The trick to getting it all working was replacing the Z stepper that shipped with Cupcake #235 and replacing it with a more powerful one from Lin Engineering (which required a new metric pulley from SDPSI). The Z-table is now quite zippy and does not stall like the old one did.

Photos and parts lists to be posted everything’s a scattered mess in the aftermath of Pittsburgh MiniMaker Faire, the lasersaur build, fixing my mom’s laptop, and a thousand other papercuts.

The STL and images are posted over on thingiverse. The short of it is:

1. make a hollow object
2. determine which way will be up/down when you print it
3. add columns along this axis that are close enough together and to the edge that the spanning shells will hold
4. print!

Here’s an example: The top piece is a completed print, the bottom is a partial print showing the base, rotated 90 degrees. You can see the starts of the three columns that support the rest of the print and the inlet (the big hole on the top print) and the outlet on the other side of the print:

It’s really just that simple.

handwriting ->blog might kick ass.

Today, for example, I got a request to do a tech review in trade for a copy of the book. Here’s my response:

Sorry, but I’m not interested in doing tech reviews for a copy of the book on a subject where I’m already an expert. Back in the 90s I got paid decent bank per-section to do tech reviews, I see no reason to work for less than minimum wage at this point in my career.

It’s my strong opinion that over the next year open source hardware will really start making an impact in the local and small-scale fabrication space. While there are plenty of shops using EMC2 in large-scale fabrication, the learning curve is steep and EMC2 is focused on subtractive machining operations. There are no fundamental patents on things like mills or lathes to deal with, but a lot of the control circuits and interfaces used are proprietary or at least closed source.

With lasersaur using grbl, Makerbot using (and supporting) ReplicatorG, and the increase of quality tools like Inkscape and OpenSCAD I think we’re finally seeing small-scale manufacturing with a toolchain almost entirely made of open source hardware and software. (I’m not going to wade into the argument about whether or not it’s “real” open source if you’re still buying steppers or power supplies or other COTS items. :-)

In order to help move this process along, I’ve created a new mailing list, opensourcefab, and am working on a wiki/web forum as well.

My goal for this list (and for the forum that will soon go online) is to create a space for those of us who want to use these tools for serious fabrication. Maybe you make/sell model railroad components or build big skeery robots or work at an in-house shop making spares but we’re all interested in the same thing — using open source tools in a production environment.

–jet

Something we in the open source hardware need to adopt is the idea of standardized tests / QE. If I were at work, the first thing we’d have done was toss the mobo in the “to be re-tested” pile and grabbed a fresh one to see if we could replicate the problem.

On the up side, while researching the problems I was having, I stumbled across a great blog that every Makerbot owner should read.

MacMemoriesManager, a memory manager for the 897/817. It plays well with my microHAM USB Interface III.

MacLoggerDx, a contacts manager for contesting and whatnot. I’m not thrilled with its memory management — it can only tune frequencies from a list and can’t set options — but it’s very good for logging and looking up contacts. If you program your radio’s memories/settings then use MacLoggerDx in “read-only” mode, it’ll work quite nicely.

VX-7 Commander, which is a Windows program for managing VX-7 settings but if you tweak the comms settings it’ll work nicely under VMWare.