Just Another RepRap

Trying to catch up as fast as I can. As of the last post I was caught up to December 21st, 2011 (today is May 16th, 2013). Let’s keep going.

Before I get to the heart of the post, let me get one bit about the snowflake from the last post out of the way. I had just finished printing a replacement piece for a snowflake ornament (one of the kids broke the last one) with my newly lathed heater barrel, fresh cut heater block, and PLA-printed (bad idea, I know) extruder. Here it the replacement:

Ornament fixed! Disaster averted!

So.

Ok. Next, well, I considered not blogging about this next part for now, but I think it’s better to get it out of my system. As people who know me (and people who don’t but who’ve been reading this blog for a long time) know, my best friend Kevin Stearns died in a car crash back in February of 2010. Back then I posted about that, and one of the paragraphs of that post read:

Over the past year he’d listened to more of my RepRap ramblings than anyone I know. He came up with a great idea for something fun thing to print on a RepRap, which he was going to share when I finished my Mendel. He designed software to create it, made incredible progress, and was just about done. Some day when I get my Mendel completed, I’ll share his creation.

Well back in December of 2011, with Chrismas and the anniversary of Kevin’s death approaching, I felt a self-imposed pressure to print that object before that anniversary. As you’ll see, I had a hardware failure that set that back, then some limited success, but an additional setback had me realize I wouldn’t get it done in time. That caused a great amount of stress, pressure, and pain (for obvious reasons) so I decided to pause work on the project.

Of course a month or two later, someone else on the internet finally had the same idea we’d had, and went ahead and posted it (which I’d like to say devastated me, but I think instead I became numb and wouldn’t let myself feel the pain, although I was underwater submerged in it). End of the story first: I never finished it.

As a result, I’ll blog about the attempts I made here, and post a video of his initial work, but I make no promises to myself or anyone else that I’ll ever go about trying to finish it (especially since someone else has already done it). (Please don’t post or personally say to me any attempts at motivating me to do it, even if I’m looking for something to print.. it brings too much pain and pressure along with it). Apologies to anyone who was waiting for some big post specifically dedicated to this with great happy results.

Ok.. So one day while at a Patriots game in Nov 2009, Kev and I were talking about one of my main topics at the time – “if you had a RepRap, what would you print?”. (Again, I didn’t have my Mendel built yet, although noone else in the U.S. did either). We talked about childhood toys, most of which were plastic. Then as we were talking, an idea came into both of our heads around the same time, but I’m pretty sure he thought and said it first. We thought about the Fisher Price record players that we had as kids, and how they had multiple discs you could put on and listen to songs.

We thought that if the resolution was good enough, you absolutely should be able to print those records.

Then Kev decided immediately what song it should play first, and his idea was the absolute, obvious, completely correct answer to that question. He said “it should play the first song it was ever exposed to!”. I knew exactly what he meant.

Kev was making a reference to a video I’d shown him by dbenoy (Daniel Benoy), where Daniel was testing some opto-endstops for his RepRap. He’d put firmware on the motherboard such that it spun the stepper motor to the tune of the Imperial March from Star Wars:

I completely agreed – the first Fisher Price record we needed to make was absolutely the Imperial March. If we could.

We bought a Fisher Price record player off of eBay since neither of our childhood ones were handy.

I sent Kev pictures one night with a few key measurements, including this pic:

and two weeks later, this:

and lots of other pics of images of the records and a video or two of it playing Jack and Jill.

While I worked on building my Mendel, Kev wrote software to simulate a Fisher Price record player. Since he wanted to give JavaFX a whirl, he downloaded it and whipped up a simulation, which he showed me (and it was glorious). He teased me that he knew how he’d motivate me to get my RepRap going – he’d post the record to thingiverse soon, and I wouldn’t be the one to print it first. I assured him I’d get the printer done soon.

I lent the record player to him the last night I saw him.

Again, Kev died before he could see the RepRap completed. Some time after his death at his house, his wife let me go through his computer to get the simulation and run it. I recorded a video of that:

Then (remember, I’m describing events from December of 2011) almost two years later in December, I was finally printing with good enough resolution that I thought it was worth trying.

At first I just tried making a blank record, with the grooves in the right place. I later tried a simple scale.

The print failed.

The extruder that I’d built out of PLA couldn’t withstand the pressure being placed on it by the M3 rods holding up the PEEK block on my new hotend. Here you can see the hotend is at an angle:

..and here you can just barely make out a bit of sagging of the bottom of the extruder where it wasn’t strong enough to hold up the M3 threaded rod holding the hotend:

Here’s a view from the back, again showing the bad angle of the hotend:

At least since I printed on glass I could convince myself that I had some of the dimensions right before the next print:

and I could try putting the peeled off failure onto the record player itself..

Taking a look at the bottom of my extruder confirmed that the PLA had failed:

Look at the left side of this pic – the plastic had softened up and the rod pulled through:

So I went back to my Wade’s Extruder.

Short term, I tried a few other prints for a change. An attempt at a bracelet:

some square thing that I can’t remember:

an OpenX carriage (out of PLA again, still a very bad idea):

Wow.

The carriage looked great.

Here it is assembled and snapped onto the x-axis rods as a test:

and here it is next to its brother from another mother:

The open-x carriage looks so good..

Surely it looked good enough to motivate me to try printing the record again.

It finished printing!

Here it is off the bed:

Here’s what the bottom looks like:

It looked so good near the record player..

On it went..

I tried playing it.. (this record try only attempted to do a few notes)

It fit. Tried printing another record with more notes.

I’d changed the grooves on this one a bit so each circle has two lines to it.. I like the look of the first one better but this was an attempt to get the notes better.

Time to try that one..

Playing that scale had me realize that our understanding of how the notes lined up was wrong (I hadn’t expected the double notes..). So that had me realize that Kev’s note as arranged might not even work. That discouraged me enough to postpone continuing work on this.

Here were the two records (with slightly different sized grooves) side by side:

Done for the night (and since someone else eventually posted the same idea before I got back to it, done trying for the foreseeable future), I put the record I’d made in its new home:

I miss you Kev. Sorry I didn’t get it done in time.

Stay tuned for a more cheerful next post. We’re now caught up to January 1st, 2012 (and I’m posting this on May 16th, 2013). Just over 16 months behind, but we’re gonna catch up soon. I promise.

I am so unbelievably behind with my RepRap blog, but I refuse to skip anything. I WILL catch up, and end this ridiculous post naming scheme (it’s been going on long enough that it’s actually a scheme!).

Today is March 19th, 2013, and where we last left off was talking about the events up to November 26, 2011 (that blog post was made in September 26th, 2012). Actually, after that post, I cheated and skipped ahead, blogging about me bringing my RepRap down to Makerfaire NY 2012. Now to go back and catch up on stuff before and after that.

Ok events from 16 months ago – the end of 2011.. I’d been having beautiful prints (including an extruder printed out of PLA), then an iPhone tray I designed failed due to Y-skipping, and worse, it broke my printer because I was foolish enough to let it keep printing “just for the hell of it”. The warped part pushed up against the nozzle, plastic backed up into the PTFE insulator, and the extruder pushed out. This was using my old Wade’s extruder, a PTFE insulator, and a simple hollowed out M6 rod as my heater barrel (at least it was using a brass heater block, and not the ancient nicrome wire trick!).

Since I had to take everything apart again, I figured why not try assembling the Greg’s Accessible extruder I’d printed, even if it was printed out of PLA (a very bad idea, because not only is the melting temperature of PLA lower, but it softens even lower than that). Still, I tried it.

In these pictures, you’ll see the head of the hobbed bolt is on the opposite side of the extruder from the big gear, and two locked nuts are on the gear side. This is opposite how I’d done it previously, and was an idea passed along by a friend that made it easier to remove herringbone gears. I’ve since decided that I don’t like it that way (plus I’m not even using herringbone gears) and I’ve gone back to having the head of the bolt in the gear, but that’s why these pictures look the way they do.

One of the reasons I printed a new extruder was that I wanted to try making Adrian’s Geared Extruder Nozzle. (Remember, this is 16 months ago). I’d had enough of PTFE insulators not holding a thread and pushing out the extruder nozzle onto the bed. This one would be held in by M3 threaded rod holding onto a PEEK block, which in turn would hold the nozzle up. The bottom of the extruder I made had two holes for those rods.

I then let myself have fun with my lathe, making that extruder nozzle I’d wanted to make for so long. (I previously described making the nozzle for a RepRap Universal Mini Extruder, but I haven’t made that extruder yet).

Here was the result of my lathe work:

The idea of this nozzle was that you’d still have a PTFE insulator, but that it would screw into the nozzle, not the other way around, so if it expanded it would only make things better by sealing the join rather than having them fall apart. That meant I had to create a PTFE insulator with actual threads on the outside of part of it, which wasn’t easy. My first try broke.

Still, eventually I had it.

Here’s looking down through the extruder, out the nozzle hole:

PEEK in bar form is particularly expensive, so on the Extruder Nozzle Variations page of the RepRap wiki, it was suggested that you could cut the PEEK bar from a piece of PEEK rod. Here are a few concatenated videos showing how I cut the rod into bar:

I then put the bar in a vise attached to my drill press, and drilled out the holes.

Here’s a phrase that happens a bunch on my blog: “And then this happened…”

And then this happened…

As I said in the video, I was crushed.

So… I got up again, and did something better!

That’s the PTFE sleeve nozzle variant of the Geared Extruder Nozzle. It’s closer to the nozzle I’d made previously for the RepRap Universal Mini Extruder (which is still unused), but bigger. It’s push-fit, so no threads, and uses a strong PEEK insulator.

Here are the schematics (copied from here):

I wanted to use a slightly different design for the heater block though. Rather than continuing to have the tip of a thermistor pushed into the side of the block (with the risk of it coming out), I’d rather have a through-hole thermistor embedded in the block itself. Taking inspiration from this variation of the smaller RepRap Universal Mini Extruder heater block, I decided to make something similar, sized for this nozzle.

Another picture copied from that page:

And here’s what I made:

Before going any further, I wanted to figure out how I’d do the wiring to my RepRap. Ever since having a removable carriage, I’ve wanted and planned to have multiple swappable extruders. Here I ran into a snag though because this Greg’s Accessible extruder needs the extruder motor to rotate in a different direction from my Wade’s extruder. There needed to be a standard (even in a field where “RepRap doesn’t do standards”), at least for me and my extruders.

Chris Connelly told me about the idea of using these video-card PCI-e power cables as a connection point. When I ordered these Athena Power Cable (M84M84F) extension cables for like $5 USD, I found that they’re keyed.. There are two male socket shapes and two female socket shapes, which aren’t physically compatible. This was good – it let me designate one to be for the heater and thermistor line, and another for the extruder motor, without any risk of having them accidentally plug into each other.

I needed to create a standard for the pinouts, such that I could wire my Wade’s interface one way and my Greg’s interface another way, and they’d still be the same at this junction point.

And thus, the RepRap Extruder Connector Standard was born. I wired up both my Wade’s and Greg’s to this standard, as did Chris, and our extruders are completely swappable (except for perhaps some thermistor settings.. grumble).

Here’s a video I recorded about it:

Here is a picture of the female white side of the cables, permanently connected to my RepRap motherboard:

Chris finally got around to putting it on the RepRap wiki:

http://www.reprap.org/wiki/Extruder_Pluggable_Wiring_Convention

..and here was a picture of my original notes about the pin order (with specific-to-me color-coding, which we fixed for the reprap.org page above):

With all of that decided, on to my wiring. I had done shrink-wrap around solder connections before, but I’d never used a heat gun, nor PTFE sleeving.

Having crimped it, I put it on the ground (cement) and shrunk the sleeving with the heat gun.

I assembled everything and mounted the extruder in the RepRap again. Even though this first picture doesn’t even show the extruder, I wanted to point it out – I love this photo.. It’s so bright, and it’s nice crisp high definition (click for full resolution):

Here are some more pictures, this time showing the extruder, nozzle, and heater block:

Here’s another one that I love that’s worth clicking through for a high-resolution version of:

And here it is printing:

Well there ya go. That brings us up to December 21st, 2011.. (Today is March 19th, 2013). So while I’m 15 months behind on the calendar, there are large periods of time in those 15 months where I did almost no printing work at all, so I’m really hopeful I’ll catch up soon. Thanks for reading!

(And it still gets better… )

So even though my blog is still around 11 months behind, I’ve decided I absolutely have to post an out-of-order post describing what just happened this past weekend. This weekend (September 29-30, 2012) was Makerfaire NY 2012. I’ve attended the previous two Makerfaires in NY (in 2010 and 2011) as an attendee. This time, I finally brought my RepRap down and exhibited. I was booth 8736. It. Was. Awesome.

I live in Methuen, MA (which is about a 4 hour drive from NY). I bundled up my RepRap in the back seat with a blanket, packed the car completely full, drove to pick up my friend Chris Connelly who went down with me, and headed for New York.

Friday night there was a big party for all of the exhibitors, the day before everything started. I took this panoramic picture after things started dying down:

Got some sleep, headed over, and set up the table.

Here were my thoughts walking back from parking the car before it all started.

Here are some pics of the booth before the gates opened:

I started up my first print (thing 21555, which I forgot to pack, but I have a 3D printer!) and waited for the attendees to flood in.

That was the quietest it would be all day.

I barely got any pictures of the crowds of people on the first day, because it was just a sea of people. It’s reported that over 55,000 people attended Makerfaire NY 2012. I believe I spoke to at least half of them.

At some point my brother Jon and my nephew Blake arrived (who I’d gone with for the past two years).

He took a few great pics too, this first one being my favorite:

And Amy Buser took this one that shows Chris too:

[EDIT: HAD TO ADD ONE MORE AFTER THE FACT.. THIS NEXT PICTURE IS NEW - ANOTHER ONE FROM AMY THAT I LOVED]

There were so many great talking points I’d gravitate to while talking about RepRap. Some of my favorites:

• “All of these things you see on the right were made by this 3D printer. But you know the coolest thing it can make? MORE 3D PRINTERS! This was made by another 3D printer, and it has made three other 3D printers!”
• (in response to “well it can only make the plastic parts”) – “Humans can’t synthesize all of the molecules we need to live. The molecules that we can’t synthesize we have to get externally from our environment. We call those vitamins. That’s why these parts (metal, nuts/bolts, circuits, etc) are called vitamin parts. RepRap can make more of its own parts than humans can!” [Note: I'd like to verify that last point]
• “Every 3D printer that you see here at Makerfaire, and the past 5 years of the 3D printing movement, all came from the RepRap project. 3D printing started back in the 80’s. The patents on that expired, and Adrian Bowyer in Bath University had access to these expensive machines and thought that everyone should have access to this technology. He realized that a great way to do that was to design a 3D printer that was made up of 3D printed parts, so it could print out copies of itself. The RepRap tradition is that the first thing you’re supposed to print, well, the very first thing is a shot glass that you use to toast the successful creation of your printer. Then you print a full set of spare parts and put them in a shoe box and put it in the closet, so if your printer ever breaks you can take the part out, fix the printer, IMMEDIATELY print a replacement part, put it in the shoebox, and put it back in the closet. But THEN, FINALLY, you’re supposed to print out at least two more full sets of parts, and give them to friends for the cost of a case of beer, and then they have printers. Now some people want to make money on that, so they’re trying to sell you printers that require something that you can only easily get from them. Don’t listen to anyone telling you that you need to buy something from them – I self-sourced everything on this except for the electronics (which is all open-source). Do you have a laser cutter? No? Neither do I. So be hesitant to buy a printer that’s made of a bunch of laser-cut parts unless it has a laser cutter in it. Everything on this could be bought at a hardware store (maybe except the electronics, stepper motors, and heated bed), but those are easy to get from multiple sources. Build a RepRap!”
• “So, unfortunately, as it turns out, this machine – this very instance of this machine, right here, is the great great great great great great great great great grandfather of the machine that will eventually enable SkyNet to take control of the physical world and enslave mankind, which ultimately leads to our destruction. So, sorry about that. So actually, all we’d need to do really is destroy this one box, right here, and we’d be fine! But, we won’t, because it’s pretty.
• “So, about that Soma puzzle.. When I was a kid, I had that puzzle. Mine was blue pieces and a clear plastic box. I remember taking those out and putting them back together like a million times. Then as you grow older, you lose your toys. Maybe it’s in a bin somewhere, but, it’s gone. Then one day I checked thingiverse for new objects (I check it more than youtube now) and I saw that someone had uploaded it. I was like ‘That’s the puzzle I had as a kid!!!’, and that night I went home and downloaded then printed it. And then it was there. I had it. I didn’t have it, and then I DID have it. Just by pushing a button. And there I was, playing with the puzzle from my childhood that I hadn’t seen in 30 years. And then I gave it to my kids to play with, and they were playing with it for the first time. How damned awesome is that?! I didn’t have it, and then I did. 3D printers are awesome.”

At one point I got to take a break while Chris manned the booth so I could walk around briefly. I walked by a booth with two RepRaps and they had a broken carriage on one (while trying to fix the other for something). I asked if they wanted me to print them a new one, and they appreciatively said “Yes, please!”. The next thing my RepRap printed was that carriage. Kids asked what it was, and I got to explain that the guys in the other booth get to have me print them a free replacement part because we can, because their printer is made from printed parts! (people loved that)

The carriage:

Filmed this upon delivery:

I talked to so many people. A crazy amount of people. I got pretty good at reading their reactions. There were almost zero uninterested people. There were a lot of people who thought it was pretty cool and stuck around for a few minutes to aborb it all. There were a similar amount of people who thought it was really cool and hung around for a long time, playing with parts, and asking questions. I’ll skip one group now and go to the top, where there were also people who said they were already building a RepRap (or were in the process of deciding which to build etc) that also hung around and asked tons of questions. But right below that there was a small very rare group of people where I could tell, from the look in their eyes, their excitement level, and the questions they asked, that they were absolutely going to build one of these in the next month or so entirely from this conversation. That small group was people who didn’t know what a RepRap was before this, but they were absolutely immediately hooked (in a way that the others who still thought it was awesome were not).

I’d say at most I met 20 or so of those people over the two days (and that’s probably an exaggeration – maybe it was more like 8-10). The very first of those was on Saturday morning. The hook was absolutely there. Then came the “I need a business card”, followed by me saying “I’ve got nothing! I’m not selling anything, I’m just showing off my printer and my fun hobby!”. Panic set in, which I addressed with “Do you have a phone that records video?”. This was the awesome result, which I found uploaded on youtube a few days later:

Here’s a long video (about 4 minutes) that just shows how loud everything was. Most of the day the printer was printing, but in a few of these videos (like the beginning of this one) there are moments where I’m waiting for it to heat up between prints. If you decide to watch it, only do so if you promise yourself to watch the rest of the videos below (don’t let this slow one slow your momentum, especially when the video right after it is one of my favorites).

And here’s one to watch – this was my thoughts after the first day, while walking back to the car. I got kind of emotional recording it. My throat was destroyed:

Packed up, got dinner, saw a movie, and went to bed. Slept late, got in, set up again, parked the car miles away, took the shuttle back, and started it all over again.

Here was what my voice sounded like early on Sunday, after the constant talking of the day before (Saturday night I was literally coughing up blood):

More pics:

Then here’s a quick glide around the tent, then across the way to Bruce and Nicholas Wattendorf (and their absolutely crazy-awesome-sized version of the Ultimaker):

Sunday seemed even busier than Saturday, if that was possible.

There were a bunch of people that I was glad to see on Sunday. (Mentioning them in no particular order). Aaron Double stopped by the booth (he’s up from my neck of the woods in Boston but we hadn’t met in person yet):

Then there was this guy (I forget his name):

..who if I’m remembering my faces right was the guy who talked to me for a while about the RepRap, loved the idea, seemed genuinely interested, and then said “listen, I hate to ask this if I’m wrong and you’re not related, but your name sounds so familiar. Did you have anything to do with the TiVo community?” With excitement I confirmed it, then pointed to the mention of it on my booth sign. He proceeded to tell me that he had my book (“the green one!”), had read it cover to cover (that was a 550 page book!), hacked his Series 1 to the max, but didn’t really bother with his Series 2 since it was such an additional pain. We talked for a while about that and then I told him with an ear to ear smile that he’d just made my day (which was something, since the day had already been incredible). That made me pretty damned happy.

I talked at great length with Tony and Amy Buser both days, and I’m always glad to see them.

Had a good talk with someone named Dimitri:

Here’s hoping he builds a RepRap and makes what we talked about privately (shhh).

I had a damned good talk with Johnny Russell, where we realized that our journey had been almost exactly the same.. He’d also built a Makerbot Cupcake to try building a Mendel (around the same time as me), he had all of the same problems I had, he also tried doing direct drive by mutilating the shaft of a perfectly good stepper motor without luck, and he was also in the same IRC room the same day I was when we saw the first Mendel that I can remember seeing video of from the U.S. (Tonokip’s? maybe it was this one?), etc. Lots of good conversations there. His new RAMBo board (RAMPS but all in one board) looked pretty good!

Peter Coe was there again this year – I’d met him last year and admired his prints – I remember it revving me back up last year.

I got to finally meet whosawhatsis in person, but didn’t get to talk to him nearly as much as I wanted (next time!). Had a few discussions with Josef Průša about his new machine, open source, and thingiverse. Got to see my friend Will Ware and the friend of his that I met last year (sorry, can’t remember his name). Loved seeing Bruce and Nicholas Wattendorf and the crazy big Ultimaker they made (see pic/video above). More shouts out to Tokonip, Andrew Plumb (Clothbot), the Hive76 guys, Anderson Ta (he had a Rostock printer that looked pretty sweet), John Abella Sr and John Abella for setting up our 3D printing villiage, and to anyone else I didn’t mention that I don’t mention somewhere between here and the end of this post.

So it turns out that the guy next to us at the DIWire Bender booth actually designed the OXO turntable that I had my RepRap on! What a small world!

A special thanks to Mark Russell for not only coming out two days in a row to visit, but bringing me the closest you can buy to Excedrine Migrane (it seems it’s temporarily off the shelves until they can work out some contamination issue.. that caused pure panic that I buried away), and then helping us pack up the booth (including walking my keys out to me when I left them behind during a ridiculously long bus fiasco). Thanks man.

Obviously thanks to Chris Connelly for going down with me and sharing the experience. Booth 8736!

Ok so enough people. Finally started up the last print of the day (or at least I’m guessing that’s what it was from the fact that it’s the last print picture on my phone):

Walking out towards my car, I recorded two videos (one pointing the camera towards me, one using the front facing camera). Both are must-watches, so I’m putting them both here. Watch them both.

That was it! All done.

For dinner, rewarded ourselves after a crazy weekend of exhaustion with a trip to Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Dayum!

There was a lot of media attention and pictures of me, Chris, and my RepRap. Here was the one that I remember most:

NY Tech Scene — Rising (Week of 10/1/12)

There ya go! Next post I’ll jump back 11 months ago and catch you up on the stuff that led up to my feeling confident enough in my printer to bring it to Makerfaire this year.

So. Damned. Cool.