The MakerGear M2 3D printer the KAOS lab ordered arrived last week. I am thoroughly impressed with the machine and how little fussing has been required to get decent prints out of it.
I’ve been pushing annotated pictures of our adventures with the M2 to a G+ album, because the auto-upload from my phone is too good to give up, even if the G+ album manager sucks. Take a look to get a taste of our massive new distraction.
This was originally posted as Shapeoko: Part 6, because I apparently can’t count.
A while ago I ordered a 300W ER-11 DC spindle kit from China to install in my Shapeoko. I finally got to the post office yesterday (stupid recipient-must-be-present shipping) to pick it up, am impressed with the whole process. Most of this post is about the spindle, there is some more belt tensioner tinkering down at the bottom.
I’ve been watching the talks out of 29c3 as they become available online for the last couple days, and these are my favorites with comments. I’ve never come up with an excuse to actually go, but always find that it is the conference with the most things I am excited about every year, and end up watching more recorded sessions than I could have attended had I been present. The ones I picked below were both topics I found interesting and good presentations – there were a couple I hoped would be good but had talks that made me just give up and read the paper that I won’t mention here.
I got some more time to work on my Shapeoko over the last few days, and now have mostly correct 3-axis motion. As before, details under the fold.
Naturally, this post is a follow-on to Shapeoko: Part 1 and Shapeoko: Part 2. I’ve basically put the machine together now, and can move the X and Z axis around from the host computer, but still have to figure out belt attachments for the Y axis, and run the wiring in a sane way. I was holding up a microswitch to the various relevant spots for end-stops as I went, and everything but detecting the upper extreme of the Z axis should be easy. As in the last two posts, there is an assembly gallery under the fold.
This continues from where I left off in my previous post Shapeoko: Part 1.
I alternated my Sunday afternoon/evening between tackling my grading backlog and building pieces of the Shapeoko. This pattern works well for tapping since they are both exceptionally tedious tasks, but in different ways. Gallery with captions below the fold:
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My Shapeoko kit arrived from Inventables while I was away at SC.
I’ve been trying to build myself a small CNC milling machine since 2009, and contemplating it for longer than that. It became clear that my original design, however educational, was a dead end sometime last year. I’d been idly watching the Shapeoko project for some time as it had similar aspirations to my design, and a couple months ago I was in a particularly mechanical mood when I saw that a batch had reached enough buyers to be produced, so I bought in for a mechanical kit to mount my existing electronics on.
The Shapeoko community is really excellent, and the kit was designed to be flexible, so I’m starting off with some suggested modifications – I’m using NEMA23 motors instead of the usual NEMA17 on the X and Y axis, because I already had some nice Lin Engineering 130 oz-in NEMA23 motors and the frame can fit them. I’m configuring for dual Y motors, which give more even force across the Y axis, and routing my belts on the outside of the frame, since I needed to buy different hardware for the NEMA23 motors anyway and this particular modification is widely recommended.
There is a gallery to document my first round of assembly below the fold (captions don’t display properly in the RSS feed).
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I’ve got my pictures from the event up in an album in google’s cloud.
Here are the big, cool things I learned on the floor or at the various evening events:
There will be at least one more SC12 post later, when my cube of schwag arrives. The T-shirt harvest was great this year…
Some time ago I came across yet another angry discussion[1] about systemd, and have been reading and thinking a great deal about the design of Systemd, and what it says about Linux. I’ve come to realize that the strife in the Linux community is because an active and well-funded group of developers who have been driving the direction of various core components are not building UNIX. They are building some other philosophically divergent system on top of the Linux kernel, with roughly the same relationship to UNIX as Plan9[2]. For convenience I’m going to call the non-UNIX environment they’re building FLOS for the remainder of this post (F since the FreeDesktop.org folks, and their backers in the Fedora project, are driving this, L for the Linux kernel, OS should be self-explanatory). I intend this term to be value-neutral[3].
To me, the core of a UNIX system is a philosophical matter. To quote Mike Gancarz’s The UNIX Philosophy from 1994, UNIX has 9 paramount precepts:
FLOS is a nearly diametrically opposed design, with design concepts like the following:
I’m not sure that this is a bad design, but it is most definitely not UNIX or anything like it. I’ve seen some fairly convincing arguments that the FLOS design philosophy has serious benefits, and there are decades of convincing arguments that abandoning the UNIX way is the path to ruin. Systemd is the big realization of the FLOS design, but many projects, especially FreeDesktop projects, have been working this way for some time. I’m going to pick out a couple examples and talk about them under the fold.
As a fun aside to the previous post, there is a story my parents like to tell from my childhood, which generalizes the kind of permissive learning objects learning computers are an instance of. When I was very little, I … Continue reading
