Author Archives: paulwallich

Arduino on Windows: not ready for prime time

Posted on July 10, 2017

I’ve been teaching a little middle-school mobile robot workshop at the 12-year-old’s school, and it’s been a mess. The kids did pretty well assembling the bots and wiring them up, but clearly I needed to spend much more than the … Continue reading →

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Buy extension cords, not wire

Posted on March 1, 2017

When you’re in the sticks, your supply options are limited. That’s why the other day I bought a couple of extension cords instead of the bulk wire that was right on the other side of the aisle at the hardware … Continue reading →

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Solder first, Trim Headers Later

Posted on January 26, 2017

I had a bunch of Adafruit Metro Minis to solder up for a workshop I’m teaching, and –as usual — almost all the header strips were longer than they needed to be. I guess it’s much quicker to pack a … Continue reading →

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A really stupid feature set

Posted on November 14, 2016

In the process of getting solar panels, we talked ourselves into a heat pump with a couple of split heating/cooling units (gotta find something for all those nice renewable kilowatts to do). But it turns out that Mitsubishi designers are … Continue reading →

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Lubricate your fans

Posted on October 28, 2016

(tl;dr: if you have a fan that cools your hot end or heat break, lubricate it. It may solve some problems.) It’s a good thing I splurged on the dual extruder for my printrbot way back when. Not that I … Continue reading →

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Everything is parallel

Posted on October 6, 2016

Or at least multithreaded. I was prototyping some vaguely image-related ideas in Processing, and decided that I wanted to pick which image file I was going to mess with on the fly rather than hard-coding the filename and path into … Continue reading →

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The autopilot conundrum

Posted on May 11, 2016

This morning I stopped by a local school where some of the kids had crowdfunded a 3D printer (a printrbot Play) to see if I could help them get it working. I seem to have become the town expert, which … Continue reading →

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