You know, it'd probably be cheaper and easier to just make the reprap motherboard able to write the card, either just for the purposes of the machine or as a full-blown SD card writer. USB devices are easier to do than USB host adapters. The first option probably wouldn't require anything but software, too. Cheaper than doing USB hosting, at least - might not be cheaper to do the USB-to-SD adapteby jonored - General
> - Garbage collection (so we don't have to worry > about the most common bugs: various types of > memory leaks and buffer overflow issues). Interestingly enough, garbage collection is directly at odds with real-time control for all but extremely specialized garbage collectors, and even then it is hard to get it to perform right. It leaves your system suceptible to extremely chaotic delby jonored - RepRap Host
Yeah, given the differences in the protocols and physical layers between USB and TTL-level serial it really isn't viable to do it without additional hardware. USB looks a lot more like networking than a straight serial link, and you can't really hack it unless you've got an extremely weird hub in your computer, and then you're less portable, not more. That said, the additional hardware that is neby jonored - Controllers
BGA would be impressive to get to work. Hard, but impressive. In terms of getting parts from the state they come in the mail to positioned on a toolhead, I've detailed my thoughts in the thread in general discussions: and I've almost got enough information to get a model of what I'm thinking put together. Cut tape specifically seems to me like it's probably the way to go to load a reprap pick-anby jonored - Controllers
What I've been looking up specs to draw is to put a row of posts along the side of the build area - It would look rather like a big row of lego - with the same pitch and hole dimensions as standard tape for SMT. What I don't know is the diameter of the actual holes themselves - I do know that they are on a 4mm pitch. The parts already come coarsely aligned and positioned in that tape, and small aby jonored - General
> SMT is designed for large scale, serial production > environments. It's a pig to prototype with, which > means that board design is going to happen where > there is capital concentration adequate to buy the > equipment to get past the awkwardness of the > components for circuit designers. That limits the > number of people who can participate to those with > significanby jonored - Controllers
> What I AM saying, however, is that if the goal is > to create a 3D printer/milling machine/whatever > that exhibits a high degree of self-replication > and can be built by an ordinary person, SMD is > most definitely NOT the direction we ought to be > going. I can see where you seem to be coming from, but for the purposes of the mainline RepRap using SMT technology after havby jonored - Controllers
The trick, of course, is that millions of people won't just up and buy those machines. Maybe hundreds would, if you're really lucky, at this stage. And then the cost of the moulds for injection moulding or any other very-high-volume process would make it not so cheap anymore. And if you go to something that doesn't require tooling for the part, well... that's what we're doing right now... we ratby jonored - General
Bah. BRL-CAD for me. Even will let me tag regions with information specifically for the machine. Working on making it spit out G-code for a part itself, too... And the main interface isn't one of these silly GUI-centric things. (Although there is a project to make a new front-end that is).by jonored - RepRap Host
> - Never design a robot that can build repraps ( > full self replication BAD ) Oh come on. It's not like we haven't been using fully self-replicating machines for a lot longer than we've had any other technology to speak of. It's just that this one is all-synthetic, and requires feed that requires a huge amount more work to get. I would be tremendously amazed if any "grey goo" that we evby jonored - General
FYI, it is /possible/ to do freeform deposition processes with metals. CMU does it all the time in their shape deposition manufacturing processes. In order to get anything even remotely like a reasonable surface finish they machine it afterwards... This does, on the other hand, let them make parts that you just can't do by normal machining, and brings the complexity of going from solid model tby jonored - General
Well, if it's that much of a resource hog to run a build, then it looks like I'll /have/ to arrange something else when I get that far; all of my computers are substantially less beefy than that. And all of them run brl-cad perfectly well, too... Something seems more than a little off if it's taking more than an eeepc to run a build.by jonored - Controllers
> Adding value to an item isn't the same thing as > making it scarce. The question that I have in, > however, not why you would want to add value to an > item, but why you'd want to make it scarce? The way I consider this is simple; I'm not trying to make the final product scarce. I'm trying to approximate selling the scarce resource of my time by charging for a copy of the thingy,by jonored - General
> Can I use Exhaust Cement (rated to 300C) for > repairing car exhausts instead? Certainly worth trying, but at least here (northeast US) furnace cement is something that you can go to a hardware store and buy that's good to a couple thousand degrees. Although I think only one of the two big home improvement warehouse-stores had it.by jonored - Plastic Extruder Working Group
From that page, it looks like the solution was a few (nice, admittedly) caps, and some ferrite beads. That doesn't seem like too much to me. Alternately, if we swap to brushless motors instead of DC motors, then we don't have (unintended) spark gaps and high-voltage transformers as part of our motors; just relatively simple-to-handle inductors. It'd probably take a bit more care to make them runby jonored - Controllers
nophead Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I don't think 'elongational viscosity' has much > bearing on this at all, perhaps it affects ABS. > The four plastics we are playing with all behave > very differently. I think some are crystalline and > some amorphous. Elongational viscosity sounds like it's part of coping with the fact that melted plasticsby jonored - Plastic Extruder Working Group
Comments on slashdot suggest that he was researching ways of pulling some of the nastier pollution poisons out of the environment - which suggests that he may have had some amount of them there. This hasn't, so far as I can tell, crossed out of the realm of "firemen came, found something that could be an old chemist doing harmless experiments, a meth lab, or a chemist working with nasty poisons,by jonored - Massachusetts, Boston RepRap User Group
SDM requires five axes to do shapes more complex than are easily doable on a plain five axis machine without burning days with a half-sphere end mill getting the finish just right, but you'd still be able to do much better for many surfaces with just the three axes we already need for a reprap - they just need to be sturdier. All that's there on a fundamental level is alternating between some amoby jonored - Paste Extrusion Working Group
> I think you are refering to shape deposition > manufacturing. I don't think he is; it looks more like a hybrid of assembly and fabrication (which is a very good idea; pick and place of mechanical components into parts would be helpful.) Contrary to what the name seems to imply, shape deposition manufacturing doesn't actually involve putting preformed shapes into a part. It's called shapeby jonored - Paste Extrusion Working Group
I would like to point out that companies can and do make substantial amounts of money using open source software; I see no reason to believe that simply because it can build itself (much as software can simply be copied/built from openly available source) and anyone who has one can have another there will not be significant possibilities to make money off of the RepRap. It certainly contrains theby jonored - General
> > If a large corporation wants to start selling a > > 100$ solid object printer which can make its > own > > parts tomorrow, everyone here would rejoice. > > I agree. But there are some of us who would be > disappointed with a printer that costs $100 and > isn't intended to improve itself but instead > requires you to continue buying new proprietary > uby jonored - General
Consistent, simple syntax (although more explicit than most lisps), a facility equivalent to real macros, proper tail recursion and first-class continuations on the way... seems lispy to me. True that it doesn't appear to be writing a tree of operations directly, but I never said it /was/ a Lisp... and given that Scheme is one of the two dominant dialects of Lisp, I'd hope it's lispy - and it drby jonored - RepRap Host
The place is Plastics Unlimited, Inc in Worcester, MA - is their website. Right near WPI. They sell off the material from their scrap bin reasonably cheap. It's not a /reliable/ supply, but it's not far to go for me. Of course, it's also entirely possible that they might be able to just produce parts - I'm not sure what their pricing is like for that, though.by jonored - Massachusetts, Boston RepRap User Group
I didn't make it to the meeting, but I do live a short bike ride away from a place that sells scrap plastic by the pound and a friend with a laser cutter in his apartment (although he still hasn't gotten it up and running).by jonored - Massachusetts, Boston RepRap User Group
I suppose what I'm really not clear on is what this gets you; it feels like python for the sake of having python syntax to me. Using mged already is programming the part; I've attached the preliminary source for the rotor part of the 'turbine' command I'm working on ('generate a turbine fitted to the head and flow rate of this stream'). All that's needed to use it is to source the file in mged (oby jonored - RepRap Host
It seems worth note that a good chunk of the BRL-CAD stuff is written in TCL - in fact, what you've written here is translating from Python to TCL, because mged's commands /are/ TCL, as is their ascii representation for databases, etc... On the matter of a new GUI - if you like TK, you can load that straight from mged as it stands and make whatever extensions you want... although I can understanby jonored - RepRap Host
I would be extremely surprised if producing a new reprap and connecting it to power and a computer did not involve more work than running a single command to automatically configure a package to your environment, one to build the new software, and one to plug it in - er, install it. This also leads to the peculiar concerns of being expected to work for free rather than for help. Developing sometby jonored - RepRap Host
Yeah, it's that they haven't been keeping their binary package for debian up to date. That doesn't matter much to the devs, or to the powerusers/testers, or the gentoo users, etc... It seems worth pointing out that the "linux download" you are referring to is a debian-derivative-specific binary package that will work on only x86 machines. To include binary packages for all configurations in use wby jonored - RepRap Host
Having talked with the folks on #brlcad, the sort of thing I'm talking about is somewhere between partially implemented and on the list of things to do sometime, and closely related to stuff that they're doing for the SoC. I suspect that we may end up with BRL-CAD just because of it becoming the best tool for the job in a relatively short timeframe. Of course, it won't exactly be hard to deal wiby jonored - RepRap Host
The only problem I can really see floating around with BRL-CAD is that so far as I can tell there are no macro-like mechanisms in it - you can't, for instance, make a feature, then /define/ a pattern, and have that feature repeated in that pattern and be able to edit the definition of either the feature or the pattern without having to manually repeat each step since the change. I would be delighby jonored - RepRap Host