Disruptive Technology

I've grown somewhat weary of WIRED magazine in the last decade, but they still have some amazing articles from time to time.  Right now they are covering the Disruptive By Design conference in New York City.  


http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/05/you-didnt-know-you-needed-it/
Daniel Pink on Disruptive technology...

Disruption is giving the world something it didn’t know it was missing. Three years ago, did you know you were missing an iPad? Ten years ago, did you know you were missing a web browser? Perhaps the savviest of Wired readers did, but the majority of us only knew we wanted these things after we’d experienced them in some way. Now that they’re a mainstream part of our lives, we couldn’t imagine life without them.

I really hope 3D printers will be a disruptive technology in the next 10-15 years.  I think they have the potential to make us look at the way we do a lot of things now and realize how asinine many aspects of intellectual property is.

TimeLapse Camera hack

For building my 3D printer I was thinking of setting up a my Canon to capture a time lapse of the whole build over the course of however many nights it takes me to build the whole thing.  I found this guide for building a super simple camera trigger and using a firmware upgrade called CHDK.  I've used CHDK before on my camera, but it was a few years ago.  This might just be the perfect use of an arduino nano, 16x2 LCD screen and a few TACT buttons to navigate a simple menu system.  Ideally I'd like to set this whole thing up to tie into a 3D scanner I've been looking at building.  For the short term I'd be happy if I could have it take a picture every one or two minutes during the build.  I have an 8GB SD card so it can hold thousands of pics so storage for all the shots shouldn't be an issue.  If I don't get around to doing that I do have a 720p webcam that I've used in the past.  Still not entirely sure I want a video of me beating my head against the wall as I run into problems that I'm just going to assume will happen as there are so many different things that can go wrong while building a 3D printer.

DIY Shutter Release Cable for Canon Cameras

CHDK Wiki

3D Printing, I'm in awe of the potential

I've been hearing about 3D printers for a long time now, but they always seemed like these magical devices that were out of reach of anyone not willing to turn it into their career and had $20,000 to $100,000 to spare to buy one and start a business.  Then about two or three years ago I hear about the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic an amazing 3D printer that can be purchased unassembled as a DIY kit for $1,100.

The MakerBot Thing-O-Matic

While still not a trivial amount of money for most of us, it's getting into a price range that begins to bring in hobbyists and small businesses.  It also uses an Arduino to run the whole thing which is a device I've been playing around with for the past year or so and am comfortable programming and building electronics with.  The idea was really neat, but I was looking for something that felt a little more hackable and where I could potentially be able to contribute to a community.

RepRap Prussa 2 

So I just recently heard about the 3D printer called RepRap.  RepRap is an open sourced 3D printer founded in 2005 by Dr Adrian Bowyer, a Senior Lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.

These things are amazing, they are built around off the shelf parts and are constantly being tweaked with new software and hardware revisions.  One of the awesome things about 3D printers is that they can print out many of the parts needed to build them.  While I'm hoping I can do a better job with my wiring to give it a cleaner look, the picture to the left is essentially what I'll be building.  A Reprap Prusa Mendel for about $500 including a few extra bells and whistles.

I've been researching everything I can find online about these 3D printers.  From build guides, to working with programming the microchips and modifying them.  Calibrating the whole system so it will print right and how to build your own 3D models to print out.  There are some limitations with the quality or resolution of printable objects at this point, but cutting edge stuff like this will always have it's flaws and issues to be worked out and in the past 6 years they've figured out solutions to a lot of them and refined the printing quality to rival some of the professional 3D printers out there.

New Arduino Boards announced!

The New Arduino DUE, just look at all those pinouts!

I've really enjoyed learning basic digital electronics with the Arduino UNO it's a little lacking in the number of pinouts for different sensors and such, but that's also forced me to learn how to use many basic electronic components  like transistors and shift registers to gain additional functionality.  Problem is I've been kicking around a few ideas for some larger projects that I've already started sketching out on paper and figuring out the  parts needed, but most of them were far off way down the road because I figured I'd have to purchase an AVR programmer for programming powerful microchips.  Then out of the blue I come across a few posts on different sites I get RSS feeds from and find out that the makers of the Arduino are releasing some newer boards with even more power, memory and larger number of pinouts for hooking up more sensors and such to an Arduino.  I'm really excited to see how much the new Arduino DUE will cost and to get my hands on a couple of the boards as I've already started to go back to my long list of projects and realizing there is a good chance quite a few of them can be accomplished with this new board.

From the  wired article...
"The new Arduino Due sports a considerably beefier set of stats, incorporating a 32-bit ARM-based microcontroller that can run up to 96 MHz. For comparison, standard Arduinos normally have an 8-bit, 16 MHz processor. It has 256 KB of flash memory and 50 KB of RAM (SRAM, to be precise). This more advanced processor should allow hackers and DIYers to create more advanced projects than have been possible with Arduinos in the past.


The Due will first roll out to developers, rather than immediately being released to the community at large. The company plans a final, tested release by the end of 2011."

LED Cube, why you a maka me so crazy!

Do I have the wrong transistors!?

So in trying to make a 3x3x3 LED cube I've learned a number of things.  First, my soldering skills were horrible when I started and by the end they were mediocre, but  passable.  I had so many crappy solder points that I didn't do right early on that I've only just gotten it so that I can connect ground to any of the 'rings' and a postive to the column and light up each individual LED, so my LED's and solder are working now.  Yay, for the basics!

So now I've followed an Instructable called LED Cube and Arduino Lib I followed the instructions as best I could as a few steps had been left out either because they were totally obvious to anyone that understands electronics (not me) or the guy that made it just didn't think they were needed.  Anyways it left me guessing in a few parts but I tried loading the sketch to my Arduino Uno and got absolutely nothing.  I think the problem might be with the transistors I used (2N2222).  So now I'm so frustrated I'm trying to write my own sketch where I can just light up a single light at a time and build it from there at least that way I'll understand how the code interfaces with the ATmega328 chip on the Arduino board. It's been a long time since I did anything with the C programming language so I'm rusty with my coding and building my own libraries so I've been having to slowly go through all the tutorials I can find for creating Arduino sketches. 

Light pen drawing with a custom made "light pen" LED
 I made with extra parts I had lying around.

As frustrating as it can get when I can't figure it out, when it all finally just falls together; makes sense and the project works right it's fucking amazing.  Just gotta start out small with proof of concepts projects and then refine it and make it awesome.

  

Ordered some stuff from Jameco to finish my projects

I couldn't sleep and noticed that the full moon outside my window was lighting
up the clouds over downtown Juneau in a cool way so I took a few pics.

Haven't been sleeping all that much the last few nights, so I started doing a lot of reading on LED cubes and looking at what's needed to finish my current one.  I finally think I ordered everything needed to finish my little 3x3x3 LED cube and build a simple 4x4x4 cube much easier for a friend, at this point my soldering skills are whats holding me back more than anything.  With each project I've worked on I'm definitely improving by leaps and bounds in the soldering department.

With the parts ordered I can finish my 3x3x3 LED cube that is basically a proof of concept and allow me to work out a few of the kinks as far as getting a perfect grid of LED's which now I'm leaning toward reading through the comments on Instructables a user mstoetz1 had a good suggestion on the message boards about getting a better grid for the LED cubes.  While using the drilled board is perfect for getting the spacing to keep it looking tight you need to do a little work on all your LED's first like this...

Create a grid with solid core wire first to help keep the grid tight.

By curling the leads of the LED like this it makes the soldering
much easier since you just slide the solid core wire through it.

I'm trying to finish my 3x3x3 LED cube now, and a friend wants me to do a 4x4x4 LED cube for him, but ideally I want to get up to an 8x8x8 LED cube, but my soldering skills are gonna have raise to some kind of ninja master before I take on 1024 solder points.  I'm hoping using the pics above I'll be able to make the 4x4x4 LED much easier than the 3x3x3 where I'm soldering the legs together without any wire.  Well at least all this electronics stuff will help keep my mind distracted for a while. 

3x3x3 = 27 LED's X 2 =  54 solder points

4x4x4 = 64 LED's X 2 = 128 solder points

5x5x5 =125 LED's X 2 = 250 solder points

8x8x8 =512 LED's X 2 =1024 solder points 

I received my Arduino UNO!

Another victim of Mr. Wizard's 'science'

After spending the last month doing a lot of late night reading about electronics, schematics, data sheets, and LED's I finally decided to order some electronics from Jameco.  I ordered a few grab bags with servo's and motors as well as capacitors, resistors and switches.  I also ordered the Light Organ kit to fix an old 60's era lamp that used to be able to pick up audio via an old electret condenser mic (I think that's what it used, haven't torn it all apart yet) and lights inside would 'dance' to the beat, you know what the 60's had instead of a computer running visualizations of MP3's.

Awesome thing was just 60 minutes into playing with the Arduino I was able to control a couple of motors with the UNO and added a couple of POTS to make it easy to vary the speed of the mirrors and was able to make a very simple laser light show that looked a lot like a spirograph drawing.  With the two motors having variable speed I was able to dial in all kinds of weird shapes.  I had been thinking it was going to take weeks to be able to do anything with the UNO, but the first evening I was able to try out all kinds of ideas and get a quick idea of this little products huge potential.

Arduino UNO ordered from Jameco... it's like Electronics Porn.

I'll keep posting my progress, frustrations and (hopefully) success as I work on a few projects.  My plans are to do a few preset kits and basic Arduino projects and then begin building some of my own creations.  I'm mulling over the idea of documenting all the parts and process so I can post it up on Instructables.  I'm relying so heavily on the community that has come up around this amazing product that I really want to support and help enrich the community.  Since all of this is built on the backs of those that geeked out on electronics well before I ever got the idea.

Finally I'd like to thank LadyAda of Adafruit Industries it was her thorough Arduino guide that convinced me to dive into electronics.  No, I have never met her or even exchanged email, but her website, guides and store should be a guide to others for how a electronics hobby kit website should be run and be leveraged to build a community.