In the process of developing a novel data sharing system, Kiepert became convinced that the best way to test his ideas was to simulate them on a Beowulf cluster. A Beowulf cluster is a group of computers, usually identical, that are networked together in order to share the task of processing complex problems. (The name Beowulf was chosen by NASA engineers almost 20 years ago for a computer they deemed especially powerful.) At Boise State University, a Beowulf cluster exists in the “MetaGeek Lab” (or Onyx Lab), which is run by the Computer Science Department. The Onyx cluster currently consists of 32 processors, or nodes, each of which has a 3.1GHz Intel processor and 8GB of RAM, allowing substantial parallel processing capability.
We are offering affordable PCB assembly in the good old USA.
We purchased a MannCorp MC385-1V1 pick-and-place assembly machine for our retail and wholesale operations late last year, but our particular market will be slow for the next 6 months.
We’re looking for an excuse to keep this wonderful pick-and-place machine running over the summer (it’s a shame to have it sitting there collecting dust). We are hoping to find designers who have prototype, small batch, or low to medium volume needs.
Please contact us if you are looking for machine PCB assembly in the USA. Rates are negotiable – we don’t have a rate sheet because we’re new to doing contract work and it seems that every job is different.
We have placed SMT’s down to and below 19 mil pitch. Machine can easily place 0402′s and 010005′s (we purchased all the bells and whistles for this machine). We can pick up reel parts, cut tape parts, waffle packs, loose parts.
Our stencil printer is a manual stencil printer, we have printed SMT’s down to and below 19 mil pitch.
We can handle single boards, simple matrix panels or complicated matrix panels up to about 14″ x 12″.
We can do lead and lead-free. We are rather informal so we feel we are a good fit for designers who are on a budget but don’t want to send their pieces overseas.
Looking forward to working with you on your project.
Check out this BeagleBone Black update of the 3D printing-friendly Replicape Beagle Bone cape project from Hipster Circuits:
There it is, the new revision of Replicape. This revision is more compatible with the new BeagleBone Black that has a built in eMMC. There are a lot of other changes as well on this revision. The most important is the moving of the stepper motor connectors to the outside of the receptacles so removing is no longer necessary. Furthermore there is no need for a separate 12V and 5V power supply. You can now power the whole board with a single 12 to 24V PSU. Other things to mention is a major upgrade to the tracks and connectors for the heater cartridges and heated build platform, the addition of a fuse and finally a new color so that there will be no doubt which BeagleBone this belongs to : )
I’ve gotten a lot of help from Dirk Eichel on this revision, especially on the fat power tracks, the addition of a freewheeling diode across the MOSFETs to suppress voltage spikes and grips to reduce noise on the ADC lines.
Although there are a lot of nice changes, there has also been a lot of work put into keeping the cost down. The total cost of the board is the the same (BOM is ~$90).
I’ll give it a couple of days to get input from the community both on bugs in the layout/schematic and feature requests. Have a look at the RevA2 tag of the repository.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Here’s short review from SolidSmack.com addressing the recent crowdfunding project 3D Printer Test Kit by 3DKitbash.com — a set of tools designed to help you calibrate and analyze the calibration of your desktop or professional 3D printers:
As the number of 3D printers purchased each week increases exponentially, many proud new owners of a 3D printer are also learning the limitations of their new device. Chances are, an entire weekend may have been spent calibrating your printer or waiting for that very first test print. But what about the other limitations of your material? Recently posted on Kickstarter, the 3D Printer Test kit offers eight unique sample chip files that allows a user to test everything from ridges to flexibility to overhangs so you’ll know exactly where the limitations and strengths are for your 3D printer…whether it’s a Replicator 2 or a Fortus.
FOR PROS AND CONSUMERS
With the rise of consumer-level personal manufacturing, there will oftentimes be a disconnect between the understanding of material properties and expectations for a final product. As professional toy developers, the designers at 3DKitBash have no doubt done their homework and deciphered an affordable and accurate method for teaching both professionals and consumers how far they can stretch their 3D prints.
We want to help Makers, Inventors, and 3D Explorers do their thing Better & Faster. It’s a passion of ours and one that keeps us constantly on the move.
-3DKitBash
The kit consists of 8 ‘Tolerance Chips’ that each highlight a unique material characteristic to see how your 3D printer performs with various shapes and forms. While your 3D printer and material may excel in one characteristic, it may not do so hot in another, which can ultimately save you a lot of time and money down the road.
By combining 3d scanning, 3d digital modeling, and 3d printing, it is possible to create amazing and surprising effects, objects that can seamlessly blend between reality and imagination. In this tutorial, I describe the process of making a full colour 3d printed object that seamlessly fits on to a real sandstone wall, producing the illusion that the wall is built from pieces of lego. But the techniques described have a more general usefulness, almost limitless potential, and are easier and less expensive than you might think!
Staring with a real physical object, in this case a sandstone brick wall, I create an inexpensive but high quality digital 3d scan using a stills camera and the program Agisoft Photoscan. I then model the lego brick shapes over this scan using 3d software, I make this model fit perfectly onto the scanned wall by using boolean subtraction, I add colours clone stamped from the photos, correct the scale, and finally I do a colour 3d print, which fits seamlessly onto the sandstone wall, producing a novel illusion that would be difficult to achieve by other methods….
Great news for those curious about “soft robotics” — Matthew Borgatti shared his Trefoil Tentacle project
as Thingiverse Thing 92103, a project he created code for via discussion here on the Adafruit Forums as he went:
I’ve been developing ways to use 3d powder printing to make air powered robots that have no hard moving parts. Using procedural modeling I can create rapid iterations, incremental designs, and inexpensive prototypes with a simple set of tools. Find more details at – http://bit.ly/softrobots
This is an early prototype of a trefoil tentacle. There are three hollow ribbed volumes inside this tentacle that control its motion. It is controlled through a Processing interface and an Arduino switching a bank of solenoid valves using a simple Darlington transistor. You can grab the code here.
This whole project has been made possible by the folks over at http://viridis3d.com especially Jim Bredt. They’ve been very generous in letting me use their machines and helping me figure out solutions to the material science challenged involved in this kind of work. They’re awesome.
Instructions
Print out three copies of the shell component on a powder printer. This method would also work on a DLP or Objet printer. Print one copy of the block mold. Infiltrate all the parts with an epoxy resin. Wax all the surfaces that will touch silicone to make sure no rubber penetrates into the matrix. If this happens it’s guaranteed to lock your mold and you’ll have to start again from the beginning.
Pour silicone into the block mold up to its rim. When it’s cured, remove it. Use an xacto to split the rubber on the overhang down at one end of the mold. Once you’ve removed the silicone, flip it over and cast wax into the voids.
Laser cut the alignment jig out of .11″ material and assemble it. This will help align and center the wax core. Take all the wax pieces out of your silicone mold and assemble them with the help of the alignment jig. Use a soldering iron to melt the wax between the seams of the tall wax pieces and the base.
Bolt the 3 mold shells together with 1/4″-20 screws and insert the wax core. Pour a slow curing silicone into the holes at the top of the mold. This mold doesn’t contain a sprue, so be careful not to pour too quickly and overflow the mold. For a bubble free casting, I recommending putting this whole assembly into a vacuum chamber, but a low viscosity silicone will do a pretty good job all by itself.
When the silicone is cured you can take the mold apart and pull out the wax core. If it doesn’t come out cleanly (mine took a lot of fiddling to finally eject) boil the tentacle in soapy water until the wax melts out.
Laser cut the stand out of 1/8″ material. Run 3/8″ tubing through the trefoil shaped piece, leaving about 1″ sticking through it. Stick the tubing into the tentacle, and adhere it to the base using silicone caulk (I use Sil-Poxy). I fastened everything together with luer fittings, and controlled the tentacle using an arduino PWM-ing a few solenoid valves. You can see my code here http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=36579
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
In this blog, I’m continuing my exploration of what Chris Anderson’s company DIY Drones has done in using open-source methods to create products that are exponentially less expensive to make.
Memorial day is 05/27/2013 – Adafruit will be open and taking orders online, free shipping to any military base as always… Orders will ship out on May 28th. There will not be any deliveries or shipping on Monday.
Memorial Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the last Monday of May (May 27 in 2013). Formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. men and women who died while in the military service. First enacted to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War (it is celebrated near the day of reunification after the Civil War), it was expanded after World War I.
Amid a number of interesting “print-my-doodle” projects shared lately, from Doodle3D to Doodlesculpt,
Cubify has just launched a robust and intuitive Cubify Draw free iOS app for iPhone, iPad, and iPad Mini that allows those just starting out with 3D printing to instantly create a 3D extruded doodle that can be uploaded to Cubify.com for their service to print or send you your processed STL, depending on your interests. Check out the tool for free now to compare to the other sketch-to-object projects you have tried before to get a sense of why this app is worth checking out!
Turn your fingers into an instant 3D drawing tool.
HOW IT WORKS
Step 1: Draw
Use your finger to create a shape.
Step 2: Make it 3D
Turn your drawing into a 3D model. Email the file to yourself or upload it to Cubify.com.
Step 3: Print it
Using your 3D printer, make it real!
FEATURES
Turn your fingers into an instant 3D drawing tool
Bring your imagination to play and simply use your finger to draw on your iPhone, iPad, or iPad Mini – Cubify Draw will turn those images into a 3D model, automatically.
Create a shape, make the line thicker or thinner, then make it 3D! The drawing is turned into a cookie-cutter like shape, and from there you can adjust thickness and height, or make the shape solid, before saving the file.
Make a Cube printable .stl (saved in your My Cubify account, or sent to you by email).
Print out your file on your 3D printer at home.
With Cubify Draw, anyone who can draw (ages 8-80) now has the ability to create unique 3D content. No special software or special skills required!
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
This weeks Designer Spotlight focuses on Bathsheba Grossman, a long standing and influential community member here at Shapeways, whose beautiful mathematical designs have inpired many designers, not to mentions a few past designer spotlights!
Tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you? Where are you located?
I’m a designer for 3D printing, and my day job is trying to sell what I come up with. I’m bicoastal, usually spending winters at Santa Cruz, and summers at the trendy hacker hotbed of Somerville, near Boston. I’ve been working with 3D printing as an art medium since 1997, that’s been quite the roller-coaster! Overall I can’t say I’m getting rich (or at least not quickly) but the toys are great and my time is my own.
What’s the story behind your designs? What inspires you?
I was originally a math major interested in geometry and topology, when as a college senior I met the remarkable sculptor Erwin Hauer, and suddenly it was obvious that what I had in mind was more art than math. Symmetry is the foundation of what I do: there are many more ways to be symmetrical in 3-space than the familiar ones, but not so many that you can’t explore them all and delve into the most interesting ones. Over the years I’ve moved away from literal math — as the field has grown I no longer feel called on to make nifty math models simply because no one else is doing it! — and into more freewheeling biomorphic shapes. But although now I play more with suggesting and breaking it, now I believe I’ll always be working in some way with symmetry.
What brought you to 3D printing with Shapeways?
When Shops were launched I already had some reputation as a 3D printing artist, and I was offered the chance to join early, so I leaped at it. The chance to sell in a new venue with easy setup and no cost was very appealing: running a retail website was never part of my artistic vision, and this solution just has no downside. Other people selling sculpture while I’m sleeping? That’s my kind of business.
How did you learn how to design in 3D?
I’m self-taught, which arguably means I never did learn. In the mid 90′s Rhinoceros was in beta, and you could download it for free so I did. It has a command line and my day job was programming, so it wasn’t a completely unfamiliar environment, and slowly I figured out how to do some things. Since then I’ve used all sorts of design software, and written some of my own, but I’m still more comfortable with a command line than a GUI.
How do you promote your work?
Mostly I just hang it up on my site, and of course on Shapeways, and hope. Sometimes I buy magazine ads, either in STEM-focused journals like Scientific American and Science News, or more general cultural magazines like Atlantic and Smithsonian. I’ve experimented with various kinds of online ads, but never seen any measurable effect, so I no longer buy banners or AdWords or anything like that.
On the social media side I only have enough juice for one outlet, and I picked Facebook. It’s good for the late-night moments when I’ve just finished something and I’m dying to show it to someone; in art school I used to rush out in the corridor waving the model, and now posting screenshots to Facebook feels a little like that. I think readers respond to that feeling…it’s the best part of being an artist, so it’s nice to be able to share.
Who are your favorite designers or artists?
Of course I feel close to people who work with geometry and algorithms: Henry Segerman, Oskar van Deventer, Virtox, unellenu…and I’m especially awed by both the mathematical and marketing of Nervous Systems. Overall I try not to surf too much, I get envious! …
…as fans awaited the release of Daft Punk’s first new album in eight years, demand has soared for facsimiles of their iconic headgear. Some cash-strapped fans are proposing long-term payment plans; others are fretting over whether they will be able to find models that fit their heads.
“Price is not an object,” wrote 27-year-old Boston-area fan Trevor Bates in a recent posting on a popular Daft Punk fan site, saying he was prepared to spend at least $2,000 and warning he also had “a large head.”
Printable catalog (PDF)
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro”? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.
FEED
