Kicked Due to Excess Flood

Over the next week, I will be updating this here blog with several backlogged things including, my trip to the Parallax Expo / UPEW, Maker Faire Bay Area, and more.

Don't worry! I'll go back to my more usual slower pace of updating afterwards.

Update:  Ok, so this never happened. Sorry, but things got kind of crazy with moving and stuff. I will post stuff soon(ish).

ELEV8 Fun

I finally got around to editing a video together of the footage from my GoPro HD attached to my ELEV8. The footage was all taken on January 29th at a park near my house.

Adventures in 3D printing...

So a while back I contributed to an Indiegogo (like kickstarter) for the eMaker Huxley. A RepRap based 3D printer kit.  When I got the kit I built the thing pretty quickly and tried to print some stuff. It kind of worked, but the I could only print very small simple things and even those were low quality compared to what I saw others being able to do.  So I let it sit for a while as other things came up.

What it looked like then...

A few weeks ago I decided to try "fixing" it. So I rebuilt the extruder and hot end (more carefully this time), and I spent a bunch of time adjusting everything to be square and level as best as possible.  After that it did start printing much better, but still I wasn't totally happy.

I did a bunch of research on different firmware and host software and the ones I really wanted to use wouldn't work well on the Sanguinololu board I had without first upgrading the MCU chip.  I ended up buying a RAMPS 1.4 board and an Arduino Mega 2560 to run it for now (I am starting work on an interface adapter for the RAMPS 1.4 board and a Propeller Platform or Quickstart board.) .  The software I am currently using is the Repetier firmware and host with Slic3r to produce gcode from STL files.  I am pretty happy with the print quality now.

What it looks likes now.

Here are some of the things I've printed with it:

A spool for filament coils

Some random test objects and stuff

I've been watching the new Doctor Who

The bracket for the RAMPS board &
a bracket for  hooking servos together

Minecraft creeper
want's to give you a hug!

This is what I was able to print with 1 pound of filament.
Quite a bit of stuff, lots of failed stuff from early on, and
lots of test objects as I was tuning things.

Parallax ELEV-8 Quadcopter

I recently visited Parallax in Rocklin, CA, and while there I was given an ELEV-8 quadcopter to build (thanks Ken!). Here's a neat picture of the completed ELEV-8 at night with the LEDs on:

And here is a video I put together of my build pictures and video clips of it flying: