If people were manufacturing and distributing plastic parts for less than bitsfrombytes, why would bitsfrombytes exist? Uuntil more people have reliable repraps and are happy to distribute bits, the moulded parts from bitsfrombytes are the best, and only, that you'll get. Time to start saving upby Ru - United Kingdom RepRap User Group
Quotea little like trying to hack pieces of a Mac onto a PC Nowadays, the underlying hardware is pretty much identical You pay a premium for a pretty exterior. Not that I have anything against that, of course. QuoteI didn't know better, Brian, I would guess that you got what you know about Reprap's capabilities from the fab@home website. It looked like a quotation of their site to me, especiaby Ru - General
"It depends" For constructing spheres and things, you could always fabricate two (or more) parts separately, and then stick them together at the end, though this isn't ideal. The rough edges is more an artefact of an 'unpolished' toolchain. If your design program exports models with large facets on curved surfaces, the product is going to share those facets even if your CAM and driver softwarby Ru - General
Well, I think he's probably referring to the 'rep' bit, if it can machine its own structural elements (and I guess there's no reason why it couldn't). I was just amused that it is referred to as a reprap even though it isn't a rapid prototyper... reprap is just a nifty and useful term. Repmil or reprou don't quite cut it somehowby Ru - General
More interestingly, they linked which also bills itself as a 'reprap'. Might have to investigate that one a little more...by Ru - General
QuoteI am talking about an existing CNC controller running Fanuc compatable Gcode where a G4 P?? is a delay And the controller does not understand the use of P in any other context? I will politely describe this as 'poor design'. QuoteMost CNC machines have configurable M functions but not all of them allow access to the actual gcode Words such as X?? Y?? or P?? for use in those M functions. Aby Ru - EMC2
QuoteOn my control I cannot access the P word as it is actually delay time for pauses Have I missed something fundamental here? I was under the impression that P was always a parameter of some kind, never the start of an instruction. It's used for both setting extruder speed (M100) and temperature (M104). If you can't use P as a generic parameter, then something is terribly wrong with your contrby Ru - EMC2
Random unhelpful comment... SMIL is already used as an eTLA by 'streaming multimedia interaction language' and prnounced in the same way. Nothing else immediately springs to mind which is as conveniently pronounceable (using things like T for toolpath or R for reprap, etc). Maybe an A for Abstract might help But you could always use Builder Definition for Sliced Models... *cough*by Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteIt'll be interesting to see which "breeding strategy" works better in the long run. Speaking as someone who was all geared up to try making a fabber@home before finding this place, I'd say that reprap being a fraction of the cost is a major differentiatorby Ru - General
QuoteRu, what do you mean each design of fabricator would need it's own object file? This was mostly in response to this... QuoteIf people want to create machines that can run standalone from the PC then they will be loading the fully processed machine control code into the device, not this intermediate format. This means my device isn't entirely standalone... I will need a decent driver to geby Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteThats Kinda funny considering both projects are open source. Microsoft and Mac have the problem of being competitors were RepRap and Fab@home have the advantage of being open source projects that share technology. Not sharing technology really seems kinda pointless. But if we all worked on the same thing, wouldn't it be dull? The fact that therer are several different projects with differenby Ru - General
Looking good so far! If you really wanted status dumping, I'm sure you could hack some (or more) of it into the arduino firmware yourself. You can look at the existing temperature reporting code to see where to start; it shouldn't be too hard As for EMC2 users... if there weren't any before, there would seem to be a reasonable chance of getting more now. It would be nice to have projects likeby Ru - EMC2
QuoteXML may not be very efficient, but with modern computers it's not really going to have a big impact on processing time (most of this will be the slice & dice). True, but it certainly doesn't keep the file size down. Its the unnecessary bloat I object to. The notion that you don't need to be efficient because we how powerful computers is what bought us Vista QuoteIf people want to creaby Ru - RepRap Host
Any sort of control would do. The spamming process is inevitably automated and always easier for the spammers than it is for the cleaners :-/ Personally, I'd be in favour of locking down the object library for now. As no-one is contributing, this wouldn't be an issue. If people do have things to add, they can request an existing user/admin to give them an account. This would be a perfectly reasoby Ru - Administration, Announcements, Policy
QuoteQuoteBut always allow for the possibility that you might be totally wrong. I know I do It is nice to know that folks out there are allowing for the possibility that I might be totally wrong... Oh dear... I didn't think that sentence was grammatically ambiguous. Consider the following... "Always clean you teeth. I know I do!" "Always check your boots for scorpions. I know I do!" You canby Ru - RepRap Host
I'm not sure that using gcode is particularly useful for an intermediate stage. Gcode is fairy closely tied to the device and the driver system, which limits its portability. Describing complete toolpaths is very verbose, and probably unnecessary. Perhaps some benchmarking is needed here to see exactly how much time toolpath generation for a layer takes? Verbosity is more annoying here, as it geby Ru - RepRap Host
Because if you use the Arduino, there's no reason to use EMC2 at all. EMC2, like the Arduino firmware, is a GCode interpreter which generates pulse trains to direct your steppers. I imagine there are various good reasons for this, not least because EMC2 is reliable and mature, well supported, various UIs, etc etc.by Ru - EMC2
QuoteFor this kind of fabbing there should be an optimization, which instead of simply slicing through the complete object should output every 'column' separately from the bottom to the next possible junction (in respect to the shape and outer diameter of the tool-tip). This could prove exceedingly tricky to do correctly for the sort of space-frame Kyle as looking at. Completing one edge of a /\by Ru - Controllers
QuoteSo what happened? Did Bill Gates make some kind of offer they couldn't refuse to OLPC to prevent such a scenario? Not directly Given the world-wide Windows monopoly, some governments were not interested in a device that would not allow their budding citizens to learn to use Windows in preparation for and exciting career as an 'information worker'. This sort of self-perpetuating monopoly isby Ru - General
That radian.org essay is not a happy one, is it? I'm totally unsurprised that OLPC is a train wreck in progress, but at least there will be a crapload of useful, resilient hardware out in the world for *someone* to do something useful with. Their lack of commitment to open source was apparent from way back when they specced the hardware. I'm happy that reprap pretty much has to be open source asby Ru - General
Ahh, now that does look interesting, if only because it looks like you could conceivably assemble one yourself; something that you can't do with a gumstix. I can't tell if it has a bunch of GPIO pins available for triggering steppers though... it sounds like the sort of thing that it *should* have, mind you. The gumstix has all sorts of nifty looking breakout boards for driving various things suby Ru - Controllers
Hmm... they're cheaper than gumstix, but this might only be because you have to buy them in bulk. The development kits are also very expensive, when you consider that the gumstix can take all sorts of other off-the-shelf toys supported by linux very cheaply.by Ru - Controllers
Well spotted, however you aren't the first I'm afraid!by Ru - RepRap Host
As I vauely recall mentioning before, possibly in response to a post by Forrest, this sort of thing is very non-trivial. For USB, you'll need access to some hardware that implements USB host mode, I believe. Its probably not at all the sort of thing you'll want to be trying to implement yourself. Cheap microprocessors do exist that will do this... google should list you a few. Then you'll only nby Ru - Controllers
There's potentially lots of space on Earth, too. If you've not already done so, I think you should read Diamond Age, and see what product Imperial Tectonics makes. There are all sorts of thing you can do with clever replicating technology, after all...by Ru - General
This is what software engineers might describe as 'non trivial'. Setting out from the start to use this sort of modular design is tricky, as I suspect that not everything the software will eventually need to do is currently known. More importantly, the benefits of such a design probably wouldn't be realised any time soon, given that most of the sorts of things you mentioned simply aren't being dby Ru - RepRap Host
Surgery, and the larger parent field of medicine in general, may have rewards other than financial. Same for most public services, I'd say. One of my previous employers was a volunteer lifeboatman, when he wasn't doing his day-to-day IT consultancy stuff. I don't imagine he was risking drowning for a few extra bucks In fact, in some areas you could well find emplyment increasing, as you can doby Ru - General
Farming animals is of course a terribly inefficient thing to do. But you can grow animals in places where it is not possible (or merely not practical) to grow food crops (first thing that springs to mind are sheep on moorlands and highlands). Short of nice, industrial scale protein and sugar synthesis, things will probably stay this way, though you may find yourself becoming increasingly vegetarby Ru - General
Yeah, just volume of text. Its a common bulletin board thing, cos its easy to script. Some kind of peer review might be more suitable, but that would be a) hassle and b) cliquey, cos it has the potential to foster groupthink. See also, karma on other bboard systems. I think we all know who are the 'real' gurusby Ru - Reprappers
I suspect one problem will be persuading people to do the really nasty jobs that really need doing, when there is little economic incentive for them to do so. But this sort of thing is likely to happen in the mid-term future, when all those countries we rely upon to make cheap stuff for us become a little wealthier and suddenly our cost of living is rising to cope with theirs I presume the unwrby Ru - General