killercarrot

I've been pretty dismissive of 3D printers, chiefly because I view them as complex, fiddly, erratic, temperamental and inelegant machines. If you want a lumpy thimble made very, very... very slowly they are perfect. If you want anything even moderately useful, then you probably need a machine bigger than you can afford, and it will still be slow... and probably breakdown... or print 80% of the thimble then suddenly have a funny turn and stop, or bung up or something. They are a bit like "classic" cars, where "classic" means poorly designed, 1970's British monstrosity. However the #BuildBrighton folk organised a 3D group, so  I thought I'd rock up and see if they couldn't dispel my negativity now I actually have a part I need to make  (a collet for the "gun" on my Dalek.) The #BuildBrighton 3D printer group started with a talk from Alex about OpenSCAD , which is a simple scripting language that allows geometric primitives to be comb...

Build Brighton is a top place, full of electric lasers and 3D, but it's an absolute sod to find. So I decided to add a little bit of trim ( or flare as they might say in "Office space" ) to the inconspicuous BB doorbell. A quick measure, and a few minutes with the #BuildBrighton jigsaw on some scrap mdf left over from the Dalek, and I had a some shapes. I sanded them down, and primered them up, then gave a quick splash of the ever useful "Plastikote" enamel paint. Final job was to stick the blocks to the wall using a couple of dobs of Gripfill, that way if we want to get rid of them, it's a ten minute job with a crowbar. So that's Donation bot's cousin, Welcome/Direction Bot... I guess we could tap the power to the doorbell to run a couple of LEDs but for the minute, job done.

So, for a bit of light relief I bought a few of Justin's LED Christmas tree kits. I think the original idea was to have a relatively easy kit to put together on Saturday workshops in the run up to Christmas, but they seem to have become quite popular with all manner of folk. Anyway, the kit is based around a couple of well made pcbs, a bag full of components, and the simple instruction that +ve is UP. It took about 10 mins to solder all the bits together, and with a huge amount of satisfaction over the end result. Justin and his Christmas tree kits can be found here: http://cyber-lane.com/ The Build Brighton Christmas workshops will be running each Saturday from 30th November to 21st December from 10am – 2pm. Entrance is completely free. Kits are priced between £2 and £5. #BuildBrighton can be found here: http://www.buildbrighton.com/blog/

Before all the nonsense with Angelina Jolie pretending to be a computer nerd (seriously), and our Colonial Cousins making up stuff about inventing computers at a model railway club... the  name Hacker was synonymous with Radios... The Hacker brothers created the DYNATRON brand in the 1920's (how cool a name is Dynatron?) I'm a little tired of listening to 6Music through my phone, so this Thursday's #BuildBrighton project will be to resurrect the Hacker as a bluetooth speaker... or something. Spiders will likely be harmed in this project... look away now.

I managed to get the little Jansen style walker up and running on radio control. Probably overloaded the central supports with a huge 5 cell AA Nicad pack, and 7 channel Rx... and indeed it did "realign" the gears, which caused a bit of skipping. However the point of the exercise was to see if it would take a radio signal, and it does. If it takes a radio signal it means I wan swap in an Arduino and use the PWM channel. On another tack I nipped down to #buildbrighton last  Thursday and with Adam's help disassembled a Dalek voice changer helmet, and stuck the sound circuitry into the head of our "real" Dalek. It works after a fashion, and flashes the dome lights too. Once I've done the hard work building the neck section, I'll strat wiring stuff up properly.

I rebuilt the servo mounts and everything seems sort of sorted. There's lots of flex due to the wonky gears, but it seems to move. I think i need to add some tension springs to keep the legs pointing in the right direction, they get easily deflected. Also my birthday present has turned up: a Gakken Rhino walker

I've had trouble getting enough torque out of the tiny HS50 servos that were fitted to the walker, so last night at #BuildBrighton I added a pair of meaty old 3003's from an old antweight robot. It works, buuut I need to make some mounting brackets. Video taken on my iPod touch by Adam, who is trying for the "Bourne Identity" shakey cam effect.... but even so you can see the organic wriggle of the legs. Adam also had a bash at creating the walker mechanism using Lego mindstorms. (Originally I put the video on Vimeo, but 12 hours after uploading it's still sitting in a queue for conversion... so good old YouTube did the job)