Hackerspace Adelaide

The adelaide hackerspace recently submitted an application to become an incorporated body.  This week Pix brought the certificate along.

Pix brandishes Hackerspace Adelaides Certifcate of Incorporation

Simon has decided to build a hexapod robot using micro RC servos.  To simplify the task of driving the required eighteen servos he is using a development board based on the same TLC5940 chip used by the Peel Street Lantern.

Simon experimenting with TLC5940 servo control

That is a lot of servos…

Fee Plumley has been continuing to work on her Really Big Road Trip crowdfunding project.  As part of her “Twelve Days of Busmas” she has developed a custom keyring as a reward for supporters of the project.

The tag at completion of printing on the Huxleys bed

Fee modelling the tag

Nathan has been developing a 3D model of a popular cartoon chracter using Blender.  As an experiment his model was exported to an STL and printed.

Gir printing. There is a large amount of scaffolding due to the spherical nature of the characters head.

Completed Gir. The finished model is about three centimeters in height.

Work continues on the updated Lantern.  Peter and Damien seem to have fixed the communication and colour issues with the new boards.

New Model Harvester at work driving 1/8th of the Lantern.

Finally Mark has been working on Software defined radio using a re-tasked USB TV tuner.

This weekend a few hardy souls gathered together for a hacksession organised by Robyn that was so incredible it could not be contained within a simple 3 hour period.

Robyn continued to work on her robot

Robyns robot

Pix brought along his Makerbot to experiment with methods of calibration.

Pix' Makerbot

This was also the first occurance of “Craft time with Pix.”  A humble beer carton was converted to support the operation of the Huxley.

An unsuspecting beer carton

Carton based filament holder

During the afternoon the chips were opened – I repeat, the chips were opened.

The chips - opened

A lot of printing occured:

I printed some Huxley parts:

Parts for an Huxley - some were prepared earlier

Pix printed a white PLA dome and Kylie(?) printed a TARDIS.

Dome and TARDIS

Ryan printed a case for a Raspberry Pi.  He also continues to work on his own Huxley – the application of PTFE tape may have fixed his bowden extruder issues.

Raspberry Pi case and TARDII

Robyns robotic vacuum cleaner

Robyn brought along a robotic vacuum cleaner with a stuck brush.  It was later seen happily cleaning the floor of Formats basement.

Scott continued to work with wireless communications.

Scott working with wireless

Arduino with wireless transceiver and LCD display

Hackerspace logo being printed on the Huxley

The Huxley continues to print well.  There were issues with overloading that were traced to the heated bed, but printing quality does not appear to be affected by printing wothout it.

The blue painters tape covered bed provides excellent adhesion.   Removing the part required careful levering with a sharp instrument.

Simon and Pix have been working on a three dimensional version of the hackerspace logo.  On Saturday this logo was successfully printed.

Completed Hackerspace logo

Ryan required a replacement y-axis bracket for his printer.  After calibration (and discovering the calibration method of sprinter had changed) a replacement was printed.  Adding the command “M92 X 80″ to the start_pla.gcode file corrected for the incorrect x-axis pulley.

The part was successfully fitted to Ryans printer

Bracket installed on the printer

Some happenings from the most recent Hackerspace.

Scott dropped by to experiment with arduino networking

Ryan dropped in with his Huxley

And Hackerspaces Huxley had its heater resistor replaced

A completed part

Untangling the Huxley's filament - time to build a filament spool?

Last night Hackerspace Adelaide had its incorporation meeting.

The attendees assemble

Final attendance was approximately twenty members physical and virtual.

The provisional constitution and the name of the organisation were approved by the participants.   In addition Pix has been selected as the initial public officer.

Minutes of the meeting can be found here.  Members updates and corrections are encouraged to add comments to that document.

Thanks to Ken for tidying up some of the minutes formatting.

For your edification we present a few hackerspace related events:

Hackerspace member Fee Plumley is currently crowdsourcing funding for her reallybigroadtrip project.  She intends to travel the country cataloguing digital culture off the beaten track.  If you are interested in contributing here pozible page can be found here.

Mark has been continuing work on the Project Horus with a number of new boards being produced

Horus board through a magnifier

A new drive gear for the Huxley x-axis has been secured and is working well.

Huxley with replacement gear

Another night at hackerspace

Peter West (Scout), one of our members and an enthusiastic electronics hacker passed away recently.  This weekend his family generously donated his electronic tools and supplies to the Adelaide Hackerspace.

Scouts tools and supplies

We are in the process of inventorying this donation and intend to make it available for the improvement of members projects shortly.

Yesterday ANAT held an event examining the impact of 3D printing technologies on the future of manufacture.  A full program can be found here: http://www.anat.org.au/2012/02/3d-printing-forum-riaus-monday-20th-february/

For information on proceedings, check out the twitter hashtag #3DprintADL particularly the tweets of Hackerpsace member Fee Plumley who was live tweeting most of the event.

Update: ANAT have published a gallery of photos from the event here.

Update2: Paul has some photos of his Huxley in operation here:

Some photos of the event:

Paul and Ryan demonstrating an Huxley.

The long view - Pix considers the future of fabrication

Today the Huxley printed its first parts.  The hot end jamming problems were traced to obsolete firmware that incorrectly read the temperature.  Due to the low extruder temperature resulting in only partially melted plastic and corresponding high resistance when printing.

With the updated thermistor settings the extrudate flowed freely.

Huxley at work

The first print did warp – this may have been due to an incorrect temperature setting in the bed.

The Huxleys first print - four PCB clips and a power clip

With a bit more care subsequent prints were of higher quality.

Two more PCB clips were printed and fitted to the Huxley.

PCB clips in place