Next blog

If you press the "next blog" button at the top of the page, then you get a random post.  Here's what I got in order that I clicked
Shards of My Sanity 

International Tina Turner Fanclub
Real Women Have Curves
Prowling Sheep

I had to stop at the sheep.

Construction begins . . .

In the last week, we got the orders from McMaster and Dell Fastener in. We still need to order bearings, motors, and electronics, as well as a few other things.

So, we started in on the grunt work last night.

There was a lot of discussion about how to proceed. One of the big things was what to do about the problem of engineering drawings. Adam suggested that it was probably worthwhile for us to do our own drawings and assembly for two reasons: First, it gives us a better understanding of how the C-Rap goes together, and second, it allows us to be more consistent in our construction and modification of future versions. Those of us with access to a CAD package will start working on that over the next two weeks.

Once we got that out of the way, we broke up into groups: a few of the guys went down to the dungeon and cut the threaded stud and rod to size,

a few started cutting out corner vertices (we decided that we were going to make as many parts as possible out of MDF)

and Devin started looking at making real parts out of these pesky STL files.

Now that we have an idea what needs to happen for each part we make by hand, I think it will go a bit faster.

The next meeting will be on March 1st. Same time, Same place.

Weather

There was no meeting (or pizza or beer) this week, due to a fairly impressive snowstorm that has blanketed the east coast.

We'll try again next week

Nothing is easy

I had not anticipated the difficulty in getting the parts and information that we needed to get going.

On the ordering side of things, we've found that many of the parts we need are on backorder, and in at least one case are discontinued.

Almost as obnoxious is the difficulty in getting CAD data for Mendel. For some reason, the reprap project uses Art of Illusion (a surface based modeling program) files as the native data format. These files are, so far as I can tell, impossible to import into a commercial CAD package, making measuring and modifications difficult at best. While many parts are modeled in SolidEdge, these models are not kept up to date. We have found several cases where the PAR files do not match the STLs, and since we can't effectively measure the STLs, it is difficult to verify that a PAR file is correct.

Orders Aweigh!

I sent out two orders for stuff today.

McMaster-Carr is sending us rods, belts, and a few other misc items.

Dell Fastener is sending all the screws and nuts

I'll add order specifics later.

A bit of background

I thought I'd write down why we are working on the project. I (and, I suspect several others) have been wanting to build a RepRap since I first heard about it. The idea of having a rapid prototyping machine of my own appeals greatly to me, but commercial machines are . . . expensive, despite the fact that the processes used in rapid prototyping are relatively simple. (It's all about the accuracy.)

Since a commercial machine is out of my budget for this decade, my only real option is to build one myself, or live without. Unfortunately there are major hurdles to building one myself:

0) Time

1) Electronics

2) Software

3) The women in my household, particularly my daughter (Shiva, destroyer of worlds)

Any one or two of these I could probably handle on my own, but the combination is a powerful multi-drug cocktail that has side effects of pessimism, malaise, and a powerful tendency to procrastinate.

Oh well. This pattern of thinking: "Maybe when the kiddo is in college" was well entrenched until last Wednesday. That morning Costa came in and was telling me about the most recent issue of Make Magazine (issue 21). The feature project is a "Cupcake" CNC machine. Costa said something to the effect of: "Wouldn't it be great to have one of those?" Someone pointed out that we probably had enough brain power sitting around to do it without any trouble. "We could do it." I though about that for a moment, and I asked Costa something to gauge how serious he was . . .

And we were off. The project had gone critical.

I fired of an email to pretty much everyone in the company, hoping that at least a couple more people would be interested. Well, they were. All of them. The EEs, the Software guys, the interns, the CTO. I admit that I was kind of surprised at the level of interest. I suggested that we meet one evening every two weeks, figuring that that would keep the time commitment to a manageable level for everyone, and floated the idea of beer and pizza as a way to keep people from having other commitments during that time. (Hey, it works, what can I say?)

We had looked at the RepRap website, and it estimated that we could build the newest version of the machine, "Mendel," at a cost of about $520. (I'll talk more about this in future posts.) This sounded perfectly do-able when I was thinking that we'd have two, maybe three guys working on this. Now we had ten. no problem. A few guys suggested that we should talk to Craig, and have him sponsor the project. I didn't think it would happen, but figured that we probably shouldn't count on it. Adam was fairly adamant that it we could give him a good sales pitch, and that it would work, so I told him to work on it. About 5 minutes later, Craig called me over, and asked me: "So, what is this thing you are working on?"

So I got to make the pitch.

Then, lo and behold, Craig agreed to provide us with a budget, which was negotiated up to $750, to be used for parts, pizza, and beer. At this point, all we need to do is get started!

So on Thursday, Jim picked up some beer, I ordered some pizza (from Pizza Parma: a Parma Pie and a Mediterranean Pie), and we all got together after work for the kickoff meeting. There we gave an overview of the project plan, picked out a project name, started this blog, and started laying out what we wanted to get done before the next meeting (to be covered in my next post). Costa managed download and install the current reprap software, and he and Marius took a look. It sounds like they have some work to do to get it up to our usual standards.

Here are a couple of pictures from the meeting.

Here's a picture of about half of everyone. Those are Marius's hands in the lower left. You can't see Somesh or Nikola (those might be his hands on the right edge), or myself.

Here's my daughter. Having a good time. We only gave her empties, I swear. . .

Yay! software built. Runs, but is extreeeeeeemlely primitive from a UI point of view. Time to learn Java.

Everyone left...no picture...sorry.