I spent Saturday and Sunday at Singapore’s Hour of Code demonstrating the BeerBot to kiddiwinks, parents and passers by. It was at Singapore Science Centre and was organised by the same team that runs the Singapore Mini Maker Faire. It was a lot of fun and I got some great ideas from some of my fellow presenters.
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I was invited to a 1920s themed party a little while ago and instantly felt that the theme demanded the construction of an electronic exploding zeppelin costume.
The suckiness of Squirty’s ability to make nice overhangs and bridges has been getting to me recently. I have been really impressed by the cool support-free prints created by LeFabShop on thingiverse but then have been disappointed when I find that they don’t quite work for Squirty. Their elephant turned out nicely but when I tried to print their awesome car it failed to print the tougher parts of the print. I’ve also failed to make a home hydroponics kit that will hopefully stop our houseplants from dying. I’ve now installed a ducted fan attachment today which hopefully will allow me to make overhangs and bridges without support.
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If you are used to using the version of Slic3r that came with your version of pronterface (V 0.9.9 for me) and then download the new version (V 1.1.7) you may be horrified to discover all of your print profiles have gone. You then may be even more horrified when you open the old version of slic3r and realise that your print profiles aren’t there either. Trying to load them by going to File-Load Config and navigating to the .ini file only allows you to load one at at time and messes up the naming.
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After the creation and destruction of the case for Squirty I’ve started designing a replacement. This gives me a chance to make some improvements to the original design and is also an opportunity for me to learn to use Github, which has always been a source of wonder and mystery for me.
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About 1 year after I started working on it I have posted Project Tombstone on Thingiverse. It took the approach of Halloween to make me finally upload it. You can view it here. It builds on the randomisable grassy knoll that I described back in February.
I first printed around March, but I had to make some edits before I could post online (which took me ages to get round to).
As mentioned in the last post the Raspberry Pi I have been using to control Squirty the RepRap suddenly decided to stop connecting to my home network. It would work with a different wifi dongle, but not with the one I have been using for the last year or so. The “broken” dongle was able to connect to the network without any problems when connected to my windows desktop, so I was quite mystified as to what happened.
My usual approach when encountering problems like this is to try a few random solutions, type error messages into google, read, generate some theories about what might be going wrong, try some more things, then mope. I think this is the least effective possible approach, but somehow I do it anyway. If you spend all your time generating theories and trying solutions it is easy to become frustrated and to overlook something important, so I started this post with the intention that I was not going to solve my wifi troubles, instead I would just try to document and properly understand the problem. Unfortunately at some point I accidentally fixed the problem without really knowing how I did it. Although the solution is not as satisfying as I would like because I don’t know what caused the problem in the first place, I found the process of documenting everything I was doing in the post quite helpful. Therefore I’m keeping the rest of the post as I originally wrote it in case it is useful to anyone else or in case someone has a better idea of what went wrong in the first place Continue reading
Building Squirty the RepRap has always seemed like a one step forward, two steps back kind of exercise. The last weeks have been a two step back phase. Continue reading
I recently had to print about 30 unique items with a similar geometry but with different detailing. They were all an awkward shape to print – there was no way of aligning them so that there were no overhangs. I found a way of batch processing them to get them all ready for printing.
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This weekend the Wife and I had a booth at Singapore Mini Maker Faire. This is the second year we have been and the first time that we had a booth. The Wife exhibited some of her oil paintings as well as some sewing creations. I showed the BeerBot and Squirty. Given the breadth of our combined interests (which confound gender stereotypes) we called our booth “Tinker Tailor”. There were also some Soldiers and BeerBot could be viewed as a robotic Spy. Continue reading