Turning A 12 Year Old Mill Into A Modern Workhorse

August 9, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

Even though the Roland MDX-20 CNC mill fetched a pretty penny when it was first made available 12 years ago, there were a few features that made any builder lucky enough to own one scratch their head. The only way for a computer to communicate with this mill was through an RS-232 connection, and instead of a normal control protocol such as GCode, the Roland mill uses a very proprietary software package.

[Johan] fixed these problems and at the same time turned this wonderful machine into a tool for the 21st century. Now, instead of running a very long serial cable to his mill with a serial to USB converter at the end, he can just plug a USB cable into his mill with the addition of an FTDI USB to serial chip wired directly to the mill’s circuit board.

Stock, the Roland mill used a very strange proprietary communications protocol. [Johan] was able to reverse engineer this protocol by tracing out a few simple shapes and curves and taking a highlighter to the printout of the resulting file. Instead of the outdated software package that shipped with his mill, [Johan] can now export tool paths directly from his CAD program and send them over a USB cable.

It really is a shame such a nice machine like [Johan]’s mill suffered from the glaring shortsightedness of Roland executives 12 years ago, but at least now [Johan] has a machine that should easily last another decade.

Pwdr, The Open Source Powder Printer

August 8, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

Meet pwdr, the open source 3D printer that is a complete departure from the RepRaps and Makerbots we’ve come to love.

Instead of squirting plastic onto a build surface, pwdr operates just like the very, very expensive powder printers used in industrial settings. Pwdr uses gypsum, ceramics, and concrete for its raw stock and binds these powder granules together with water deposited from an inkjet cartridge.

Inside pwdr there are two bins, one for storing the raw material and another for building the part. The part to be printed is built one layer at a time, just like your regular desktop printer. After each layer is finished, a counter-rotating drum scrapes the raw material over the build area and another layer is printed.

There are a lot of advantages to pwdr versus the melted plastic method of printing used in the Makerbot; because each build is self-supporting, it’s possible to print objects that just couldn’t be made with an extruder-based printer. Pwdr also supports laser sintering, meaning it’s possible for pwdr to make objects out of ABS, Nylon, and even metal.

Right now, pwdr is still in the very early stages of development, but you can build your own powder printer from the files up on Thingiverse. Check out the video of pwdr printing after the break.

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Drawing Things Very Slowly, Very Easily

August 6, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

A while back, we saw [Euphy]’s polar pen plotter project. The mechanics of the build are very simple – just a pair of motors attached to a pen by a beaded cord. Even though the build is very simple, it’s possible to create awesome works of art albeit very slowly.

Since we featured [Euphy]’s polar pen plotter, a lot of improvements have been made. Now the Polargraph has an SD card slot for computer-less printing, a touch screen for manual control of the plotter, and a few new drawing styles that improve on the previous version a lot.

Right now the improved version of the Polargraph is set up in the front of a graffiti art supply shop in Edinburgh where it spends its time slowly drawing a window dressing. [Euphy] put up a few videos of what the Polargraph is capable of doing, very impressive and we hope he gets a few more PCBs in soon.

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Building A SkyCam-like Camera Mount

August 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

With the Olympics on there are a lot of really great camera shots shown during the events. One of the best is the overhead view, which is provided by a camera suspended between cables. It’s not new for the Olympics, SkyCam has been around for over twenty years. What is new is [Dan Royer’s] attempts to build his own aerial camera setup.

He’s not starting from zero with this project. [Dan] has done some really great work with the Drawbot. It’s a two-motor, two-axis plotter which uses CNC to draw on a white board. For this project he combined two Drawbots in order to add a third axis. The image above shows the camera mount suspended between the four strings. He’s been working hard on getting the software ready for this kind of addressing. Along the way he broke the strings a few times because he was too far from the kill switch to stop it in time. But what he’s got is a nice start and we hope to see a more illustrative follow-up soon.

One of the things that SkyCam has going for it is a stabilization system. We wonder if a spinning gyroscope would work as well as it did for that balancing bike.

Melting Plastic Powder Together, One Layer At A Time

July 27, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVOtKSKyIvI&fw=470]

Here’s an interesting development in the world of 3D printers: A rapid prototyping machine that melts plastic powder together to create objects with extremely good resolution

The Blueprinter works by drawing a 0.1 mm thick layer of plastic powder over the build platform. After that, a very hot needle-shaped probe melts the plastic together. This process continues at a rate of 10mm an hour on the z axis, and a very precise plastic model eventually appears in the powder.

There is no price ( or solid release date ) for the Blueprinter, but this 3ders.org article from earlier this year tells us the price for the machine will be €9,995, with a material cost of €49 per kg. Pricey, yes, but seeing as how the RepRap community already has the techniques behind melting plastic down pat, it might now be too hard to build your own plastic sintering printer.

If you know of any current projects or builds that are trying to emulate this plastic powder melting technique, drop us a note on the tip line. We’d love to see a version of this printer up and running. Until then, you can check out the render showing a rendered Blueprinter in action, along with a demo of a plastic clip printed on this sintering printer.

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Box Maker Extension For Inkscape

July 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

If you use Inkscape to lay out your laser cutter designs you might want to look into this box maker extension. Inscape is [Elliot’s] drawing software of choice since it’s easy to use, and it’s open source. After having to lay out the tabs for a box he decided it was worth his effort to develop a tool to do this automatically. The extension works inside of Inkscape, letting you start your projects with a set of automatically generated box sides.

The input window for the extension leaves you plenty of options for the joint design. In addition to the size of the box (inside or outside measurements can be selected), you need to enter the thickness of the material, the kerf size (how wide the cut will be), and how much clearance you want between the teeth. The width of the teeth is also configurable.

Our feature of a laser cut replacement case is what prompted [Elliot] to tip us off about his extension. That project used a web-based parts generator to do the joint design.

A Mixer (re)built To Travel

July 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Toby Cole] likes to mix tunes whenever he gets a chance. But the size of his DJ equipment made it a real bother to lug around with him. He does own a Behringer portable mixer but without cross faders it’s not really all that usable, and most of the other offerings don’t get good reviews. He ended up replacing the enclosure of a proper mixer in order to make it light and small. The growing availability of affordable laser-cut parts made this project possible.

Build Brighton, [Toby’s] local Hackerspace, has a laser cutter. So he knew that if he could figure out a smaller case design it would be a snap to get his parts made. He cracked open the heavy metal case on the KMX 100 mixer and found it had a ton of extra room inside. He designed all of the plates using a digital calipers to properly space the holes and text labels. These designs were combined with BoxMaker to produce the files the laser cutter needed. The first prototype was cut from cardboard, with the finished product cut from 3mm plywood.