CAM Geeks

That's true, the first inkjet head is comming to RepRap, which will empower us to make our own Open Source 2D ink printer for printing on paper, wood, clothes, PCB, etc.

How does it looks like?

The mechanical part, printer head:


And his layout:


The electronics:


So, there is also a nozzle with a hole that should be smaller than 0.1mm to verify . A bimorph a piezo like the ones on buzzers vibrates at hight frequency creating pressure over the ink or any other liquid and that will make the jet :-

For electronics, the piezo just needs a signal of ... [Link] [Cache]

When creating waterlines or 2D offsets using a “sampling” or “CL-point based” approach the result is a grid or weave such as that shown in black above. The black lines can in principle be unevenly spaced, and don’t necessarily have to be aligned with the X/Y-axis. The desired output of the operation is shown in red/orage, i.e. a loop around/inside this weave/grid, which connects all the “loose ends” of the graph.

My first approach was to start at any CL-vertex and do a breadth_first_search from there to find the closest neighboring vertices. If there are many candidates equally close ...

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Hi folks,

Just a quick and very sleepy post before bed.

I have a confession. My extruder works far less often than it's in a melty state of not-workingness. And this makes me sad. And causes me to spend unneccessarily on PTFE barriers, which invariably melt due to being in contact with a 240°C heater barrel, causing the extruder to irreparably jam. This is just silly, and I decided that I needed a new hot-end extruder design if I was going to go more than a few weeks without a catastrophic extruder failure.

At first I had a look at the new design ... [Link] [Cache]

This example has three times more fibers, and thus also CL-points, than the original one, but it still runs in a reasonable time of ~15s because 1 I hard-coded the matrix-determinant expressions everywhere instead of relying on a slow general purpose function and 2 the batch-processing of the fibers now uses OpenMP in order to put all those multi-cores to work.

red=vertex contacts, green=facet contacts, blue=edge contacts

My initial point-ordering scheme based on a complete breadt-first-search at each CL-point is a bit naive and slow that’s not included in the 15s time , so that still needs more ...

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I'm trying to get some momentum built up on an open source and cleanly written slice application here:
http://github.com/MaskedRetriever/SuperSkein

The code is more or less cleanly written but I've got a bug I'm having trouble tracking down, and I know for a fact Forrest Higgs has a slicer that solves this, but as far as I can tell he hasn't posted his code.

Basically, my sorting algorithm is orphaning edges, resulting in ugly jaggs around the perimeter near the end of each layer as the sorter picks up those last edges. Anyone have a better algorithm than the one I'm using? [Link] [Cache]

For making 60-degree dovetails, and R=2mm rounded edges.

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• Modeling and simulation of high-speed milling centers dynamics –
• F-22 Raptor WIN –
• Homebrew Cray-1A – FGAcray –
• 2000V washer launcher –
• Review: Lenovo ThinkPad X201 –
• Boat Launching FAIL –
• Canon EOS 60D. A hands-on preview –
• EOS 60D, 50D, 7D and T2i 550D comparison –
• Lightning, slowed down by a factor of 300… –
• Building a laser cutter from a weak laser –
• Gingery-style homemade metal lathe builds –
• Canon 60D Announced –
• ISS Sun Transit –
• The Danger Of Green Laser Pointers –
...

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Today I made a set of double-six dominoes. I used my usual trick of cutting the entire outline full depth minus about .005 inches, and then whacking the parts with a dead-blow hammer to "dismount" them from the stock.

This leaves some mess at the bottom edge that usually has to be dealt with separately, but in this case I wanted them to have a nice chamfer anyway, so they are pleasant to handle.

I did this by setting up a work stop at the left of the milling vise to ...

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22 skippers with guests from RUS, SWE, and NED, in addition to FIN skippers came to this two-day event in Espoo. For me it was a non-event since I don’t own the smaller MicroMagic rigs that were required during the first day with steady 7-8m/s and up to 11-12m/s of wind in the gusts.

At times you hear voices out there who mutter that the IOM sort of “fails” as a one-design because there isn’t a minimum fin thickness, and the minimum weight is so low it is really difficult to DIY build a competitive boat on your own kitchen table. ...

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This swedish wikipedia page has images of the metamorphosis from egg to young caterpillar, mature caterpillar, and finally moth.

This is a bad mobile-phone photo where are my two DSLRs when I need them! , but there’s a nicer one from 2005 here or try a big 1920 pixels wide image .

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RepRap Mendel with Pololu Electronics from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

A while ago I designed an alternative set of RepRap electronics with the intention that the PCBs required for it would be particularly simple, and hence potentially reprappable. This is the prototype which I made on stripboard - also easy working. It's all described here on the wiki, along with a number of other people's versions.

The steppers are being micro-stepped 1/16 . This makes the whole thing virtually silent, and very smooth in its movement. The firmware supports this new configuration. [Link] [Cache]

Dear readers, the developers of the Michigan RepRap User Group cordially invite one and all to the Detroit Maker Faire!

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I've moved the Mini-Mendel page on the Wiki to form a Huxley page here:

http://reprap.org/wiki/Huxley

This is where development of the new machine will be centred. Many people particularly Erik have already done a lot of work on Ed's original design.

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I’ve written a function that looks at the weave and produces a boost adjacency-list graph of it. The graph can then be split up into separate disconnected components using connected_components. To illustrate this, the second highest waterline in the picture below has six disconnected components: around the beak, belly, and toes 4 . When we know we are dealing with one connected component we pick a starting point at random. I’m then using breadth_first_search from this starting point to find the distance, along the graph, from this starting CL-point to all other CL-points. We choose the point with the minimum distance ...

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This is the top plate of the wedge which will be tilted so that the alt/az mount which is bolted to it has its azimuth axis pointing towards the celestial north pole. The side-plates will have to wait until next weekend.

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As opposed to continuous-belt production...

I think that as with so many things the original idea for this came from Ed Sells. And lots of people have subsequently had ideas of reprapping on a continuous conveyor belt running over a flat surface. See here and here and here.

The big advantage would be that you could print for as long as the plastic filament lasted, continually throwing reprapped parts off the end into a bucket. They would be split from the belt as it ran over the winding roller.

There are two problems that have to be overcome:

1. Keeping the belt flat against the ...

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• Voronoi mapping makes pretty, efficient circuit boards –
• DIY powder coating rig –
• C02 laser in your living room –
• Fishing Lure Syndrome –
• Canon EOS Best lens list updated –
• Truetype Tracer 4.0 is released –
• Micro mill from scrap aluminum –
• Incredible 35 minute video tour of the ISS –
• Constant cusp toolpath generation in configuration space based on offset curves –
• Direct slicing of cloud data with guaranteed topology for rapid prototyping –

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I’m building an equatorial wedge which will transform my new alt/az goto- mount into an equatorial mount. This is the first part which attaches to the tripod. Two smaller side plates will be bolted to this plate and support a similarly shaped tilted plate to which the alt/az head attaches. The design is similar to the “mega wedge pro” how about that for a product name! .

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In which your narrator reflects on the rather radical difference between what he perceived the design process would be pre and post the advent of practical Reprap printers.

Do you want to read more?

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