Freeside Atlanta

I've been running Sprinter on a RAMPS 1.4 control board for my MendelMax since I built it a few weeks ago. This is the most common firmware in use, with the most community support. However there are other firmware options that are faster and more cutting edge, at the expense of having more bugs and a smaller user base. Today I switched to Marlin because I read that it handles acceleration between moves more smoothly, and can draw smooth arcs as well (a much more experimental feature). I chose this funnel as my test print because the cone and cylinders comprising it cover a range of arc sizes. On the left we have a print with Sprinter. There is a strong ridge at the layer change point near the left side, and additional ridges on every edge around the model. This print took about 40 minutes. In the middle is the exact same gcode run by Marlin. The edge ridges are gone, but the layer change ridge is more pronounced, especially on the cylinder at the top. This is much closer to wh

Zane, a member of the 7Hills Makerspace (http://www.7hillsmake.org/) to the north of us, has made this great light display for in front of his house. "...powered by a bluetooth enabled Arduino..." About $30 in parts and many hours with Zane's brain. http://zanecochran.com/entry.php?blog_id=335 Check out their group at http://www.7hillsmake.org/ and tell them Freeside says "Hello."

Our Dr. Glass and Sparr fight it out on who can create the fastest. From Dr. Glass: This was part of a "Day Project" at FreesideAtlanta.org In all fairness, Sparr and I became challenged in a Speed-Modeling contest. Me on Lightwave 3D and he on OpenSCAD. Sparr was victorious, but agreed to let me upload my model anyways. Thanks bud. I'm including this original as well as the Freeside Atlanta emboss.

Now that winter is coming to the northern hemisphere, getting up for work means getting out of bed before the sun comes up. In order to help the natural waking mechanism of light, I've decided to hack together a sunrise alarm clock on a shoestring budget. Part List: Arduino Real Time Clock Module ( http://www.sparkfun.com/products/99 ) 24xAssorted LEDs (In my case: 3UV, 2 Blue, 4 Red, 3 Yellow, 12 White) 24xResistors, 220ohm Solderless Breadboard Assorted wires 3x74HC595 shift registers A Shadow Display Box Frosting Spray To put this thing together I used Elco's ShiftPWM Library to control the 24 LEDs. You could go bigger, but I wanted this to all fit into the box. Personally, I had some PCBs from a previous project that I could fashion to make the LEDs easier to mount. Everything is hooked up like in the schematic: The "To SCL" and "To SDA" lines go to the Real Time Clock Module. The parts are all mounted to the backing board of the shadow display box lik

I am coming to freeside tonight. I should be there around 7.30pm I finished the hardware build of the new dual extruders from makerbot. Also their new interface kit build. I'll be installing them and doing the software work, calibration and hopefully a print or new design for the dual extruders before the night is up. Since I am going to be in the space anyway, I am going to open this to anyone who wants to attend. If you are bored or free try to stop by... Anyone interested in our progress on this is welcome to come read about it at http://www.linkreincarnate.com/

We will have some free freeside (free^2side?) keychains at our 3d printing presentation at Dragon*Con. In the meantime you can download the stl of the keychain here and a few of our logo stl files as well.

Here's a new video walkthrough of our space. Enjoy! Thanks to Engunneer and PeterP for hosting!