Freeside Atlanta

Thanks everyone who came out! It was a fun event and we're already talking about next year. You've still got plenty of time to build a bot for Dragon*Con, Maker Faire, or Chattacon also. The 12's and 30lb bots certainly faced the challenge of the post apocalyptic landscape that is the parking lot behind Freeside. Next year I expect to see some bots with modifications to handle the uneven surfaces better. Wedges built for a stage fight didn't fare too well against the cracked pavement and potholes. Results: 1lb: 1st- Algos 2nd- Death By Twinkies 3rd- Eleos 3lb: 1st- Torgo 2nd- Naked Singularity 12lb: 1st- Omega Force 2nd- Abrasive Personality 3rd- Hypnus 30lb: 1st- Nyx 2nd- Spanky 3rd- Overthruster Video Playlist of the fights Videos courtesy of Near Chaos Robotics

 The Atlanta Cosplay Meetup has been making a ton of progress on our Marines & Xenos group costume. We have finished up build day #6 so let's take a look and see where things are at currently! We've finished principal construction of the Marine torso armor and are working on finishing it currently. The cardboard masters were coated in fiberglass resin to give them strength, and we are going over them with bondo body filler to smooth them out. After a few more passes they should be smooth enough to use as vacuumforming masters, or to mold and cast in resin and fiberglass mat for strength. We've also started building the leg armor, using the same method as the torso. All that is left for the Marine armor is to 3D print the shoulder parts, and the helmet and various attachments. Adam purchased the same WWII helmet used in the film, which will become the base for our helmet that we will make out of cast resin and fiberglass mat. The Pulse Rifle ha

The Atlanta Cosplay Meetup is a bi-monthly-ish group of cosplayers, prop builders, and costume makers hosted at Freeside Atlanta. We have been meeting since October 2014 to share ideas and projects. In November we began discussing an idea about making a group costume - something we could all work on, and eventually wear, together - and how we could make that into a reality. After a lot of debate (and a little help for Rachel who had already made her own Xenomorph costume!) we settled on making a Colonial Marines and Xenos group from the Aliens franchise. We just recently wrapped up our 3rd group build, so let's recap what we've done so far. Our first build we focused on planning and various ideas of what we wanted to do and how we wanted to get there. We decided to use Pepakura to laser cut cardboard as the rough master for our Marine's armor, and to 3D print some of the detail parts as well as their various weapons. Pepakura is a program that takes a 3D object

On Saturday, we had one of our semi regular facility build-outs. These are great for the space and our members as it lets us focus on working on the space itself as a project to improve and maintain Freeside. This time we did a lot of cleaning up and tidying after some of the major projects at Freeside! Between the JAM build the past few months and the recent power additions, a lot of organization work was needed. Demontre and Niels put some more time into the indoor paint booth! Not much left on this project now, all we need is the exhaust fans and the filters and we're ready to paint. Nathan and Paul painted the new folding chairs for the space. Karen and Adam helped to tidy up the lumber and plastics consumables. Now we can get to scrap lumber and laserable plastics easier! Everyone pitched in to clean up the center of the workshop and open that space back up. So much room for activities! Not pictured: Tons of old dead paint that was dis

     Have you ever needed to cut a circle? Turns out you can't just freehand that. If you want to cut a circle you need a.... Circle Jig! This handy little thing straps onto a standard router. You stick a pin in one of the little holes for the center, strap a router to the other side and route yourself a circle. Here's a commercial circle jig. Seems simple enough. Now what if you want this thing -Right Now-? Well then you better have a Laser Cutter and some Acrylic. Step 1 of the design comes from measuring out the dimensions of the existing router plate. What are those curved holes for? Who knows? But they look cool right? Starting from a base circle of diameter 1/4 in (size of the router bit) we offset another circle at some whole number of mm to mark the smallest radius we can cut. Then we offset a whole bunch of other circles in 2mm increments. Then add some horizontal lines. We want to place the center holes at intersections of the horizontal lines and ci

As the cold weather season arrives in Atlanta, with it comes issues with our 3D printers. Specifically problems with temperatures and print stability. Freeside is essentially a big warehouse, and our 3D printing station is setup in the large open area in the front of the space. What this means is that when it is cold in the space, this will affect the printing quality because the ambient temperature is far lower than what is optimal for thermoplastics. The cold ambient air will cause parts to rapidly cool during the middle of a print. And with materials like ABS which can shrink dramatically during cooling, this causes prints to warp, deform, and delaminate during and after printing is finished. The print on the left is showing signs of delamination from plastic cooling mid print. To remedy this, we built an acrylic enclosure for our LulzBot AO-100, which is our dedicated ABS printer. We tested the proof of concept of whether an enclosure would help mitigate printing problem

A few years ago, a Freeside collaboration resulted in some published medical research on using 3D Printing in pre-surgery planning . In our second collaboration, we used gaze tracking to gather data on how surgeons with different levels of experience look at radiographs when diagnosing hallux valgus deformities. The new paper got published in the current issue of the Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery . Interestingly enough, we actually came up with the concept for this project during a meetup about interactive art installations. The idea of eye tracking came up and we discussed what we could discover with the technology. So we started to try to figure out how to a study with the free and open-source tools available. We ended up needing: A webcam to look at the user's eyes. ITU Gaze Tracker to calibrate and interpret that data. (However, their website is now down, so I'm not sure how viable this is as part of the toolchain now.) OGAMA - Open Gaze and Mouse Analysis