brainwagon

Apologies to Hermes Conrad. Further apologies to those who won’t get this Futurama quote. During COVID, I spent some time in my shop doing more woodworking. At the time I was trying to figure out how I could sign the work that I did, mostly for fun rather than ego (my woodworking skills remain modest […]

I’ve been an on-and-off enthusiast for 3D printing for quite some time, but in the early days, it wasn’t what I would call “practical”. They used to be fairly unreliable. In particular, my aging Creality CR-10 had difficulties with bed leveling, and while I kept modifying it to add sensors like the BL-Touch to automate […]

So, I got a new 3D printer about ten days ago, a Creality CR-10. While this printer requires a bit of assembly, it is in general a much nicer printer. It has a 300x300mm heated bed, a control box which is actually in a case that won’t electrocute you, and is constructed from aluminum channel […]

This is just a short set of updates for my weekend projects, meant to keep me in the habit. I’ll write up a more complete version of these projects going forward. First of all, a new acquisition. My Anet A8 3D printer has proven to be, well, not the most reliable of gadgets. I still […]

My previous entry talked about the problems that I’ve been having with the Anet A8. I haven’t had the time to actually do some rework of the connector (I should get to that later today) but while I was commuting I thought about it a bit, and was trying to answer the following questions. How […]

As in most things, whether you achieve success has a lot to do with what connections you have. And this is true of my somewhat unreliable Anet A8 3D printer more than most. My printer had been down for a month while I worked on getting a new hot end installed properly. It wasn’t so […]

3D printing is a big topic, and I’ve done a lot of work with this printer. There is no way for a short blog post to completely describe my experience. Consider this post the slimmest introduction about 3D printing, and a request for questions that can help others who are interested in the topic. My […]

Okay, I bet that hardly anyone comes to this blog anymore.  I’ve been slack, and there hasn’t been any reason other than the simple fact that I haven’t felt motivated to invest the time and energy to talk about any of my projects.  But that doesn’t mean that I have completely halted all attempts at […]

A few days ago I pointed at Mark Harrison’s Instructable on a 1 Hour Quadcopter. I thought it was cool, not so much because it could be built by him in an hour, but because it showed that quadcopters are actually not all that complex, and you might expect to be able to build one […]

I remember reading about Chris Fenton’s homebrew Cray, which was impressive enough. It was implemented on a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA board, and eventually he got a Cray assembler written. It also is neat, because it looks like a tiny Cray: But I wasn’t too interested in actually building one. But the gods of Internet surfing […]

If you haven’t heard of Theo Jansen and his incredible walking machines, I can’t do them justice with words. Check this out: His work is accessible from strandbeest.com. I find his creations amazingly cool. And others do as well, even hamsters (although cats seem less impressed): But while I’ve found these things fascinating, I didn’t […]

Last year, Mark H (who blogs at Eastbay RC got me into the world of building RC airplanes. While my early attempts were limited in their overall successfulness (I demonstrated that I was awfully good at snapping props) I have been keeping up in my interest, and slowly acquiring more tools and hardware. Recently, I’ve […]

Okay, our Replicator 2 went back online this week, and I decided to give printing my Arduino bumper another try. Since the last time, I have revised the program and code a couple of times. I was concerned that the various bits of solder protruding from the bottom of the board would need extra relief […]