Tag: sumu

Doing the RepRap #13 — Printer finished

It’s been a long road, but my Reprap Mendel Prusa 3D printer is finished and I’m printing stuff. There have been so many problems and fuckups along the way, that when I finally started printing stuff a week ago I didn’t think much of it, but with hindsight it was a Grand Moment™. I’ve joined the ranks of 3D printers. You may now commence the “oohing” and “aahing” I understand are my dues.

So far, with the exception of a frog and a replacement LM8UU Y axis holder, I’ve mostly been printing calibration cubes. These are shapes intended to troubleshoot your printer and give you an opportunity to get your Skeinforge/Sfact setting correct. As you can hear in the video there’s some rattling going on on the Z-axis, and I have some trouble with Y-alignment on some prints, but with lowered acceleration on Z and Y, and perhaps tightening of the belt on the latter, I think I’ll be able to print halfway decent parts.

Sara came over for a few days, and as any good boyfriend I set about making her feel comfortable helping out with the build. It was much appreciated as it often seems I have three hands too few to get something assembled. Making the print bed was slow going, and as I’m using plexiglass for print surface we broke off a couple of pieces before getting a more-or-less square one. The plexi is actually good for printing on cold, at least once the PLA starts sticking to it, but if your hotend gets too close the PLA fuses with the surface, and you’ll inadvertently run the head through the board which will create pockmarks in the surface, and possibly plug your nozzle with plexi — which is the reason I’m printing with the 0.5mm nozzle instead of the 0.35 I started with.

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We were leveling the print table for a good two hours, and found that the design with springs between the lower and print bed wasn’t optimal, since the springs were unevenly springy. I had bought a whole kit with the suckers but none seem to fit well enough and give enough force to work. It’s a good design on paper, but we found that it was just easier to use two sets of nuts per fastener bolt. Protip: Get spanners which fit instead of fiddling with adjustable ones or pliers; it’ll save you so much time and temperament it’s worth the expense.

At this moment thanks might be in order. A great amount of those go out to Traumflug for design and massive help with the electronics, and Kliment, Triffid_Hunter, Action68 and everybody else who’s been quick to lend support in #RepRap on IRC or on the reprap.org forums. When you’re as ignorant of a subject as I was about the RepRap, you rely on the help and input of friends and strangers, and without the support of everyone from awesome girlfriend Sara to KKV electro to that guy who barely spoke English but cut me some metal rods, this project might have fallen over and not gotten up after any of innumerable stumbles.

Of course, thanks to the people here in Turku for providing an incentive to start this, as well as the means and time to finish it. Ultimately, bigup to Adrian Bowyer for getting the RepRap project started, as well as all those who keep improving upon it. I have a public presentation of the project on Thursday 6th October at 1800 in Gallery Titanik in Turku, and if you’re nearby I’d love to see you there.

Turku: The art bit

For the past three weeks I’ve been in Turku, in the studio of Gallery Titanik, whacking away at the RepRap Mendel Prusa 3D printer. I’ve been kept so busy toiling with this that I’ve lost sight of the grander scheme of things, like why I’ve been building the printer in the first place. I’ve been putting off communicating what I’m doing not because I don’t think it’s worthwhile, but rather because the more immediate problems of finding screws or getting the electronics to work seemed so much more pressing; and besides, it ought to be obvious what I’m doing, no?

Then again, every once in a while it’s good to remind oneself that one of the few telling differences between an artist and a crazy person is that an artist at least nominally does her stuff for an audience, while the crazy keeps to herself or only occasionally performs for medical personnel.

If the Work of art in the age of reproduction spoke about the disappearance of aura, of authenticity and a direct interaction between any one artist and her audience, the means of reproduction through RepRaps and similar DIY machines reintroduce at least the authenticity of the machine — or its configuration, parts and calibration — into the object.

There are things about fabbing which sets it apart from traditional reproduction, as for example there is no original on which any copy is modeled but only a digital model created to exist in a different medium from that of any physical copy. Any artworks which are printed from a CAD file are originally only ever mathematical descriptions in a 3D-file format on computer storage. So although the printed object isn’t unrelated to the artwork, it certainly has a random element to it, a stutter in its materiality.

Historically art was about creating objects which based on esthetics and social function were considered “artistic,” then around the time of Fountain it became explicitly about an artistic aura, and then fluxus removed even the “work” part of “art work” which after post-modernism left us with the free-for-all shit buffet we’re at today. Perhaps fabbing could at least offer a lifesaver?

With fabbing, we have the possibility of having art which is highly conceptual, but which manifests itself physically not by the mediation of the initial artist, but rather through printers — machines and their operators — which exist in a DIY sphere and so are all different, temperamental, uneven; In another word, they are unique. But just as we don’t give artistic merit to the assembly-line worker who manufactures the printer with which we print our photographs, we are unlikely to attribute artistic merit to whomever assembled the printer which prints our CAD-models.

Rather, an actualized 3D-print might be the artwork of an artist, but it’ll have the aura of the machine, or rather the aura of the DIY home fabrication process of building and tuning the machines; If movements can impart aura, it’s an aura of industry dependent on craft, an inversion of industrialization, transforming engineers into cottage industry artisans churning out other peoples art objects.

nathan7: and I want a good print
nathan7: a really good print
nathan7: without overhangs ruining things
nathan7: it’s about the end result here

From a discussion on IRC #RepRap

The idea of personal fabrication is positioned to affect the manifestation and appreciation of art as soon as some critical mass and manufacturing capacity is reached: The result will be analogue objects bearing the likeness of art; not simulacrum or simulation, but a second order relation to the artwork, twinned with the aura of machine. Perhaps fabbing can be a disruptive enough technology to change the artists role into something new, something interesting, something other than making artworks.

Doing the RepRap #11 – Frame & motors

I got the frame of the Prusa more or less assembled, even though I still need to make sure that it’s straight and so forth. The motors are mounted and connected to the correct rods or belts, and they are stepping at 1/16 nicely, although the LM8UU bearings don’t seem as smooth as I’d like them to be; I will probably re-assemble the Y-carriage whenever I add the hotbed, seeing as that might be cause for some misalignment and grinding.

Robin from the forums popped by the studio and we compared builds and I got some advice which is always welcome; where to source materials, in what order to assemble specific parts, why patience usually pays off better than a flamethrower, etc.

The long M3×60 screws for the adjustable extruder have proved elusive, so I’ve gone for an M3 rod I’ll put wingnuts on. Once you get warmed up and understand how things are supposed to fit together and what functions they perform, you relax enough to improvise. It’s a good feeling. The Makergear hotend shipped with a mounting plate which doesn’t fit my Accessible Wade’s Extruder so I schlepped the studio bike around looking for 4mm plywood to drill a replacement. Once that’s done and the hotend built, I’m pretty close to testing to print.

Perhaps I’ll be able to melt som plastic into a horrible blob in time for tomorrows opening of the new show here at Titanik and impress Sara who’s coming over for a few days. That would be most excellent.

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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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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 #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