We got a mention on CultureMob.com for our upcoming participation with PAFA at their next After Dark event.
The white whale of 3D printing
Late last night I succeeded at something that I have been obsessing over for almost a year: printing City Hall.
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.
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!
Week of 3/16/11 Open House Recap
Hello readers,
No recap last week because I wasn’t at open house then, but I was back for this week’s. The place was already busy by the time I got there at around 7:30 PM. It was great to see everybody, and to check out what they were doing, as it felt like I hadn’t been there in awhile. We saw some new faces tonight (new to me at least), and people I hadn’t seen in some time.
Sean McBeth showed off his latest project: a multiplayer tetris clone. As far as I know, it’s the first computer game that was developed at Hive, and also the first Hive 76 themed game. 100% original code, 100% original graphics, and with some interesting planned features. There’s ingenuity for you.
Jack Zylkin showed me a cool 3D model of a narwhal he did in Blender, and Chris Tompson showed me some gears he printed for a major ongoing project. I’m constantly amazed at the stuff Chris and Jordan Miller are printing these days.
I mentioned new faces earlier, and we had a guest come by from our IRC channel. Kate aka “inquiryqueue” stopped in and completed an awesome dual-output device for practicing morse code. She came up with some pretty amazing solutions to some of the problems she faced with the project.
As with most open houses now, we capped off the night with another great karaoke session. Some highlights were Brendan Schrader doing “Africa” by Toto, Kate doing “Walkin’ After Midnight” by Patsy Cline, PJ Santoro doing “Rainbow Connection” with a spot on (and I kid you not) Kermit the Frog impersonation, me (at least in my opinion) doing “Closer to the Heart” by Rush, Sean McBeth doing “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees, Chris Thompson doing “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash, and last but not least, our very own Hive 76 group chorus version of “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie.
We’ll see ya at next week’s open house!
Wednesday, March 23rd @ 8:00 PM
SketchUp class wrap up
Sorry for the delay, but on February 26th we had a successful class based on using SketchUp for 3D printing.
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!
Thanks for learning at Hive76!
2011-03-13 Board Meeting Notes
Hive’s Board had a meeting, check out the Notes Here.
We reviewed officer reports, financial outlook, strategic planning, events coordination, and planning the first Hive76 annual report. Lots more planned for the coming year!
TIWrap makes your LaunchPad steak house handle like an Arduino bistro
We whipped up a Wiring-ish wrapper for the MSP430 a while back in order to simplify the task of porting Arduino libraries for use with MSP430 microcontrollers. It turns out, we weren’t the only ones that thought of it. PJ spotted a post on Hack A Day where someone unveiled something remarkably similar, and that post resulted in at least two other folks besides us posting their similar ideas — so there are at least four of these wrapper libraries out there.
Naturally, we’d like to think that ours is the best of the bunch, and the best named too — TIWrap. Seriously, though, we seem to be genuinely different in that that we have bundled in actual libraries ported from Arduino, such as the HD44780 and MAX7221 libraries. There are some piezo buzzer libraries and we expect to add some Charlieplexing utilities soon. You can get a copy of TiWrap here.
The demo above is a “Fancy Flashlight” concept proposed by Matt Torbin. It’s just one MSP430, two LEDs, a button and a bit of code which you can find in the TiWrap examples.
March Philadelphia Robotics Group Meeting Wrap-Up
Hey guys,
Another great meeting of the Philadelphia Robotics Group has gone by and it was awesome! I must say that this has been one of our more populated meetings thus far (although not the most by a bit). In addition to regular Philly Robotics members and Hive 76 members, we had a few new people show up for the group, newish people coming back from the previous month, and even a returning member from long ago.
We talked about everything from Lady Ada and her beginner Arduino kits, the work being done on our own Web presence (phillyrobotics.org), to a project concerning a radio controlled Dalek (of Doctor Who fame).
All in all a great 3rd meeting for the year. See you all next month on the 14th!
New USBTypewriter Video
Hey, look at the great new demo video Kelsey made for me, complete with cheesy samba music:
Announcing Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator Night
Hey readers,
Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator has it’s own night at Hive 76 now! For all you trekkies out there, Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator is a networked multiplayer game that simulates a spaceship’s bridge; much like what you’d see on Star Trek®. We’ll be doing the event on the second Tuesday of each month, and our next game is… tomorrow (Tuesday, March 8th)! If you can make it, don’t forget to bring your laptop or netbook.
Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator NightHive 76 (915 Spring Garden)
Tuesday, March 8th @ 7:00 PM.
Engage!
Week of 3/2/11 Open House Recap
Howdy folks,
Last night’s open house was awesome. Some new people stopped by and that’s always great to see. The highlight of the night (at least for me) was doing karaoke again. Even when you’re screeching out of key, karaoke is always a good time.
See ya next week!