Make Hack Learn

Warning: This post is rather heavy with the use of Flash to show videos. Sorry!

I've seen a bit of weirdness involving records, of all things, lately. Records, specifically Vinyl Records, are a pretty obsolete technology at this point. Yes, I'm well aware of the undying love for the "superior" sound quality of vinyl from a certain subset of bibliophiles. These people adore their record collections until the end of time. The rest of us, like my wife, have long given up on vinyl and moved, first, to compact discts (if not tapes) and then to mp3 files and our iPod-like devices. This moves record technology for most people, especially the young, into the same realm as wind up gramaphones or rotary telephones and HAM radio: old technology loved by a view but looked upon oddly by the rest.

Now, in spite of this (or maybe because of this), people are doing some weird things with record technology right now as artists. I wanted to share a few instances that I have come across, two from the same person. I came upon all of these within the last two weeks so they kind of stuck in my mind.

First, we have ice records. Cue video:

A band, the Shout Out Louds, sent out ten kits to people that have a silicone negative image of a single from their recent (unreleased at the time, I believe) album. This came with instructions to pour enclosed distilled water on it, freeze it for six hours, and pop and ice record from the mold to then play. You can view the results above.

Next is Amanda Ghassaei's attempts to play with record technology as an artist. First, she used some high end printers to 3D print a record. She details this (at great length) on a post on instructables on this. She figured out a method to convert an mp3 music file into a grooved shape thaat would play on a traditional record player. This was then printed on a high end printer, though I suspect that a well tuned hobbyist printer might work well enough. She mentions that it has a sampling rate of only 11kHz and 5-6bit resolution, which makes it sound a bit like an ancient Edison era recording. The video below gives an example of the result:

Amanda has more recently gone on to try the same trick using a laser cutter, resulting in a wood record etched by the laser. She wrote another instructable describing this process. You can also watch her video about it below to hear the wood one:

She's actually done this with acrylic using the laser as well and I think that it sounds a bit better than the wood one:

All of that said, the audio on all of these is horrible. I actually think the ice record sounds the best. What I've found the most interesting about this is the intersection of an obsolete and very analog technology, the record player and the records, with interesting art and even cutting edge tools like a laser cutter or a 3D printer. Technically, the ice record could have been made 50 years ago (I don't think making a silcone negative is likely a difficult technical challenge) but this marriage of art and technology is fascinating.

People often ask me, "What do you make with a 3D printer?" The joke, of course, is the answer, "Parts for more 3D printers" (thought it is often true). That said, the ability to quickly prototype, especially to prototype from an artistic vision created within a computer, is really cool for art. Amanda wrote a script in Processing, an open source language used by artists a lot and often used with arduinos, to do the conversions for her to turn the music files into a three dimensional construct that she could then print or cut. What other art do people have locked inside of them that they can use these tools to express?

Last week I was up in my old home of Seattle for a few days to see family and friends (my daughter just turned 17).

While there, I dropped by Metrix Create:Space on and off as I was staying a 10 minute walk away and the owner, Matt, is a friend of mine. I talk to Matt on IRC fairly often and have been monitoring 3D printing developments at Metrix through him and watching their flickr feed. Since I had the time, I came to the weekly 3D printing night to meet folks working on projects at Metrix.

Johann Rocholl has been the primary moving force in the current interest in Delta printers within the reprap community. He has a tumblr with many pictures of his work and maintains a github repo for development. Terence Tam also does a lot of work at Metrix with his OpenBeam aluminum extrusion, which is a 15 mm profie extrusion that is open source and used by a lot of folks for building 3D printers. There is also Mattew Wilson, who has developed the Brainwave all in one printer control board (which is very nice), working out of Metrix.

They have quite a critical mass of people doing fun things with 3D printers and open source.

You can see the "OpenBeam Kossel Pro" that Terence and Matt have been developing:

Johann was also working on his "Mini Kossel" (which also uses OpenBeam), which is his attempt to build a portable Delta printer that can travel easily and maybe even be battery powered:

From talking to folks, I expect that there will be announcements at Maker Faire in Redwood City in a few weeks and Delta printers, among others, will make a heavy appearance there.

It was nice to see folks actively working on printers and advancing the technology associated it.

I haven't posted much about my printer projects in the last few months as I've been making incremental progress. My Rostock Mini is largely stalled out due to lack of desire to deal with some design issues on it (though I may pick it up again soon) but I have a Hadron Ordbot that is completed except for mounting the heated build platform and splicing some wires. I've tested all of the electronics and motion but haven't printed with it yet. The Foldarap has been waiting for the last six weeks or so for me to mount its printing bed and carriage but I hope to have it on the Ace Monster Toys table at Maker Faire in three weeks.

current state of my Foldarap

my Hadron Ordbot

One thing that I've been doing is co-hosting an ongoing 3D printing meetup every other Wednesday night at Ace Monster Toys. People have been showing up to work on printers, discuss issues around them, and generally show off their work. I'm actively working on creating a bill of materials to self-source parts to do a workshop series where 10 people (hopefully) build a Printrbot Jr. clone at AMT. The real issue there is trying to get the cost of the materials as near a $250 price point as possible (and it may not be possible to get below $300 really). Electronics from Printrbot are $129 retail, the hotend is $59, and, realistically, we need four stepper motors for roughly $15 each plus all the screws, rods, etc. It is the combination of the electronics, hotend, and motors that is kind of hard to move without just completely replacing them with someone else's parts.

Atom Bomb at AMT is actively discussing the development of a new "all in one" 3D controller board with built in stepper controllers that do 1/16 motion. We're hoping to publish a specification and have PCBs made for this, even if we don't use this for the 3D printing workshop. The end-goal is to have a solid board with a total cost for the bill of materials around $40, which is half or a third of the common cost for RAMPS and other 3D controllers. I expect we'll have more news on this in a few weeks or a month.

I'm hoping to have more announcements in the future but all of this means that I'll probably be assembling a Jr. (or a variant) soon because I'm going to need to know it backwards and forwards to teach a class on it and I may wind up making a bit of a variant later.

When last I wrote, I said that I was building a Rostock Mini 3D printer. That is still true but I hit a few snags. The creator, who did a lot of cool work making a parameterized design for it, never quite published his extruder design. That means that I've been trying to figure out how I was going to get the business end of the printer extruding plastic. I've been looking at v3 of the Airtripper Bowden Extruder but had to order a bunch of parts for it. (As an aside, while I do everything in metric to maintain compatibility with the worldwide making community, it is a real pain to get metric screws of all sizes in any number so I have to order them and wait wait wait…) This combined with needing to replace the carbon pieces that I was using for arms meant that I was a little stalled out on the Rostock Mini.

Foldarap by Emmanuel Gilloz

So, like any dumb hacker, I decided to work on another printer instead. I guess I've caught the reprap bug. I decided to make a FoldaRap. Emmanuel Gilloz, a French hacker, came up with his own RepRap design that uses 20 mm extruded aluminum (which is cheap) that can be folded up and put into a padded case. This makes it a both affordable design but one that can easily be taken to hackerspaces, conferences, or other events. Since I've had to lug my Up! Plus to Ace Monster Toys three or four times in the foot well of my car, this is a real plus.

Foldarap in Suitcase by Emmanuel Gilloz

Building this, the most difficult part has been sourcing the materials. Emmanuel is in France and they have a different convenient supply chain in Europe. He published his build of materials but I had to do my best to make some adjustments (and find yet more metric screws). The two biggest issues were the source of the aluminum extrusion and the fact that he used some RepRap Huxley components, including a Huxley hotend.

With the Huxley components, that meant that he used a 140 mm square aluminum heating bed. Since Prusa Mendels are the most common RepRaps that I see here in the US, I either had to order overseas for the bed or cut my own. I actually found an individual making them, removing the necessicity to cut my own plate and then tap it for screw holes for mounting.

Most American builders are using hotends from Makergear or J-Head hotends (which are out of stock for my size plastic except for Chinese copies). I didn't feel inclined to deal with yet another custom extruder system (see Rostock Mini issues at beginning of post) so I wound up getting the Huxley extruder that Emmanuel recommended, minus a few unnecessary parts.

The extrusion of choice here in the US is MiSumi 2020. It costs $3 for a 300 mm long piece, which means for about $30 plus cheap shipping (in California even), I can have regular, solid aluminum pieces. As a bonus, Misumi will cut to length in half millimeter increments so the pieces arrive ready to go.

All of my materials arrived about a week ago except for my Huxley hotend and my aluminum (with the exception of my control electronics). I used my existing printer to start making pieces per the FoldaRap design and immediately hit a snag: my plastic wouldn't fit on my extrusion. (No, that isn't a euphemism.) I asked Emmanuel about it on the RapRap forums and he was very responsive to questions. Initially, it seemed that my Up! wasn't printing with enough precision to fit the gap between my extrusion but, pulling out my calipers and then looking at Emmanuel's designs, I found that his design had a 1.5 mm gap where my extrusion was (roughly) 2 mm thick:

not 2 mm!

Luckily for me, open source wins! Emmanuel has the source for the FoldaRap up on github. Like many hackers, he does all of his 3D design in Sketchup (because it is free and easy to use, I assume). I've never done much with it but I've seen it used at AMT quite a bit by a few of our members. A quick download of it and the github source and I had parts to stare at. I then spent an hour givining myself a crash course in how to alter metric parts in Sketchup, expanding the gap in the above picture by half a millimeter on four pieces that needed to fit with a plastic 'T' connector. Exporting it out to STL format, I started a test print and went to dinner with my wife. On returning home, I tried it out and it worked!

If Emmanuel wants it, I'll submit a patch to Github with the Misumi specific changes to the four files. I made a separate sketchup file with just those four pieces in it. That might be my first submitted patch on github if I do so.

I'm now printing out the other three pieces (two of them are three hour prints each) so I can begin the actual process of assembling the FoldaRap over this three day weekend. Given the missing electronics and general slackitude, I don't expect that I'll finish it this weekend (hmm…I'm missing my power supply as well, come to think of it) but I do expect progress. I'll then get back to my pesky Rostock Mini. I expect that the FoldaRap build will go quite a bit more quickly as Emmanuel's build documentation is quite thorough with both pictures and video of the various stages.