May 2013 – Hive76

May 25, 2013

Getting Raspberry Pi to control your 3D Printer

We got some Raspberry Pis and began jumping through some tutorials. Adafruit has a particularly thorough and easy to follow series. We’ve had good luck with the Raspbian Wheezy distro and it works just like familiar Ubuntu since it’s based on Debian. Remember to run:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
upon first launch. That will make things a lot easier since the release is rather old by now.

I got some time to explore the Raspbian distro.

After seeing all of my efforts, Morfin couldn’t wait to give it a shot.

Eventually we got my favorite light-weight print controller github.com/kliment/printrun running an active 3D print. It really was incredible to have a $40 computer connected to the interwebs and sending gcode with a full GUI over python->USB-serial. It’s a bit too slow for computational slicing, but would probably be GREAT for a bot-farm. Note that you should also use pianobar instead of full-blown pithos for pandora audio. Note that the audio worked great after we ran the apt-get upgrades mentioned above.

And remember to grab our desktop background! It’s only 1.2 MB.

May 10, 2013

ShopBot as a 3D Printer: controlled by a RepRap RAMBo

suggested by Kliment via IRC (/ht), the way to have a heavy toolhead moving about in 3D with high speed AND precision is to modify a ShopBot instead of a Rostock. Recall, the Darwin suffered this design challenge which led to the Mendel.

With RAMBo bypassing the stock motherboard we can drive the ShopBot to scary speeds (10x faster in XY and 100x faster in Z.). Precision should also be ~10x better than belt-driven motion, but needs more fine tuning.

and did i mention it was freaking awesome?

My ShopBot RAMBo Marlin firmware branch is available via GitHub (of course). Follow along in the GitHub log to understand our process.

Thanks to ShopBot and Ultimachine for all your help and schematics!!

May 3, 2013

Render your next Logo Design

Blender, the awesome open-source do-everything model/rig/render/animate program continues to be an important part of my toolkit. The Artist Community is definitely a huge bonus. So check out this excellent tutorial over at BlenderGuru.com

So…I put Sean’s Harrow through it’s paces, and here are some of my newest desktop backgrounds.

First you get the basic render down. I use 32-bit color with OpenEXR file format, saving z-buffer info too, just, you know, in case you need it later. You should get something like this… kind of flat when viewed on a crappy computer screen, but i assure you there is a ton of color info there for fine tuning later.

With all that extra color depth, you can easily fine tune the contrast, like so.

Then you need to come up with the shadow version… Andrew Price from BlenderGuru does this in a new Scene. I like the stark contrast… when you look carefully the sharp edges tell you that you are looking at a perspective view.

Put it all together, and you get a softly-back-lit Logo. WIN!