Tag: turku

Turku: upsetting

Besides walking around Turku and trying out vegan cupcakes (yay cupcakes!) I’ve started work on building the RepRap at the gallery. I have all the metal bits cut to proper length, and the threads fit the screws and the printed parts I got from Greg Frost in Australia. Last night I was polishing the threaded rods, after which I realised that I could actually start assembly of the rig. I was too tired to do it yesterday, and I still haven’t decided on how to do with the bottom plate (I’ll forego the heated plate at the moment, it’s easy to drop in once I have it) but after the weekend I’ll have somehthing which actually looks like a RepRap. It will feel good to have a frame on which I could pin my ambitions literally instead of all figuratively, in my head.

Of course, the hot-end from Makergear still needs assembly — and it’s a total PITA to put together, let me tell you — and the electronics are still home to a stubborn ghost, but it’s getting there. Once I’ll relax a bit more perhaps I could actually scout opportunities to do something with the printer which doesn’t revolve around the printer itself…

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Performance bus: Turku

With my arrival date set, I was invited to go along as audience on a Performance Bus™ with a bunch of spectators and performance artists. It seemed an excellent opportunity to see the surroundings of the city as well as meet people, so of course I signed up. Ever since my ask over at Metafilter I’ve been trying to come up with coping strategies for performances, and immersion therapy might be just the thing to push me over the edge into something resembling professional behaviour.

Most of the time, I’m not comfortable enough with the form to have an opinion one way or another, but insofar as I have a taste, it skews toward those performances which don’t take themselves too seriously. A group performing in the bus did so in Finnish, allowing me to fill in the blanks of their text, or rather just focus on the rhythm and rhymes — as a result their performance was one of the more interesting ones. This goes to the heart of what David Sedaris learned from his career as a performance artist:

It was the artist’s duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience’s job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.

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Kimmo Modig, the director of Gallery Titanik was along for the ride to do a performance, and we spent the trip chatting about art and related topics, as well as chickpea pancakes. We seem to agree on many things, so he’s obviously a clever and sharp fellow. For his performance, people could help themselves to a bucket with all the money he’d received to do the performance; in the end he tossed the remainder into the river. Value-destroying performances have been done before of course, but I imagine that actually tossing fifty Euro into the drink feels different from thinking about it.

All in all, driving people around from one event to another is a good way to ensure a captivated audience, and it was a day well spend, especially with an excellent picnic at the end of it. You can read a short article in Finnish about it on uudenkaupunginsanomat.fi and in English on Facebook, and I’ll post some reviews as well once I find them. Leena Kela, who is the regional performance artist of Finland Proper (and who organised this Performance Bus, see video) does some other projects of her own which might be interesting to check out. For example, I’m going to read up on the outcome of Alter ego — being someone else for a month, and then having to refer to oneself in third person. “Yes, she was much ruder and ate a lot of cheese.”

First impressions: Turku

I still require parts for the RepRap, so I walked south on the recommendation that K-Rauta might stock the metal rods I need. The surroundings quickly changed into an industrial park, and shortly thereafter I find out that K-Rauta does not have what I need, unless I what I need are two burly men behind a counter. They did point me to an adjacent store which looked promising albeit closed, so I’m going back there Monday.

I’m staying in a student dorm named Domus, and have found a jogging route. The shared kitchen is a dump but there’s Al Jazeera English on the TV and a balcony I’d appreciated were I still smoking. The room is nice enough, fridge kettle shelves, and the smell of soap will be renewed once a week when someone cleans the room. Oh, and there’s a sewing machine in a cupboard, which will come in handy since my last pair of Cheap Monday jeans once again have experienced crotch failure.

The esthetics of the city is odd — it’s a mixture of fifties functionalism and drab Soviet buildings — and wherever there might have been an uncertainty about what to build, they just poured more asphalt; The roads are wide and everywhere. If there’s a city planner, that guy sure likes cars. Given a chance, I’ll ask.

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Doing the RepRap #7

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at HQ, consisting mostly of me troubleshooting my Gen7 1.2 board in the forums and on IRC. You can read of my ordeals under the title “Getting movement with Teacup + Gen7 1.2” and my aborted attempts at troubleshooting the (probably dead) Pololus is here: How to check if A4988 is fried?

Finally, Traumflug offered to take a look at the board if I could send it to Germany. I dropped it in a mailbox quicker than you can say “Spitze!” and worried my head about getting a multimeter which wouldn’t give me random readings instead. A couple of days later I got an email back which opened with:

Your board arrived today. It took me something like a minute to find the bridge … :-) See the attached picture.

Which at once had me feeling happy that it’s solved, and rather dull for not having spottet the short. I actually got a small microscope and went over the board to find shorts, but I ignored the areas easily visible by the naked eye… Since I have very little dignity left to salvage I’m taking this in stride and the board is on it’s way to Turku, where I’ll assembly the 3D printer. Shouldn’t take more than a day or so, right? What could go wrong?

Speaking of being on it’s way to Turku: I’m writing this at Landvetter airport — amongst screaming children and the smell of fear which is probably I — and my plane leaves in a while. I’m drinking expensive beer and hoping that my luggage is under the weight limit. Seeing as this is my first residency, I’m looking forwards to having a change of scenery and a deadline for the project. Although these open-ended processess are all good and fun, actually setting print to paper — or plastic to Turku, as it were — will feel nice.

As for the multimeter, at first I got the Fluke 115 — all the reviews list Fluke as the doubleplusbest — but switched to an Agilent U1242B after watching the one hour “multimeter buying guide” with David Jones over at the EEV blog (it gets better once you get used to his voice. Your ears take five six hours to adapt, in my experience). The deciding factor was that the Agilent had μA while the Fluke only did mA — I’m not good enough at these things to know when I’ll be using what, but will take others word for it. Also, the Agilent can use temperature probes which might be handy if I’m calibrating the Makergear hotend or the heated bed.

Ok, enough with this light banter. Off I go.

Doing the RepRap #3

I’ve successfully drilled and soldered both the Gen7 v1.2 motherboard and optostops.

Redundancy is king so I made nine optostops, two of which seem broken — they light up regardless if you apply current. People in the forums helped me troubleshoot, but having confirmed that the sensors work (i.e. infinite resistance when the optos are blocked) I can’t find anything wrong with them.

What is more worrisome is that I haven’t yet tested the motherboard for shorts and whatnot; If I can mess up a 15-solder board, surely a 400-solder one is going to explode. This might be exiting; If my apartment burns down in the process, I’m crying force majeure and buying it finished, like most people seem to.

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What is remaining is everything else. I need to get all the metal parts — nuts bolts and washers — and don’t really know where to order them here in Sweden. I’m tempted to order from McMaster-Carr only because they have such a well designed site it makes me all weepy.

Hopefully, I’ll get my hands on the printed parts along with an extruder — Wade’s geared extruder — later this week when we’re going to play around with a MakerBot at KKV Elektronen, printing the boards with components at some point; It’ll be great to finally get a look at a 3D printer in action, and get a hang of the software to run it.

Speaking of which, I have to load the bootloader onto the ATMega 644-20 PU, and hope to use an old Arduino I have laying around somewhere. Sounds simple, but this would also require me to get a power supply for the rig. (12V pushing 15Amps should do it. The machine only requires 5Amps, but the heated bed requires an additional 8Amps, so there you go.) The power supply needs to be hooked up to the board, as does the Arduino, so I need to figure out what cables to use and make those, after which I get to hook computer to Arduino and let it do it’s programming magic.

The optostops need to have flags made for them, preferably out of soda cans, so that the stops can be engaged for calibration and safety. I need a couple of 5mm wide belts to drive the extruder and bed, and I can either buy them directly or split them myself from more standard widths. Having chosen to go with Wades extruder, I need to manufacture or buy a hot-end, the part of the printer where the plastic poops out, as well as the hot-bed onto which the pooping will happen. So tonight is “ordering shit online” night. That, and crying into a bottle.

So far, this has been a crash course in electronics, and the fact that I haven’t yet been electrocuted or blown a fuse is encouraging. I can almost feel my neural pathways adapt to all these Ohms, Amps and whatnots, and it’s nice to learn something new again.

Doing the RepRap #2

Perhaps it’s the colder weather or perhaps the glass fibers I’ve inhaled are tickling my hypothalamus, but today I woke up early with the minimum of suicidal thoughts and have gotten a lot of stuff done. And it’s not even noon!

Most importantly, I’ve gotten around to ordering all the electronic component and connectors needed to finish the Gen7 1.2 motherboard and optostops. When envisioning the project, I was determined to bond with ELFA, to find a weary comrade at the store who would regale me with tales of how she set fires on things in her first project as well, and I would offhandedly follow the advice and recommendations for what to buy. Then I realised that ELFA is up to three times as expensive as some of the net stores, so screw that.

Last night I was up with a bottle of wine and a Dremel, trying to drill really fucking teensy holes in the PCBs. I was wearing a mask most of the time, but some of the glass fiber is bound to end up in my brain. Considering I’m doing this in the kitchen, let’s call it additional roughage. The drilling went well, and I managed to substitute the smallest drill bit with the conical diamond bit. I thought I would need a press drill for precision, seeing as the smallest holes are half a millimeter or so, but as long as you limit yourself to two glasses of wine you’re good. At three glasses you become a bit cavalier re:precision.

The parts I ordered were mostly from Reichelt with some remaining stuff from RS Components. Reichelt has a nice webstore with pretty pictures and all, but their customer service is either shy or enjoys receiving multiple emails with similar questions. Most businessess, I imagine, upon receiving an email asking “can I pay with Mastercard or do I pay on delivery?” would answer both parts of the sentence, not limiting themselves to “You cannot pay with Mastercard.” Playing coy might be a good way of wooing the shy guy with a beret, but I’m trying to pay for your services so no need to beat around the bush here.

Before I got to the stage of drilling holes and ordering parts, let me tell you the story of how I learned of which parts to order. I believe it’s telling of how quickly one gets mired in tracking down information when you know as little as I do on a topic.

In order to make the PCB I had to find a list of the required parts to mount on the PCB. I couldn’t find anyone who could tell me what parts are required. I couldn’t find a written list of parts, but there were instructions somewhere on the wiki telling me to open up a file of a certain type, changing a setting in an application, and then export a BOM — Bill Of Materials. No hint of what the file name is nor what application is required, but OK.

So I go onto the #reprap IRC channel and ask my stupid questions and get very little response. Someone recommends that I check out gEDA PCB, an open source application for creating PCBs and schematics, because EAGLE might not be able to open the file I need to open, whichever file that is. GEDA is actually mentioned on the wiki, but there’s no information as to what it is or where to get it, so I thought it was a filetype at first.

I check out gEDAs homepage, which tells me that I need to compile the application from source. Ok, so poke about a bit then realise that gEDA requires FINK to install, which in turn requires installing FINK and dependencies via the Terminal, which I’m shamefaced to admit I suck at using. FINK requires the Xcode developer tools, so I leave that to download for half an hour and then have the Devtools install running in the background while I try to get a feel for the RepRap IRC community.

Among the running chatter of people troubleshooting their machines, there was some discussion about the first case of 3D fabbing copyright infringement, when someone recreated a prop from a Paramount movie and they got on his case. It’s surely a sign of things to come, but as long as there are open source 3D apps and DIY printers, I don’t see how you could stem the tide of personal infringement. It’s a short read and worth checking out:

→ Torrentfreak, enigmax: Paramount Cease and Desist Targets 3D Printer ‘Pirate’

Anyway, with the Xcode developer tools installed, I notice that FINK isn’t available as a binary for 10.6, so I download a tarball and follow the instructions for compiling FINK using the Bash Terminal. Compiling FINK has actually been the most straightforward thing I’ve done so far, as the installation was really friendly and considerate; Like a well lubed proctologist with good blood circulation.

It took me a moment to realise that I need to enable unstable packages in FINK, after which gEDA installed fine while I fell back on default selections when asked about plugins and whatnot. I’m not sure if I screwed something up in the process, cause gEDA took two hours to compile even though I had engaged all eight cores.

With gEDA installed, I find the PCB app in ~/sw/bin/pcb and open up the Gen7Board.pcb file from the app. And lo and behold, there’s a “BOM” alternative under “Export…” which gives me a list of components and their place on the board. All in a text-file which you have to manually open cause it has no filetype extension. Looking over the list of parts, I’m still confused since some of the parts are labelled “unknown” which is somewhat ominous. In the chat, Traumflag himself shows up (The guy who created and maintains Gen7 1.2) and I ask my silly questions again.

Turns out, there’s a complete parts list on the wiki, and he promptly sends me a link.

Now. When you’re as green as I am on a subject, it can be difficult for an outside observer to distinguish me from a lazy bum, but I swear I’ve gone up and down that fucking wiki and not found any links to a parts list for the Gen7 1.2 board. Apparently, Google can’t find any pages linking to it either (as of July 1st at least) so perhaps there aren’t any. I don’t know how it’s possible not to link internally somewhere on a wiki, but at least it made me feel less stupid, albeit still frustrated.

In grassroots open source project such as the RepRap community, writing documentation is boring and little value seems attributed to it and consequently little work is done on it; On the other hand, it’s really simple to get in touch with whomever designed the part you need help with, and people are often kind and willing to lend a hand.

So, with a followup email from Traumflag, I had a complete list of parts. And since the wiki contained direct store links to the components, I took the sensible approach and ordered the goddamn parts already. Though Reichelt slapped on some banking fee, the parts were most certainly cheaper than ELFA; And even if I could have tried to source cheaper components, that would have taken me a couple more days, which I rather spend solving the next problem down the road. Which I predict there will be aplenty.

Doing the RepRap #1

For the betterment of humanity, or at least the part of it interested in rapid prototyping, I’ll try to document the process of building my RepRap. So far, I have etched a shabby PCB — it’s the Gen7 v1.2 board — and I’ve tested it for shorts. It’s not the prettiest board I’ve seen and I’ll make a backup, but hopefully it’ll survive my cutting and drilling.

I’ve ordered a soldering station, having poured over reviews of different models and asking any person who has ever had a passing acquaintance with anything more advanced than a toaster, and ended up getting the Weller WHS40. I’m picking it up on Monday from ELFA, along with some solder, and will set it all up in the kitchen. Hopefully there won’t be enough fumes to kill any plants and/or people.

The instructions on the RepRap project wiki are confused and make me miserable. Many pages are not maintained properly and often seem to contradict each other. Using a wiki as documentation repository is all well and fine, but it’s not very pedagogical and frustratingly difficult to find even the PCB layout for the boards, as each new design is explained by the people working on it using whatever nomenclature — or lack thereof — they fancy. I don’t expect this process to be easy, but can for the life of me not understand why you would spend thousands of hours developing an awesome project intended to be a disruptive technology, and then fuck up the instructions. I found some excellent assembly tutorials though, which should be of great help once I’m building the actual rig.

I had a horrible time finding ready-to-print PCB layout schemes, so I backtracked the process and am trying out PCB CAD software. I haven’t been mired in learning new software in a while, so this will be interesting. Learning stuff while doing other stuff is a feature not a bug, so this might be an interesting way of learning more about electronics and CAD. As it is, I’m learning all skills necessary for the project on-the-go. I did some soldering in grade school, and I know how not to blow up my multimeter, and that’s about it as for my skillz. If I manage to build this thing — and get it to run — I suspect that most any primate should be able to.

The first PCB software I’m trying out is Eagle from Cadsoft
The build instructions for the Gen7 1.2 board are here: reprap.org/wiki/Motherboard_1_2
Layouts for the PCB are here: github.com/Traumflug and a ready to print PDF in Gen7Board Layout.pdf