Category: News

 

So it was, yes­ter­day AltLab mee­tup was full of win.
It star­ted with some­o­ne showing off his pro­ject, Laser Tag… no, no lase­rish paint­bal­lish kind of laser tag, it was more graf­fi­ti tag­ging, but using a laser poin­ter, a video pro­jec­tor, a came­ra and a kind off nifty software 🙂
Everyo­ne played with it, and hea­ded back insi­de, it was a kind of chilly in the back alley.Next, João Neves and me went on a date with Vio­le­ta… It was a kind of thre­e­so­me, but Vio­le­ta is AltLab Cup­ca­ke 3D printer!I tri­ed prin­ting a part from a Wal­la­ce, bat as usu­al, Vio­le­ta didn’t finished the print, and I was using my com­pu­ter, so the plot thickens! 🙁

 

The pro­blem is in the prin­ter, now we’­re cer­tain of this! We sca­ven­ged AltLab junk… err… the nice and very orga­ni­zed warehou­se for ATX PSU, and tri­ed a few, but that didn’t, so we plug­ged the ori­gi­nal one back, and it wor­ked! Vio­le­ta is prin­ting again, at least two parts for Franky (a mini-men­del) without a hit­ch, the futu­re will tell us.

 

And the piè­ce de résis­tan­ce was the first test of a ste­reo litho­graphy prin­ter… “what?!!?” it’s a 3D prin­ter using pho­to sen­si­ble resin as a medium, very impres­si­ve pie­ce of tech­no­logy. They made some expo­su­re tests to unders­tand how long they need to expo­se the resin for a per­fect cure, it’s around 15 seconds and they-re ready for the next layer 🙂 A full of win day!

Don’t wor­ry, he’s mos­tly harmless!
Basí­lio, a good­fel­la, a Lobs­ter, a good fri­end and a Goo­gle Sket­chUp ninja!

Well, yes­ter­day was AltLab mee­tup day, and the plan was: make a 3D model of an X axis car­ri­a­ge for a mini-mendel.

It was a suc­cess! After a few hours using Goo­gle Sket­chUp, we’­ve mana­ged to cre­a­te a darn good loo­king carriage.
The next step will be print it and assem­ble it.

At least it’s what she said! Vio­le­ta… the prin­ter, I mean 🙂
From the begin­ning, tues­day it’s mee­ting day atAltLab and I’ve dis­cus­sed with Mau­ri­cio the pos­si­bi­lity of using the Mini-Men­del with an adap­ter, a Pen Hol­der to wri­te the pcb’s layouts. The X axis car­ri­a­ge from the Mini-Men­del was disas­sem­bled and after I’ve finished assem­ble it, it loo­ked a lit­tle wob­bly, and we don’t want a wob­bly printer!
So, Thin­gi­ver­se to the res­cue, and we found theMen­del Mini-Car­ri­a­ge, and of we go… to the Makerbot!!!
This was my first inte­rac­ti­on with a 3d Prin­ter, and everything went well… until… when the print rea­ched about 1cm of height, the extru­der deci­ded stop the extru­si­on… damn!
We star­ted over, but the­re was a sus­pi­ci­on over the lap­top, so we’­ve tri­ed using the SD Card to print… it didn’t work! Now the sus­pect is the ver­si­on 3 firmwa­re… and the lap­top… it’s a caba­la or lack of luck :p
Did we give up? No, of cour­se not, we’­ve selec­ted a smal­ler pie­ce of the Mini-Car­ri­a­ge and pres­sed “BUILD”, and all went as expec­ted, the first pie­ce of the Mini-car­ri­a­ge was a success!
Let’s try another… and all went well.. until the 1cm of height… the extru­der fai­led again :p
It was get­ting late, so we’­ve clo­sed the shop for the day… err… night.
But not everything was lost, we’­ve plot­ted a plan to deve­lop a Gen8 elec­tro­nics, just wait for it 🙂