Category: News

May­be you’­ve noti­ced that we haven’t upda­ted our blog much in the­se last weeks !

But don’t wor­ry, we’­re still around and ready to rock.

The­re is actu­ally a major rea­son for this tem­po­rary bre­ak on news, we just moved to a new and gre­at spa­ce (check here some pic­tu­res). It is just an ama­zing pla­ce to run a hac­kers­pa­ce like ours!

This is just a small video showing all the work we are doing to get the new spa­ce ready.

We hope to have it all ready in the begin­ning of the next month, so stay tuned! 😉

On Decem­ber 12 and 13 we’ll hold the first big mee­ting of AZ’s 3 labs: LCD, altLab, and xDA. We’ll all get together in Por­to, at AZ’s head­quar­ters, for 2 days of cre­a­ti­ve and fun hac­king. The main goals for this hack­me­et are to sha­re kno­wled­ge, explo­re syner­gi­es, col­la­bo­ra­te, rese­ar­ch, and… (of cour­se) hang out!

Lab mem­bers are cur­ren­tly for­ming work groups around topics such as: elec­tro­nics and phy­si­cal com­pu­ting, robo­tics, smart mate­ri­als, soft cir­cuits, mul­ti­tou­ch inter­fa­ces, hard­ware recy­cling, com­pu­ter visi­on, and infor­ma­ti­on visualization.

AZ’s hack­me­et is mos­tly meant for lab mem­bers, but others are also wel­co­me to join in pro­vi­ded we have enough spots left.

Regis­ter here

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Nos dias 12 e 13 de Dezem­bro os mem­bros dos três labo­ra­tó­ri­os AZ (LCD, AltLab e xDA) orga­ni­zam a pri­mei­ra gran­de reu­nião de explo­ra­ção cri­a­ti­va e tec­no­ló­gi­ca sem fronteiras. 

Este encon­tro é des­ti­na­do, antes de mais, aos actu­ais mem­bros dos labo­ra­tó­ri­os, mas par­ti­ci­pan­tes exter­nos são bem-vin­dos, des­de que as vagas exis­ten­tes assim o permitam.

Duran­te este fim-de-sema­na serão cri­a­dos gru­pos dedi­ca­dos às múl­ti­plas áre­as em explo­ra­ção na asso­ci­a­ção: elec­tró­ni­ca e com­pu­ta­ção físi­ca, robó­ti­ca, mate­ri­ais inte­li­gen­tes, inter­fa­ces mul­ti­to­que, reci­cla­gem de hard­ware, visão por com­pu­ta­dor, visu­a­li­za­ção de infor­ma­ção, etc…

O objec­ti­vo é a tro­ca de conhe­ci­men­to, explo­ra­ção de novas siner­gi­as entre áre­as, cri­a­ção cola­bo­ra­ti­va, pes­qui­sa e inves­ti­ga­ção… e cla­ro, con­ví­vio. Liber­da­de total, para tudo ou nada fazer.

Ficha de Inscrição

News report from the fore­front of ubber geekness ^^

No we didn´t laun­ch a DIY open sour­ce spa­ce-sta­ti­on,.. just yet. What we did do is assem­ble 2 Cup­ca­ke CNC´s from Maker­bot Indus­tri­es. Maker­Bot Indus­tri­es is a Bro­o­klyn NY based com­pany, foun­ded in Janu­ary 2009 by Bre Pet­tis, Adam Mayer, and Zach Hoe­ken. It´s a very young com­pany inde­ed, and they must be one of the few com­pa­ni­es based enti­rely on open sour­ce hard­ware. Now, what is the Maker­bot Cup­ca­ke CNC ? It´s an open sour­ce 3D prin­ter rapid pro­toty­ping machi­ne. It´s a cute lit­tle machi­ne that fits on your desk­top and unli­ke a nor­mal prin­ter that only prints in 2d on flat paper, this one prints true phy­si­cal objects in ABS plas­tic. It´s a robot that makes things ! How does this work ? You design your thing in 3d soft­ware, send it to the Maker­bot Cup­ca­ke and some time later your thing exists for real, in real plas­tic, strong and durable !

Some of you pro desig­ners out the­re might say, well the­re is nothing new about this, rapid pro­toty­ping machi­nes have been around for some time now, yes you are right, but until recen­tly the­se type of machi­nes whe­re pro­pri­e­tary and very expen­si­ve with pri­ces ran­ging from 20.000 € and upwards and cer­tainly didn´t fit on your desk­top. This was true until Dr Adri­an Bowyer, a Seni­or Lec­tu­rer in mecha­ni­cal engi­ne­e­ring at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath in the Uni­ted King­dom, foun­ded and inven­ted the RepRap Pro­ject. As it hap­pens, Dr Adri­an Bowyer is one of the seed inves­tors of Maker­bot Indus­tri­es. DIY open sour­ce rapid pro­toty­ping for the mas­ses was born. Now you can have your own machi­ne for less then 700€, or even less if you recy­cle some motors from old prin­ters and you´re handy enough to saw some plywo­od into a nice loo­king box. Being the geeks we are, we had to have one of tho­se machi­nes, so many times whi­le wor­king on pro­jects we wished we could make a moun­ting brac­ket for this, or a sup­port that could hold that, or that we could just have this cool figu­re we mode­led in 3d soft­ware for real to show it off to our fri­ends or offer as a gift to our belo­ved ones. The need was cle­arly the­re, and what bet­ter way to ful­fill that need then invi­ting one of the foun­ders and inven­tors of Maker­bot, Mr. Zach Hoe­ken to host a 2 week workshop on buil­ding and using a Maker­bot Cup­ca­ke CNC.

We were very lucky in fin­ding just the right pla­ce to hold the workshop the “Facul­da­de Arqui­tec­tu­ra — UTL” in Lis­bon, a cen­tral loca­ti­on and thus easily acces­si­ble to par­ti­ci­pants coming from all over Por­tu­gal, we even had the visit of a proud Maker­bot owner from Spain. Besi­des it´s ide­al loca­ti­on, we had gre­at sup­port from the local Pro­fes­sors who par­ti­ci­pa­ted in the workshop, it was gre­at to wit­ness their moti­va­ti­on and dedi­ca­ti­on to the project.

Thanks to Mr. Zach´s pati­ent gui­dan­ce and extre­me kno­wled­ge, it took us only 8 hours to build the 2 machi­nes. Zach divi­ded us into 2 groups per machi­ne, the machi­ne con­sists of 2 main parts , the casing that holds the 3 moving axis X Y and Z and the elec­tro­nics to dri­ve them, the other main part is the extru­der aka the “Plas­tru­der MK4″, this is the bit that will pull the 3mm ABS fila­ment and heat it up to 220 °C, this guy is the ‘printhe­ad’ for your Maker­bot, It has a beefy motor. This is also the same extru­der that you would use for a RepRap machi­ne and was deve­lo­ped by Maker­bot Indus­tri­es as a part of the RepRap pro­ject. As if by magic the groups wor­ked in syn­cro mode, so that when the indi­vi­du­al parts whe­re ready, it was just a mat­ter of assem­bling them into nice loo­king and ready to print Maker­bot Cup­ca­kes. A few more hours whe­re dedi­ca­ted to test and cali­bra­te all the ele­ments to make sure they wor­ked well and prin­ted nice, it was so cool to see the machi­nes up and run­ning and to feel the exci­te­ment and awe of the gre­a­test magic trick ever ^^

Now what ? Get prin­ting of-cour­se ! Get­ting a vir­tu­al 3d model ready to be prin­ted for real is not as easy as hit­ting print in your text edi­tor, but it´s not roc­ket sci­en­ce either, the­re are a some things to know and a few tricks to learn, luc­kily our workshop host Zach knew it all and had qui­te a few tricks up his sle­e­ve whi­ch he gene­rously sha­red with us, It didn´t take long befo­re we all had something ready to print. Befo­re you can send your 3d model to the Maker­bots, you have to export it from your favo­ri­te 3d app as a .STL file, if your fav 3d app doesn´t export .STL , no wor­ri­es, Blen­der to the res­cue! Blen­der is a splen­did open sour­ce 3d appli­ca­ti­on that can read most 3d file for­mats out the­re, for sure you´ll find a file for­mat that´s com­pa­ti­ble with Blen­der, once in Blen­der it´s a bre­e­ze to export your 3d model in the right for­mat. Besi­des expor­ting in the .STL for­mat, Blen­der is handy for a few more things, you can easily get rid of any dou­bled ver­ti­ces, check for Mani­fold mesh errors, and redu­ce your poly­gon count (deci­ma­te) to impro­ve prin­ting speed.

Some of the par­ti­ci­pants whe­re advan­ced 3d artists, and some never had tou­ched 3d soft­ware befo­re, but the truth is that we all mana­ged to achi­e­ve some ama­zing results, and we were all very impres­sed by the qua­lity that tho­se lit­tle machi­nes whe­re able to pro­du­ce. Not all prints came out per­fec­tly at the first go, and here and the­re some ope­ra­tor errors whe­re made, that resul­ted in having to unmount the Plas­tru­der to cle­an it´s lit­tle teeth, whi­ch by the way is done in less then 10 minu­tes, unem­ploy­ment due to tech­ni­cal fault just gives you enough time to get a cof­fee, only if the cof­fee machi­ne is just around the cor­ner. For me per­so­nally this has been one of the best workshops i´ve par­ti­ci­pa­ted in, all par­ti­ci­pants whe­re highly moti­va­ted and eager to learn and sha­re, the ambi­en­ce was all about sha­ring and caring, how could it not be when you´r dis­co­ve­ring the ama­zing world of Maker­bot­ness, and you have a gre­at host like Zach to hold your hand 😉 Thank you.

Ple­a­se head over to Zach´s post to see some gre­at exam­ples of what has been prin­ted during the workshop.

Keep an eye out on the blogs from the AZ-Labs (AltLab, xDA, LCD) for more news on upco­ming Maker­bot adven­tu­res, inclu­ding more workshops and how to get access to our Machi­nes to print your stuff.