Adam, Peejay, Justin, and I met Saturday to see just how fµ¢%ed our old enterprise Stratasys FDM 2000 is.
Toolhead
To catchup: we got a Stratasys FDM2000 from a garage sale for a song and it came with lots of unknowns. It has sat in our hackerspace and moved with us for almost 2 years.
These things are in good order:
All 3 axes
Two extruder steppers and gearboxes
Two extruder heaters and the envelope heater
Onboard controllers
Lights
Model liquefier hot end
Problems that we found:
Support liquefier blew out. Need to tear down and fix.
Can’t connect via software. May be related to Adam’s serial adapter.
Great news! We have tons of consumables! Spools and spools of ABS, support material, some cool looking elastomer and foam for the build platform.
Last night in an emergency meeting of core membership and management, Hive76 has decided to switch its core mission from making stuff and blogging about it, to designing and playing all manner of role playing games. This includes Dungeons & Dragons, LARPing campaigns, and our new favorite: All Flesh Must Be Eaten. We will slowly transition the space into a dark and spooky dungeon that can host up to 3 games at a time. The current infrastructure such as the drill press and makerbot will used solely to support these games by printing D20‘s and crafting gaming tables. To clear out current space, the first 5 new members will receive a free USB Typewriter or BoomCase.
Under our new rules, all members are now board members as well, the password at the door is a Tolkien quote, and all members must host a non-lame game of their choosing at least once per season. All games should be women/trans friendly, but to garner more female interest in the groups, we will be running more unicorn–themed RPGs. Let us know if you can find any.
In addition, Hive76 will re refiling out 501(c)(3) applications as Awesome Dwarves, Inc. in order to reflect our new-found love of fantasy and beards. We will be running a logo contest to pick yet another graphic image for our new identity. The prize will be a tshirt.
Finally, we’d like to announce our newest venture: the South Philly Karaoke Concern. SPKC will hold bi-weekly meetings at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar to discuss pressing karaoke and RPG related matters in the key of your choice. (Over 21 only please.) The SPKC has been funded from a generous donation by the Kaufman Beverage Elevator Corporation.
Late last night I succeeded at something that I have been obsessing over for almost a year: printing City Hall.
Thar she blows!
Last year, when I really started to get into printing on Hive76’s Makerbot 3D–PO, someone suggested printing Philadelphia’s grand City Hall. It took me many months of casual attempts before I was able to clean up the model I downloaded form Google’s 3D warehouse for printing. Once I had something that wasn’t full of holes, I dived in. After just a few attempts, I successfully printed City Hall in blue PLA and posted the whole thing to Thingiverse.
Shitty Hall
Since then I have been trying to replicate my succes in other materials. Some combination of the continuously–breaking Makerbot, the black PLA and my fledgling skills produced a monumental pile of failure I like to call Shitty Hall. The extruder would jam, the heated build platform would cool down, the X or Y axis would lose steps; everything went wrong repeatedly. I had enough failed prints that I clamped and welded them together to form the tallest shitty print ever printed at Hive76. After tweaking, greasing, cleaning, and learning just exactly every way that a Cupcake CNC can break, I gave it a shot in ABS. Once the first few critical layers went down well and the material was feeding properly from above, I relaxed. Two and a half hours later, I had my prize: a 3D printed City Hall in white ABS. Here’s a picture of the whole City Hall family, including Jordan’s successful first attempt at 1.5x. Now I need to print it again!
Sorry for the delay, but on February 26th we had a successful class based on using SketchUp for 3D printing.
Shuriken
We had a few members and 2 strangers show up for the class. They learned how to make simple forms in SketchUp and design around the size limitations of the makerbot. The designed and printed objects included a Shuriken pictured here, a Barbie toilet, a rook, a laptop lid webcam mount, and a decorative unicorn. Class members: if you’re reading this, I highly recommend you upload your designs to Thingiverse so the rest of the world can print them!
Apple gave everyone a new shiny thing to talk about today and I will not be left out of the discussion! Apple’s refreshed MacBook Pro contains a new Intel chipset Core i5 and i7, codenamed Sandy Bridge. One lovely “feature” of this new processor is the Intel Insider built in to every Core i chip. This feature unlocks HD content playback on your machine for a limited time. Intel denies that this is DRM, and rightly so. DRM has been a hated buzzword among consumers and Apple alike. (No customer ever asks for more restrictions.) What Intel Insider has is worse: trusted computing, and for the worst reason too. It seems Hollywood has asked our biggest processor manufacturer to protect their business model with a feature that prevents streaming video from being recorded. Doesn’t that sound kind of unhinged?
Trusted computing is a hardware solution to the problem of trust. It has some noble goals. Your computer today may be exploited in some invisible way, but a trusted computing platform would verify all the code through it’s own protected hardware before allowing any software to run at all. The only way around this is to saw away at a encryption chip epoxied onto your motherboard. So, no malware is a good thing, right? That sounds fine until the keys to the computer are taken out of your hands and given to Hollywood/Intel/Apple/anyone-else because you, a de-facto pirate, can’t be trusted. Just wait until your repressive authorities request control of your shiny MacBook from Apple, and Apple acquiesces.
Add to that the recent processor recall, and it’s a scary time to buy new Mac hardware. Isn’t there room enough in the smart consumer market for some Linux hardware that Just Works? Today I’m one step closer to kicking my addiction for sandblasted aluminum and high-strength alkali-aluminosilicate glass.
Of course, I got all my opinions from the story 0wnz0red written Cory Doctorow for Salon.
We are offering a class on how to use Google’s free 3D program SketchUp. SketchUp is not the most powerful CAD program out there, but its intuitive design and price make it a great start if you are curious about conjuring solid objects out of plastic and bytes.
This class will run Saturday, February 2/26 from 10am to 3pm at Hive76
You will learn:
How to make simple stuff in SketchUp
How not to ruin a model by poking holes in it, what “manifold” means.
This Wednesday Mike and I will make some bioplastic from starch, water, glycerin, and vinegar. Then microwave it, squish it in a mold, and stick some LEDs in there. If you haven’t noticed, I like doing things for the sake of doing them and then maybe finding a use.
There will also be some blink & buzz supplies there and heart shaped molds for your people that care about hearts.
At open house on Wednesday I printed a LEGO ice cube mold and filled it with paper pulp. The objects you see here is the result. Improvements: smooth the sides of the mold so it’s easier to remove the paper.
