New year's resolution

-
I have a plan for this year, though the year is already 2 months in. that's not going to hold me back from building a 3d printer. 3d printing is steadily becoming popular in the maker culture, the idea that you can print your own cups, plates, gun parts and virtual anything, Is grand! but the price range for a desktop 3d printer is between 500$-5,000. I want to build a printer that is cheaper then 500$ and reliable, I am not the first one whose endeavored to do this, many people have done this before with successful results and there are many resources for this project. I'm hoping my venture is rewarding (and cheap  :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Engagement Ring Design

-
Image
 I spent a couple of weeks working on the design for this ring. My fiancée wanted a ring with story, so I thought I'd give it my own. Every part of the design is intentional and has a specific meaning. The entire design was done in Fusion 360 and printed on a formlabs printer. The design was done in fusion 360. There was a bit of a learning curve, but it worked for my application. I ordered a couple of cheaper rings to help settle on a thickness and width. I did end up increasing both of those on the recommendation of a professional jewler. The prongs for the diamonds were also increased in diameter on the recommendation of a jeweler. I also didn't spend too much on the diamonds. My fiancée wasn't super concerned about diamond quality, and to be honest you're not really going to notice the difference with the naked eye anyways. Talking about these details with your significant other is something I would recommend before dropping money on a ring. If you're thinking a...
Read more

Programming Cellular Automata - Life in 3d

-
Image
  This post covers the basics of cellular automata via Conway's game of life and a 3-dimensional derivative of it that I programmed. The images below are a couple frames extracted from that program. While at community college, I attended a night class in C-programming where I had the opportunity to develop Conway's game of life as a text program. It initiated a deep fascination for cellular automata and the idea that a computer could generate an entire world given a basic set of rules. Interestingly enough, Conway was not actually the founder of cellular automata. it was theorized 30 years earlier by John von Neumann & Stanislaw Ulam. von Neumann was interested in different methods of colonizing mars, and one of them involved self-replicating robots to setup living environments for humans. As a result of breaking that concept down to its foundations, Neumann was able to extract the theory of cellular automata. Conway popularized cellular automata with his game of life. He o...
Read more

Building DACs and playing potatoes

-
Image
I had a class last year with a a simple programming project. We were asked to program TI's MSP432 running energia (the arduino IDE for their ARM Cortex processors) to play various note when a push button was pressed. They let us use the tone libraries to output a square wave at a set frequency. The programming was very simple, too simple. We spiced up the project by first replacing the push buttons with potatoes. Using a voltage divider and the human body we used capacitive touch to sense when the potateos were being touched. We wanted to play axel F which requires a sawtooth wave. We built a simple DAC using a resistor ladder, the tricky part was getting the MSP432 to flip the pins on and off quickly. We couldn't finish the project using the Energia Pinwrite command, it was much too slow to work with a resistor ladder. Instead we had to program the registers directly. Notice my 200 year old oscilloscope in the back, only one channel works. This is what a college budget looks l...
Read more