Zipfelmaus

3D print job: a USB stick holder

SES — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:13:08 +0000

A few days ago I received an email, that tinkercad.com is back in business. I like their easy and intuitive 3D cad tool.

Here you can find my current design, a USB stick holder, a simple design that only took minutes to design and a few minutes more to print it out.

This is how the print looks like:

You can download the 3D file here:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:91512

How to fix a broken umbrella with a 3D printer

SES — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:29:41 +0000

During my last vacation my umbrella got broke again. Ordinary people would throw it away, but I wanted to fix it.

broken umbrella

Back home a printed a small tube with my 3D printer. This tube is just fitting over the small broken part.

tube

repaired umbrella

With some glue it should work till the next rain storm in NYC.

and done

Download: STL-File – tube

GoPro camera rail

SES — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 17:51:09 +0000

Just today I also finished this exciting project, a camera rail for the GoPro action camera.

GoPro Camera Rail

It is based on the rails from the german company Igus (link: . I printed two clamps with my 3D printer and added them to the ends of the rail.

You can download the STL-file here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:77377

clamps

Part list

At Igus I bought the following things (about 63€):

WS-10-40 – rail – 600mm length
WW-10-40-10 – slider

To mount the camera onto the slider I use the CB2.7 ball head from Cullmann.

In order to mount the rail onto a tripod I use the CX470 camera plate, also from Cullmann.

Both mounts together cost around 20€.

Hexy the Hexapod

SES — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 16:29:07 +0000

The “Hexy” is a hexypod roboter from Kickstarter. As always it took quite long until I received it and some parts were missing. Fortunately they were easy to replace. The manual made it pretty easy to put everything together.

Here is what I experienced during the assembly:

At first I assembled the six legs:

hexys legs

Second came the middle plattform

electronic plattform

A small part wasnmissing, so I created a 3D modell out of the DXF-files available from Github and printed it. It only took 15 minutes.

3d printed part for ultrasonic range finder

Then I combined the legs and the plattform

put legs and plattform together

The finished Hexy looks like this:

finished Hexy

After 6 hours of assembly work it does also move Have a look at this video:

I had to use 5 Eneloop batteries to power it. One more then recommended. Still it has some problems when trying to “get up”.

ECG: measure your heartbeat

SES — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 15:48:12 +0000

Its pretty interesting to measure ones heart beat. A lot of fancy analog circuitry is needed for this. But fortunately there is a Arduino shield for this: the SHIELD-EKG-EMG from Olimex.

ECG wiring

Hardware:

- EKG/EMG shield (price: ~24€), Manual: [Link]
-SHIELD-EKG-EMG-PA – passive electrode for SHIELD-EKG-EMG shield (price: ~12€)
-Olimexino-328 – Arduino Like Development Board (price: ~26€)
-some waterbased lube to improve conductivity with the electrodes

Software:

-Olimexino-Firmware: [Link], be sure to also install the libraries (TimerOne, FlexiTimer2), see manual for more information
-visualisation software – ElectricGuru: [Link]

Preparation:

-OLIMEXINO-328: remove the wire between the R6 pads, this is important, otherwise you will damage your ecg-shield!
-SHIELD-EKG-EMG: jumper settings
REF_E – closed
3.3V/5V – 5V position
D4/D9 – D9 position
ANI_SEL – 1 position (channel)

-connect the shield to the board
-connect OLIMEXINO-328 to the PC
-compile and upload the ShieldEkgEmgDemo.pde
-start the ElectricGuru software, open Preferences –> Serial Port, choose the Arduinos port; open Preferences –> Trace, select just channel 1 and maximize the height
-wire yourself to the electrodes: to your right arm, left arm and the DLR to your right leg
-connect the electrodes to the ECG-shield
-apply some lube to your arms and led between the electrodes and your skin
-ElectricGuru: click the Start EEG button

Results:

If the conductivity is bad, you might get a noisy image like this:

Electric Guru: noise

Otherwise, if everything works fine and you are still alive, it looks like this:

Electric Guru: ECG

Looking inside – the Evo/Mint cleaning robot

SES — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 14:28:56 +0000

My Evo/Mint cleaning robot made some crunching noises when it was driving and cleaning around my floor. So I thought it’s time for a quick maintance.

It’s pretty easy to open the enclosure of it. Just unscrew these for screws:

evo robot screws

After that you can see what’s inside. Surprisingly there are two big weights to make the Evo robot more heavier.
The design of all the components is pretty straight forward. Two bumper switches and the infrared distance sensor in the front. Two optical switches to detect if the robot is lifted from the surface.
In the middle you can see the buzzer, 3 switches (1: on/off, 2+3: mode switches) and the infrared detector to detect the pattern projected by the robots satellite.

evo inside

I vacuumed the chassis and removed some hairs that got between the wheels. And finally I put all together:

evo repaired

(you can even see the infrared LEDs from the distance sensor inside this image)

UP! Plus: thermal shots

SES — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 11:22:59 +0000

After the thermal shots of the Raspberry Pi I also made some therma images of my UP! Plus 3D printer.

pre-heating

Pre-heating is important to minimize wrapping. After 10min of pre-heating the heat-bed has a temperature of 55°C.

print

During printing the ABS has a temperature of 63°C and the heat bed has 86.6°C.

extruder head

The extruder head temperature is 207.3°C while printing.

Raspberry Pi Stress Test

Rocu — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:18:28 +0000

We want to host a few of our blogs here at home. Before we start and build a rack to hold all of the Raspberry Pi’s required, we want to make sure that there are not thermal problems.

Thats why we wanted to stress test one of them.

We used the program stress to generate some load.

We did not however not use the HD option, because we did not want to damage the SD card.

sudo apt-get install stress
stress --cpu 5 --io 5 --vm 5 --vm-bytes 10M --timeout 3600s
=> stress: info: [11496] dispatching hogs: 5 cpu, 5 io, 5 vm, 0 hdd

After a minutes the load average climbed up to 15.

We waited for around 30 minutes and took an image of our tortured little Raspberry PI (right), next to one that just runs idle (left).

Here is the image.

As you notice theres no big difference between the two (about 4°C) and it should be fine to put a few of them next to each other.

Raspberry Pi: thermal images

SES — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 20:07:57 +0000

There are some heatsinks for the Raspberry Pi and I wanted to evaluate if I need one.

So I decided to take some thermal images of it under typical load. I used my FLIR camera. Here are the first results.

After 10min in idle mode (96% idle): 39°C CPU temperature

After 50min in idle mode (96% idle): 42.4°C CPU temperature

The hottest spot is not the CPU, but the companion chip.

In the next days I will post some thermal images of the Rasp.Pi working under heavy load.

Update: 27.01.13:
Here is the stress test thermal shot: Link

Raspberry Pi: Unboxing

SES — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:41:23 +0000

Today I got the first batch of Raspberry Pis. So here is a first llok, what is inside the box:

3D printers: Test: Printrbot LC vs. Makerbot Replicator 2 vs. Up! Plus

SES — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 15:36:09 +0000

Recently I bought my 3D printer. (I know this is crazy.) I was unhappy with the Printrbot LC and the Makerbot Replicator 2, which I thought would be an awesome printer and would overcome everything, that the Printrbot failed to deliver. But it has it’s downsides as well.

Thats why I ordered a third printer: the Up! Plus, which is now my new favorite.

Here are the pro and cons of each printer.

Printrbot LC

pro:

-quite cheap ~600$ plus delivery and customs
-open source

cons:

-awefull documentation, no real manual, just a small quick start guide exists and some youtube build instruction videos, that will drive you crazy
-loads of parts were missing in my Kickstartet kit, so there was a high level of frustration (they never heard of a scale?)
-heavy problems with the extruder motor: it overheats after 20min of printing. Again – high frustration level

Makerbot Replicator 2

pro:

-very fast
-high quality
-high resolution (0.1mm)
-good manual

cons:

-prints only PLA, if you have never worked with this material, don’t belive it is so durable as ABS. It really breaks very easily. I was about to remove a part from the printing plate and it broke into 5 different pieces in that moment
-very costly, 2200$ plus delivery and customs
-warping, that freaking me out, you pay a premium price and prints still warp
-the software MakerWare is still in beta state, there are some thingiverse 3D models that will not be printed out correctly and the software is made for idiots, since you can adjust very little and it does not tell you, how long the print will gonna take.

UP! Plus

-medium cost: 1500$ plus delivery and customs

pro:

-little warping (see my anti-warping guide over here)
-high quality metal frame
-high resolution (0.1mm)
-they included pretty much everything in the kit: leather gloves, tools, …
-good manual
-software that also adds support structures and tells you how long the print will take

cons:

-quite slow, medium frustration level
-annoying alarm sound (it beeps when you initialize it, when you start the print and when it stops, medium frustration level

3D Printer: Up Plus! – anti-warping-guide

SES — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 08:50:45 +0000

Warping is common issue with 3D printers.

I currently work with the Up Plus printer, there are several things to take care of to avoid warping.

There are four things you should pay attention to:

1. close the fan window

2. preheat the heat bed for 15min

3. calibrate the nozzle height

3D Print –> Maintainance

4. limit the air flow around your printer

If you have further hints, please leave a comment.

My first Thingiverse design: a cable ladder

SES — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 21:44:50 +0000

Today I uploaded my first 3D printer design to thingiverse.com. It can be found here: Link

It’s a very simple cable spool in form of a ladder.

I used tinkercad.com to design the ladder. You can modify the design if you like (at tinkercad.com) or just print it (files available at http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:34794).

Printrbot: Yet another time lapse Printrbot video

SES — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 19:13:15 +0000

There might be probably a few time lapse videos of 3D printers around, now here is mine:

The Printrbot is printing this part from Tinkercad.com:

The printed part was used to fix a broken spring from an Ikeak couch:

A visit of the Ars Electronica Museum, Linz – Austria

SES — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 13:22:44 +0000

Last weekend we visited the Ars Electronica Museum in Linz, Austria. It’s not a museum showing things that were common centuries or decades ago. They show present and future technologies and try to raise awarenes for possible problems and opportunities.

Two parts of the exhibition were particullary interessting for me: The first one discussed the data protection in the internet. They showed what data is collected at Facebook and what govermental data registers exists in Austria.
The second and for me even more interessting part was the cutting edge technology that they showed in the second basement floor.
And the really cool thing is, that they don’t hide it behind glass panel, often they let you use it and literally you can hold it into your hands, as I did with the Telenoid robot. The people there really let you touch and try everything and explain. This is the antithesis of classical museum attendants.

I also tried out the rapid prototyping area, where they had laser cutters and 3D printers. I drawed a snowman and they laser cutted it for me.

As you can guess Ars Technica is not only made for older Nerds. Its really interesting for children + parents as well.

Ticket prices (2012): 8€ (adults), 5€ (reduced)
closed on monday
Website: http://www.aec.at/center/en/ausstellungen/