One of our early adopters, EdmondsLibrarian, has just posted a great picture in our forums of a recent drawing he did with the Makelangelo. I like it so much I want to share it with all of you. If you like it, please let him know.
EdmondsLibrarian is also keen to talk to those of you with GIMP and Inkscape experience. Can you give him some tips to make more pictures?
Now paint a heart on one side and send it to Valve. Portal 3, anyone?
I’ve never understood why early adopters have to pay more. They get hit with all the bugs that were missed in testing. Time and again I read about someone who paid early, waited months, and got a shitty experience. Customers who come later get a smooth ride, they should pay more for the increase in quality. Am I just backwards on this? Crack open that juicy brain of yours and spill your thought-yolks in the comments below.
For that very reason I’ve raised the price on the 3- and 4-armed delta robots. I’m falling behind on production so to slow new orders I’ve made it a little less tempting. If you bought before today, consider it an award for being an early adopter.
Also, here is a picture of the mod I made to the Rotary Stewart Platform last night at the VHS. I’ve put the code in Github and now I’m going to call some suppliers and get an emergency delivery of 100 servos so I can get all these kits out the door. Less dollars for me, more happy for everybody. You can’t take it with you, right?
If you’re using the Redsail Laser Cutter at the Vancouver Hack Space safely then the worst that can happen is your cuts don’t cut. The laser goes around, you smell the burning, and when you touch the pieces to lift them from the bed the whole sheet moves because – whoops – the beam didn’t go all the way through. Now that you’ve moved the sheet, you’ll just have to scrap that cut and try again.
So the next time you lean into the machine you put one hand down to hold the sheet and with the other you nudge the piece. Yay, one of the cuts worked! …kinda. The interior holes didn’t cut completely and there’s a few funny spots that .. aw, heck, you moved the hand that shouldn’t move.
Clearly, there’s a need for a better way. Something that will make it easy to hold the sheet at the same place for each cut to waste less material. It can’t stick up above the material or the laser head might hit it. It has to be made of material that the laser can safely cut, just in case. Something easy to make again would be ideal. Something that doesn’t damage the machine when it’s installed (no bolting or gluing or welding).
I noticed a gap at the front of the machine, just inside the door. Using a few scrap pieces of material I cut a simple two piece system. slot them together in the gap, push it to the far left, and you now have a right angle fence to line up your cuts.
If you need to make another, look in Desktop > Laser User Files > Dan R > Fence.
It’s not perfect. Can you improve on the design? Let me know by commenting below or in our forums.
Here is the Rotary Stewart Platform Code on Github. I have a lot more code from the old project that needs to be updated to work with this model. If you’re patient, stay tuned. If you aren’t, join in and start writing code.
And since everybody loves pictures, here’s an unrelated image of my first PCB, an array of QRD1114s for the maze-solving HOG Drive robot. Yes, it’s missing two 220 ohm resistors. Fixing that tonight at the Vancouver Hackspace.
