Tag Archives: 3D printing

Yet another tiny robotic car

Posted on September 9, 2015 by paulwallich

Yes, it’s made mostly out of random parts I had lying around. That’s sort of the point: even if you had to buy all the parts, this thing would be cheap, and if (like me) you accumulate toy and electronic … Continue reading →

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One step forward, multiple steps back.

Posted on August 28, 2015 by paulwallich

The good news: after 7 months I finally got the metal hot-ends for my printrbot metal plus. The bad news: I need a new printrboard. The irrelevant news: I think I’ve discovered a  failure mode for printrbot’s extruder board that … Continue reading →

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Retrobotics

Posted on July 27, 2015 by paulwallich

The 10-year-old has been getting into my old Mindstorms RCX stuff. I wrote an article about back when it was cutting-edge, and it’s been sitting mostly idle ever since. The laptop he’s using (the only one in the house that … Continue reading →

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Measure Once…

Posted on May 27, 2015 by paulwallich

This is what happens when you’re trying to design a part to fit something that you don’t have a good model of. These are all the prototypes of the fan duct I made for my printrbot jrv2, starting on the … Continue reading →

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Label Your Filament

Posted on May 11, 2015 by paulwallich

“Yeah, right, you say, I would never forget to do that.” And then you start getting filament that comes unspooled in a bag, on a cheapo unlabeled cardboard spool, in an unlabeled bag in a box with a label on … Continue reading →

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Kids love a makerspace

Posted on March 27, 2015 by paulwallich

When I got everything down to the library basement yesterday afternoon, there were already some kids waiting. Apparently they’ve been asking for a week or so when the next maker meeting was going to be. Mostly I set them loose … Continue reading →

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All hail our eight-armed server

Posted on March 24, 2015 by paulwallich

Octoprint rules. I read up on it, downloaded Octopi, flashed an SD card, booted up a pi and configured it, printed a up case and bolted it to a random piece of wood, twiddled a few settings, and here I … Continue reading →

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Nasty things, adventures

Posted on March 18, 2015 by paulwallich

When my freshman-year college roommate was in medical school, he told me that surgeons were trained to say “There!” instead of “Oops” when they made a mistake like cutting the wrong organ, so as not to panic everyone around them. … Continue reading →

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And this is why you make really sure which USB port you’re writing to

Posted on March 16, 2015 by paulwallich

(Update: Mostly fixed. If reflashing a Printrboard from the bootloader on up interests you, see the next post.) I was getting ready to print a nice big dragon on my Printrbot, but I knew it was going to take several … Continue reading →

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It’s all in the background.

Posted on March 2, 2015 by paulwallich

When I was in college, I worked in a laser lab one summer, for a visiting professor who was doing research on metal-vapor lasers. The first half-dozen times we turned his apparatus on, all it did was make the grad … Continue reading →

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