QuoteAny comments or ideas about this appreciated. I may even get off my backside and build a machine if there are no obvious snags. Difficult, expensive, slow, imprecise, impractical? I'll bet on at least one of those. After all, if it were easy and obvious, surely everyone would be doing it? But give it a blast, see if you can make some sort of shape. A prototype wouldn't be hard to make,by Ru - General
...which is nice. It's certainly my favourite online tech-tabloid. Not a very detailed article, and I await the flood of 'OMG it can't print metal, its not replicating at all' comments. But still, more publicity and all thatby Ru - General
You'll need something to talk to the arduino I don't think you can just issue it commands over a serial line, or whether you'd even want to if you could. May as well just fire up the host software.by Ru - Controllers
QuoteI'm not sure what is available in Europe besides proxxon. I suspect most of the information on cnc-conversion of proxxon mills is in written in German. Proxxon stuff tended to be a little small, or a little epensive, sadly Lots of places import the same Chinese-made mini mills from Sieg though. Pretty much everything worth having is twice the cost it would be in the States, and harder toby Ru - General
Being uninformed but bored, I'll wade in with my opinion... its more of a general open source rant, but it probably applies here too QuoteOne topic I would like to understand is how you coordinate all the different contributions: How do you ensure they can be integrated into one well-functioning product? How do you come to a decision, if you e.g. have several solutions to one issue? The numberby Ru - General
Oh yes, I did read the whole thread. I was just commenting on the fact that no-one seemed to have found a suitable source of magnetic powder.by Ru - General
I see to recall the willitblend guy made magnetic powder by blending up rare earth magnets. Not sure how useful they'd be after that beating, but it was certainly magneticby Ru - General
Odd, I could have sworn I'd heard of bronze clay before. My other half uses silver clay for various little jewellery type things. Observations: its harder to work with than you might expect... it isn't like normal clay. The dried metal clay is extremely fragile for example, and you'd want to be pretty careful doing further work on it. It should extrude easily; indeed you can buy syringes of thby Ru - Casting and Moldmaking Working Group
Quotethe two syringes should feed to a single nozzle, so they can dispense 2 epoxy components. This sounds like it brings up its own problems... how do you prevent mixed epoxy curing in the dispenser? I guess disposeable nozzles woul dbe essential, although perhaps having a cleaning needle that get spoked up the dispenser tube at the end, or a third fluid source to flush it out might do. I've oby Ru - General
What would clearly be the coolest thing is that trick whereby you get a pawn to the far row on the board, and change in into a queen, or whatever. With repchess, it really can changeby Ru - General
QuoteYou know, some of the early syringe extruder designs should be capable of dispensing solder paste and holding onto SMD components This sounds like it has the potential to be a little... kludgy. I'm very much in favour of separation of concerns... a magical multipurpose toolhead would be cool, but I just bet it would be 4 times harder than developing two independant toolheads. Paste dispensby Ru - Mechanics
Quotewhy must there be a grinder? Well, QuoteIt would be quite... interesting when you go "pawn takes rook" and the head grinds the rook to scrap I'd be more embarassed about being in a situation where you've had to sacrifice a rook to a pawn, really.by Ru - General
QuoteEnergy figures for those interested, calculating roughly at 1kW per m^2 of land and conservatively at 2000 hours of sun per year gives us a potential of 20 liters of biofuel assuming an energy content of 10kwh/liter and a 10% effieciency of conversion rate. 10% is a bit keen for photosynthesis. It's somewhat less than that (someone on another thread quoted 3% as being quite good for a plantby Ru - Plastic Extruder Working Group
QuoteAs far as swappable toolheads, goes, perhaps it has been long enough that some of you missed the prototype design that Adrian's graduate student came up with a few months ago. Seems easy and quick. I recall watching a short video of a head being changed, too. But being able to add and remove heads easily is only one part of the problem; the old and new heads need to be perfectly aligned, orby Ru - RepRap Host
Not solder, solder *paste* It would be... tricky to do a lot of surface-mount stuff without it, really.by Ru - Mechanics
So, the new GCode arduino firmware supports G2/G3 arc drawing. This is all good. But is it actually useful to us beyond the 'that's neat' or 'now we support a decent amount of gcode standard X' However, how is the host software ever going to take advantage of this fact? If we're using STL source files, any curved surfaces on the object will have already been tesselated by the design software. Thby Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteNot so much, the current toolhead can be automatically attached and released; the remaining problems in terms of toolchange strike me as software (move the carriage to the proper place, converse with the toolhead, etc), building a rack to hold idle tools is trivial unless you want to keep them active while they wait, or if you have a very large number of tools relative to the edge space of yby Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteSo long as you're playing music in your friend's backyard and making Harry Potter figurines for yourself (which you could do with a pocketknife and a block of wood today), there's nowhere for rights holders to go after you. Well, ish. Copyright law is a very fuzzy sort of thing, far more so than patent law because it doesn't deal with such tangible things. You are violating someone's copyrby Ru - General
QuoteThe sticker is the knight, but that one can be solved by printing it upside down I believe I'm not picturing that one at all! I was thinking more along the lines of having the horse's chin tucked in closer to its neck, and a thin bit of joining material that could be cut out by the end user. Failing that, a two (or three) piece knight where you print the head horizontally and then attach itby Ru - General
'Automagically' is one of my favourite technical terms (edit... oh the shame of typo-ing a one line post)by Ru - RepRap Host
Quoteit's easy enough to fab cylindrical 'chips' and print appropriate images on top of them. Aww, but that's so boring Given that most chess pieces are pretty simple things, width the exception of a few minor details (on my set, the kind and queen's crowns, a slice through the bishop's head, the knight) should be dead simple to throw some nice little models together. I'd do it meself, if I hby Ru - General
Support material is the sort of thing that the host software could calculate automagically. Detecting overhanging surfaces isn't rocket science; tracing a ray downwards until it hits other parts of the build or the bed and adding s blob of support material at each point where the ray passes through a layer is simple enough stuff. This is one of the situations where I feel it would be significantby Ru - RepRap Host
I was thinking about chess pieces last night, strangely enough. Chessboards don't have fixed dimensions, so they can be scaled to fit your build area The pieces are almost all easy to fabricate, though making a nice knight model would be the tricky bit I feel. As for plastics, presumably you could have some nice colour ABS filament made up, if you knew the right people. Failing that, would havby Ru - General
Everyone takes the 'litigate first, ask questions later' approach nowadays. Its like a reflex. Did you hear about the guy who wrote drivers to let old creative sound cards work under vista, for example? Or for a massively more harmless example, the guy who made the london tube map with anagram station names? The new intellectual property agreement looks pretty ominous too. It is intended to hitby Ru - General
Ahh, it might be worth having the 'we don't do FDM' thing sprinkled in strategic bits of the wiki. I know I use that term, as it is a handy sort of label. It would indeed be very nice if companies would build upon and contribute to the work being done here, much like the development of the linux kernel. I shan't hold my breath however.by Ru - General
QuoteIn the short term, the biggest problem might come from companies like Stratasys, whose cash cows will be the first to be threatened by RepRap. This probably won't be the case. There will continue to be a market for large, fast, reliable, safe, and otherwise flashy rapid prototyping machines. The sort which are supported by a real company, and have various safety guarantees and so on. The bby Ru - General
QuoteWhat I was thinking of doing was using my dremel to cut a small groove in.... something. The same way that if you lift a trace off a regular board, there is a groove left behind. Then melt some sort of metal into that groove If you're already milling, why not mill isolation tracks into pcb blanks, or even make your own conductive-metal-over-hear-resistant-substrate sheets? That would be somby Ru - Mechanics
QuoteAnyone looking to create something along these lines would be well served to check out the 3D Warehouse for user-contributed Sketchup models. This has been suggested before. There are a few minor issues: - The free sketchup can't export models in formats useful to us, although it can be modified to export STL I believe. - Sketchup is closed source, windows and OSX (recent versions) onlby Ru - General
QuoteHave you seen this pcb video? I remain grumpy that there seem to be no nice desktop mill kits like the fireballcnc easily obtainable in the UK; or at least in the bits of europe easily searchable in english You have it so easy over the other side of the pond...by Ru - RepRap Host