SLA 3D Prints

Please don’t look too closely at my keyboard

The first I heard of 3D printing machines was in the mid-90’s; I remember hearing of things described as “Santa Claus Machines” (perhaps this old Wired article https://www.wired.com/1994/05/santa-claus-machine/ had something to do with the name) which used computer-controlled UV light to harden a special resin. Dad bought a little bit of the resin, which I remember hearing was hideously expensive, and we had grand plans for making things with it, but we still haven’t got around to finishing the required CO2 laser’s power supply…

Fortunately, here in The Future, we can easily and inexpensively get UV lasers with power supplies, or even simple UV LEDs (remember, when that Wired article was written, blue LEDs were still a year or two away from Digikey’s phonebook-thin pages). The resin is still fairly expensive at ~$150NZD/L, so you’ll not want to be asking Santa for anything too big, but it’s approachable.

Of course, now everyone and their uncle has an FDM-type 3D printer, so dealing with the expensive resin and UV light isn’t so appealing anyways…

Except! SLA printers work really really well, and you can pay someone else to do the printing for you. Not even very much money – our friends at Dangerous Prototypes sent me the part at the top of this post (along with some circuit boards) for $3USD, and look at the quality!

Adafruit Feather M0 Express

The courier showed up today, with a really neat new board from Adafruit – the Feather M0 Express. It is essentially a break out board for the Microchip (formerly Atmel) ATSAMD21G18, which is the same ARM M0+ micro used in the Arduino Zero, plus a 2MB flash memory, RGB LED, and a LiPoly charger. It’s not too expensive at $20USD, nice and tiny, and I think could be a real hit.

Using the Feather M0 Express from Arduino IDE almost couldn’t be easier – just add the Adafruit Board Manager URL to your Arduino IDE settings, then install the “Adafruit SAMD Boards” – instructions at https://learn.adafruit.com/add-boards-arduino-v164 .

However, the really exciting new option available with this new board, is CircuitPython – Adafruit’s implementation of MicroPython. Continue reading “Adafruit Feather M0 Express”

Housekeeping

We’ve been doing a bit of work on the maker space lately, and this website too!

For the last several years, our website has been hosted on a VPS provided by Blair (thanks so much!) Now that we’ve got a reliable Internet connection at the makerspace though, we’re able to host the site from an on-site computer that’s already hosting the Valley Workspace, Dunedin Electric Bikes, and Quarantine Island sites, and some makerspace affiliated projects like Dunedin food truck tracker foodoo.nz. If you’re interested in how the Internet works, want to host a site, or have fun ideas for things to connect to the machine, just say the word!

As part of the website move, I’ve upgraded the WordPress install, and am planning to embark on a clean out of the Users (we’ve apparently got ~45k) and Comments databases. I’ll try to keep from deleting legitimate accounts, but if your dspace account disappears, just let me know and I can restore it.

Finally, some donated lights were installed last weekend, in the room adjoining the bike workshop, to light up that web server!

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Using the inductor tester

inductor tester
The inductor tester, and inductors used for examples below

A few weeks back, we had a talk on KiCad (presentation available at http://ianrrees.github.io/KiCad_talk/ ) where we ordered some PCBs to make an inductor tester (Henryometer?) from dirty PCBs. Those boards came in this week, and a few folks have already put theirs together. This post aims to be a quick guide to the usage of the tester; if you’d like to build one yourself just let Ian know, parts cost is $15. You’ll need an oscilloscope and a current-limited DC power supply to make use of it.

Continue reading “Using the inductor tester”

Debugging AVRs (without Atmel Studio)

This post is somewhere between a guide and a collection of notes, aimed at debugging programs for AVR microcontrollers (like the ones in most Arduinos) “on target”. We’ll be using an AVR Dragon connected to the target micro via the normal 6-pin programming header, with a Mac or Linux PC as the host.

Although this is a bit more advanced than most of our other projects, it’s really quite approachable and is a very powerful technique for fixing AVR software problems.

From a high level; we’ll use a debugging program on a Mac (or Linux, Windows, etc) “host” computer, which communicates with a Dragon “In Circuit Emulator” (ICE) via USB to debug a buggy program running on the “target” AVR, which is presumably running in some circuit we’re interested in. Small variations might apply for Windows hosts, using JTAG instead of DebugWIRE, other debugger tools (Atmel JTAGICE mkII for example), etc.

Continue reading “Debugging AVRs (without Atmel Studio)”

ShapeOko Toolchain and Impressions

G’day everyone.  Thank you for your kind attention during Thursday’s (9 August 2012) presention on my initial playtime with Paul’s Shapeoko CNC router.  Paul encourages people to use the router (with care) to MAKE!

As requested, I have posted the presentation slides here.  Too late to include in the presentation, but cool tools for CNC folks to use include the OpenScam toolpath visualistion tool at http://openscam.com/ and the ubercool half-tone application that MetalFusion made to convert grayscale images into .dxf and Gcode files so that you can engrave photos into materials with a cone-shaped bit.  The utility can be downloaded free from here http://www.students.tut.fi/~syvajar3/, and examples of the output can be seen here http://allthemods.com/userinfo.php?userid=564&id=8021.

ShapeOko Presentation Slides