Category Archives: making

Goodbye Green ABS

Posted on November 11, 2014 by paulwallich

There it goes, the last scrap of the first kilo of filament I ever got. Halfway though a print, of course, so I just pushed some lousy glow-in-the-dark stuff — the only other 3mm ABS I had handy — through … Continue reading →

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More Shapeoko parts

Posted on November 6, 2014 by paulwallich

I’ve been working on a revised set of shapeoko-2 endstop parts, and now they’re up at Youmagine, along with a few pictures. I decided on mechanical endstops for all three axes, both because that’s electrically simpler and because microswitches are … Continue reading →

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My hallowe’en costume

Posted on October 31, 2014 by paulwallich

Yes, I’m going as a bar graph. I’m an ex-physicist, a tech writer and a geek, so it’s perfect. I have to admit that after 30 years of working on technical illustrations that ended up on magazine covers and people’s … Continue reading →

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Hallowe’en in a box

Posted on October 23, 2014 by paulwallich

Just add switches and a 9-year-old geek. That’s Adafruit’s FX card, which can store 2MB of sound files and spit them out to a powered speaker based on any of 11 trigger lines. With additional modes including looping, sequential (play … Continue reading →

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It never rains but it pours

Posted on October 7, 2014 by paulwallich

So now there seem to be three separate makerspace initiatives in town, all serving more or less disparate potential communities — youth/educational/entry-level, light hacker/maker, heavy-equipment expert maker. In some ways those are useful divisions, because you don’t necessarily want to … Continue reading →

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A Makerspace is a Business

Posted on September 25, 2014 by paulwallich

Last night I went to the Generator member meeting. I talked with some cool people about projects, but the main agenda was listening to the staff and board telling us how things were going and where they might go next. … Continue reading →

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The Shapeoko 2 is not that hard to build

Posted on September 12, 2014 by paulwallich

I’ve been working on this in odd hours for the last month or so. But. Next time Read The ^#@^% Directions All The Way Through Before Starting The Build. No, really. I’ve had to go back a few times and … Continue reading →

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Left hand, meet right hand

Posted on September 3, 2014 by paulwallich

You would think that in a small town everyone would know what everyone else is doing. Well, they do, but not in enough detail to be of any use to one another. This morning I heard about the fourth (maybe … Continue reading →

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A visit with Tyler

Posted on August 22, 2014 by paulwallich

One morning last week I arrived at at Local64 to find a couple of spools of 3D-printer filament on my desk, one bright yellow, the other black with a label that read “carbon fiber”. Stuck on top a note saying … Continue reading →

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This is going to make Arduino workshops much easier

Posted on August 13, 2014 by paulwallich

Cloud-based arduino editor and programmer. Now I won’t have to tell people to download 100 MB of development environment, make sure they have all the right libraries installed, and so on and so forth just so they can get an … Continue reading →

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