Tag: vimeo

Doing the RepRap #6 — repair, rebuild, rejoice, despair.

In anticipation of fucking shit up I had ordered two ATMegas and having succeeded once it took me one try to get the bootloader to take this time around. The board looked fine, but after a lot of trial and error, error, and error, I resigned to the fact that my Pololus probably were fried and ordered new ones. And that, kids, is how you literally burn 600 SEK by being a lazy bum and not double-checking your solders. Lesson learned and so on.

Having received the new Pololus, and with an extruder underway from the States and the plastic parts coming over from Australia, I only need to get the motors to spin to have a semblance of a printer up and running. I have most metal parts except for some springs and wingnuts, and to celebrate the birthplace of the machine I got some SKF 608 bearings. Oh, and I still need two T5 timing belts.

In the IRC channel I was suggested to use Pronterface.py instead of ReplicatorG as a computer side controller of the board, but after the first few times I couldn’t get the thing to launch and reverted to ReplicatorG. Not that it matters at the moment, because even with the ATMega replaced and properly bootloaded and running Gen7 Teacup, I can’t get any readings or functions out of it. I made a video of my attempts and you can watch it below; it’s dry but you get to watch me prod an inanimate object with clumsy fingers.

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Mom and Tomasz decided to visit now as well. I’ve shown them the archipelago and then my allotment garden and then the KKV workshop and then mom left and now Tomasz is stuck with me while I whine about the RepRap and hush him while recording troubleshooting videos. You can actually hear him in the video above, so it’s well worth watching for that alone! Also, I totally destroyed him at pingpong earlier today, and have video of that as well.

Adjustable table: adult rollercoaster

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Last fall I got a grant in order to take some time off, buy some equipment, read a book and hopefully produce some new art. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve done fuck-all since I got that grant except working on non-art related things. What the grant money did get me — in addition to a very nice knife, new running shoes and tights, an unending supply of freshly squeezed juice and some new in-ear-headphones — is some peace of mind and a bourgeois disposition. Just cause I’m not flat out broke, I suddenly felt that getting a stockbroker account was a “sound idea” and it feels as though I’m spiraling into a bad habit which will end up with me crashing at the end anyway, when I’m back to hand-to-mouth.

The new apartment is nice enough but I keep putting off inviting people. I don’t know if it’s cause I’ve still not gotten around to getting a proper lamp in the hall, where the rechargeable flashlight is getting electronically incontinent, or if I’m in a reclusive state of mind of late. I have an adjustable table which goes up and down at the touch of a button, and standing at it I can watch the ferries pass my window, which is nice and occasionally disconcerting, creating an illusion of the whole building moving. I would have liked to have learned the names of the ships by now but they don’t seem to stick. Perhaps I need a diagram.

Earlier today, my barber Hasse told me of a friend of his who, having spent his life and career on land, decided to fulfill his dream and signed on to a ship at the age of 57. He had dreamed of going to sea for all his life, and when he finally badgered the shipping line to give him a chance he concluded after the three month stint that it sucked balls. The moral being that you set some goals for yourself in life, and even if those don’t become fulfilled at least you did some fun stuff along the way, made some good friends and didn’t start a genocide or something similarly awful. As morals go, it’s not that bad.