate to mate the unit to the table, and a shaft coupler made of (guess!) more aluminum! Unfortunately, the motors that I had weren’t up to the task, so we put in an express order with Phidgets to get some steppers The project is stating to come together! More photos to come after I get my battery recharged.

Update: The timelapse video was captured at a rate of 1 frame per 3 seconds, and plays back at 30 FPS, so the ~1 minute video represents about 2 hours of work. Whew!

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Mendel Progress!

Posted on June 12, 2010 by mahto

I’m building a RepRap Mendel 3d printer, using parts printed for me by my friend Marty on Makerbot 131, and hardware from ultimachine. Tonight’s project was to assemble all of the pieces that I could. I was able to get the X and Z stages built, mounted together, and roughly calibrated. The next steps are to get a build platform laser cut so that I can complete the Y stage, finish up the electronics so that I can control the machine, and decide on an extruder design so that I can actually use it to print. It’s starting to get exciting!

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Rotation test

Posted on June 11, 2010 by mahto

I made this little video to test the performance of the stepper drivers and rotary stage. The results are encouraging, except that I probably need attach the sample to the stage (it looked like it was vibrating around), and my flash ran out of batteries at the end (that’s why it gets darker). On the positive side, it was pretty easy to do- I just set the stepper to rotate at a constant speed on one direction, then put the camera into time lapse mode. I’ll try again tomorrow after recharging the flash batteries. The bit of glitchiness at the end is because the flash couldn’t recycle fast enough to fire on a few frames, so I showed the previous image twice to keep the motion constant.

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One shield to fit them all, and in the darkness bind them

Posted on June 10, 2010 by mahto

I’m working on a project which involves mechanizing some machining tables. I decided to use some surplus stepper motors and A4983 stepper motor breakout boards from Pololu to control them. Getting them to work on a protoboard was no problem, so I decided to see if I could design and build a PCB to connect them in a more organized and robust fashion. Well, some hours and some chemical sniffing later, I had a board!

It has space to populate up to 4 of the Pololu stepper carriers, with a few pins left over. It’s in need of some bypass caps and input filtering, but there should be ample room between the power and ground circuit rails to add them.

Want to make one yourself? Grab the board artwork and design files, and the software from after the break.

Arduino board layout thanks to Garrett at Macetech.

UPDATE: Fixed a small bug in the code (can’t call delay() from an initialization function)
Continue reading →

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Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire 2010!

Posted on June 7, 2010 by mahto

I had a great time this Saturday at the Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire 2010! Big thanks to Bob Stack for inviting me, and to my wonderful parents for helping to man my booth (I showed off my new-and-improved laser harp). The Faire has grown quite a bit since last years event, and seeing all the cool things on display has me excited for Maker Faire Detroit!

Full photo set is here.

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Ubuntu rocks so hard, it goes to 11

Posted on June 4, 2010 by mahto


Well, it allows you to set the sound volume amplification at over 100%. Which is really handy when you are trying to listen to a quiet video on underpowered speakers.
To get to this dialog, hit up System->Preferences->Sound.

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Carving foam with the Roland Modela MDX-3

Posted on June 2, 2010 by mahto

I took a few moments to play with the Modela MDX-3 tabletop milling machine that has been sitting around HackPittsburgh for the last year. It turns out that it works as a character printer device, and all you need to do to get it to run is cat a specially formatted CAD file to the printer device. Using a sample file found on a forum, I was able to put together a simple python script to generate 2.5d jobs for engraving styrofoam. Like Master Li, the script has a slight flaw in it’s character, however it is only intended for helping to reverse engineer the file format. Ideally, one would want a workflow where you could print directly from a 2d vector drawing program or 3d modeling program.

The machine can probably be made to cut heavier stuff, we just need to find some different tools for it, and work out how to mount the material so that it is flatter. Source code and example files to cut out HACKPGH after the break.
Continue reading →

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