Plastic Parts Purchased

The project has begun in earnest. Tonight I completed the checkout process on an eBay item with the following description:

RepRap Prusa Mendel with Wade Extruder - SAE + EXTRAS!!

This is a complete set of all the Prusa Mendel printed parts with the Wade's Extruder.  This set uses SAE nuts and bolts instead of metric so they are cheaper and easier to buy anywhere in the USA.   

Everything was printed off of my Makerbot Thing-O-Matic,  These still need to be reamed, but are extremely clean and very high quality (go check out some of the other Prusa's on E-bay, not very good quality!) pieces made from strong ABS Plastic.  For more information and assembly instructions see http://reprap.org/wiki/SAE_Prusa_Mendel or http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4711. 

Please e-mail me with any questions. 

I will ship this with either the bushing holders for the store bought bushings or a set of Printed Bushings printed out of ABS Plastic (Sorry, I'm out of PLA for now).  Let me know which you want or if you want them both I can throw them both in. 

This set also includes a full build instruction manual to walk you step by step through the build process of your prusa mendel.  I will also include a Parts list of all the other parts needed with their part numbers and the suppliers.

Seller info: 

elderfarrer2hy7 ( 82)  

100% Positive feedback

The total price, shipped to my door: $102.55

The seller is located in Idaho. I was hoping to find a Michigan supplier so I could pick up the parts in person and maybe see a demonstration of a working unit. Although I have had good luck finding help and people in Michigan (and Chicago) who are working on building Mendels, nobody had any parts to sell and nobody has yet been able to tell me they have a working unit. Mostly they are like the above seller who have started with Makerbot Thing-o-matics or the like.

I'm really looking forward to getting started. The parts list with supplier information will be handy and was a selling point for this eBay listing.

RepRap Project First Thoughts

Introduction to Mendel from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

You've decided you're going to make a RepRap machine? Great! Now what?

The first thing you're going to want to do is decide which RepRap machine you're going to make. It's pretty easy to say, "the most recent version," because that's the Mendel. However, it turns out there are a number of versions of the Mendel to choose from. Sells, Isaac, Prusa, Huxley, these are all the names of different flavors of the Mendel. They all have the same basic shape, but they vary in some subtle ways.  The Sells Mendel with Gen3 electronics is pictured on the RepRap home page (the video link) and is featured in the introductory videos, etc. It's named after Ed Sells, the guy talking in the above video. He developed the Mendel and the Sells Mendel is the original. The Sells Mendel has some drawbacks, however, mainly that the complexity of the design makes it more difficult to dial in and get working than other variants.

The hot variant right now is the Prusa (pronounced PROO • shuh) because it has fewer pieces, is easier to build, and is more standardized. It too is named after it's chief developer. I found this video, which compares the two models.



These just give you the basic frame and mechanics of the machine. You will need to add the extruder,  electronics and motors after that. There are a number of electronics packages to choose from. Right now the hot stuff is the RAMPS configuration. I understand the Wade Extruder is the thing to get in that department. The motors are just stepper motors of a certain specification, which is described in the plans.

Step one, pick a variant, electronics and extruder. For me, that's Prusa with RAMPS (w/ special attention to getting it with the SD card reader) and Wade Extruder.

Kalamazoo RepRap Mendel

Thanks to the generous support of Maryellen Hains, this summer I am going to build a 3D printer. Specifically, I'm going to build a RepRap Mendel, an open source 3D printer. This printer will be made available to area artists and makers somehow, though the particulars of how that will work are yet to be determined. I feel it is likely, though, that it will find a home at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

Hearing first about the RepRap project maybe three years or so ago, around about the time I subscribed to Make Magazine it drew my attention. It was still a bit sketchy at the time, however, so I put it on the, "wait and see where this goes" list in my brain. Then Make Magazine podcast person Bre Pettis started MakerBot and produced the Cupcake, but I was somewhat turned off by the fact that you couldn't use a Makerbot to make a Makerbot like RepRap was trying to do. It reminded me to check in on the RepRap and they are on their second version, the Mendel, and that looked very exciting. I put out feelers for support by founding a Meetup.com group for Kalamazoo makers and suggested we build a Mendel as the kickstart project. I didn't get a lot of takers.

The last day of my KIA web design class (which I teach) was a review and wrap up day, and a little loose format-wise. Someone got me going on CNC machines and I brought up the RepRap. The whole class was engaged on the subject, to my surprise. Maryellen in particular, who was taking the class, seemed very interested in the possibilities of 3D printing for jewelry and volunteered to participate if I could get some other people to join in. Later it occurred to me to ask her to help out in a different way.

At Jim Riegel's retirement party tonight I sat her down to talk her into helping me get a grant and/or KIA backing for the project, intending it to be a project for the KIA around which she and I would develop classes to be taught there, and out of the blue she decides to fund most of project all by herself and wrote me a check on the spot!

So now I'm building a Mendel this summer. Ordering parts this week!

Google Account Goo

I love Google. I hate Google.

Not long ago Google changed Google Apps, the wonderful suite of cloud services that makes it possible for a small organization to have robust group services, like email and contacts, for free. The change was to include all of Google's other nifty services, like Analytics and YouTube, to the list of things you could do with your Google Apps domain. Fantastic!

Not so fast. Quite a while ago we realized that you couldn't transfer an Analytics account (or profile, or anything) from one person to another. So, if as a web designer you created an Analytics profile for a client's web site, you couldn't then transfer the profile over to a client-controlled account later. That sucked. So, the answer was to create a Google Account for the company and start the Analytics profile there from the get-go. If you had a designer flake out on you and delete your profile from their account, along with all your data, well that sucked for you.

Now we have essentially the same problem with the Google accounts created for companies so that they could use Google Analytics, and other services like YouTube. You would think that once Google Apps moved those other fine services they'd figure out some way to allow an organization to merge their old Google personal account with their Google Apps domain, wouldn't you? I mean, who wants to loose all their data when bringing everything under one roof?

Not only that, but --and this was a painful discovery-- if you delete your organization's old account thinking you can free up the user name for your Google Apps account, you're going to be disappointed. Google retires usernames from deleted accounts so they can never be used again. That's a special bummer for organizations that got usernames that match their domain names or brand names.

Google, with all their genius, can't seem to figure out how to get user accounts to do kung fu, or even a half-hearted high kick. Google accounts are a data prison from which you can never escape.

Unweblike Behavior

 

For the second time in a single day I have come across content on the web that is "not available in your area". This is bullshit. It's the world wide web. It defies geographical location by definition. The whole point of the WWW is that if you put something on it, that thing can be seen by anyone on a computer anywhere on the planet.

I say that if a page has any content on it that can't be seen by anyone anywhere, then it is not on the web and should be removed from the web. Taking something off the web can be achieved in two ways. First, and easiest, it can be removed by the search engine companies from being included in results. If Google and Bing removed the above offending web site from their search results, the above offending web site would stop putting geographically limited content on their web site and thus gain re-admission to the web. I'm simply confident this is true. To effectively remove offending pages from the web, it might be necessary to remove entire domains from the search results. BBC doesn't want to have the entire bbc.co.uk domain taken off Google.

The second step would be to make a browser plug-in which referred to a black list of sites and removed links from the markup of any page linking to one of the offending pages or sites. The black list could be crowdsourced, so URL's could be added by users as they came across offending content. If this becomes an issue that people care about and start using this plugin widely, browsers might incorporate the behavior into the core of their programs.

Search engine companies like Google and Bing, and all browser companies all have an inherent interest in maintaining a global definition of the web. No government regulation is necessary to impose such a definition -- and I'm a guy who's usually in favor of regulation as a solution to big problems. But in this case there is a better way. Also, I'm not suggesting that all content be free and open to everyone no matter what. Pay walls and the like might or might not be a good idea, but they are not as a model contrary to a functioning world wide web. Certainly you do want to have restricted areas of web sites.

My thesis is simply that geolocation is an invalid filter for access to media on the web. It's perfectly fine to give me a default view that depends on my geolocation, but not to keep me locked out of certain content entirely. I think it will lead to a balkanization of the web.

Lastly, this does not mean that such geo-localized content would be banished from the world, just the web. Essentially, if you want to provide geo-localized content exclusively to people in a certain geographic area, then there's an app for that. Or, you make an app for that. The WWW is distinct and different than the Internet. I don't condone filtering the Internet.