The metal shaper man's blog

I just want to park a few research notes somewhere.

I ran across an interesting link on V-rollers and other rollers here.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/deltabot/a3PoNqsLXQc

I’m thinking I want to to go with a plastic roller as opposed to a steel roller…
I found a couple links here:
https://www.inventables.com/categories/frame-rail/wheels

http://openbuildspartstore.com/wheels-bearings/?sort=bestselling

Anyway a bit of reading I need to do.

—-While doing a bit of reading I stumbled over the Cerberus pup..
This really an interesting extruder to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnTLRB1Xc-M&list=PLTdRMts_fjH9XKIkZXFVD1O4QWMegDtmj

Hear’s a variation that’s using spectraline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0uV6PBz_w4
Also is is a very interesting magnetic arm upgrade which is different than the Cerberus pup.
http://spiderbot.eu/technology/tss-three-sphere-system.html

I was thinking about some of the design constraints I set up myself for the new printer.  One mental issue I was having with my initial fork of the Kossel Clear was the perpendicular distance of the belt from the center line of the bearings.   I’m thinking I’d like to minimize that and get it close to the bearings a possible.  Another issue was that I have a bunch of stepper motors in inventory that are not to a standard nema frame..  It would be sort of nice to use them.    The thought occurred to me is that if I rotated the drive pulley 90 degrees and put it on a bearing block I could get that real close and I wouldn’t be dependant on motor frame or shaft size.  Now that being the case, if I did that, it would be trivial to extend the shaft and perhaps mount an encoder on the shaft end… Hmmm. That would be open up the possibility of loosing the stepper motors and coming up with some type of Servo Drive… (I getting way ahead of myself here..(but that would be one way of getting this system to really fly)

If I did this one thought I was having was direct mounting the motor on the shaft with a rigid coupling.  Many moons ago I worked as an application engineer engineer for a power transmission company..  One of the solutions that I saw was a torque arm for a planetary gearbox. If someone is reading this you can see what I’m talking about on here: http://www.automation.siemens.com/mcms/infocenter/dokumentencenter/md/Documentsu20Catalogs/MD20.3_PLANUREX-Planetengetriebe_de_en_fr.pdf
This one of the most elegant solutions I ever seen for keeping radial loads out of a gearbox, and is something I’ve been wanted to try in one of my projects.   This would be total overkill (even for me) for this. But it’s definitely in the bucket list of things to do. (Perhaps for my cnc mill project)  I’m thinking that probably I corporate some standoffs to make room for some type of flexible coupling and and adapter plate for whatever I want.  Putting these constraints is going to change the way things look.

I was looking at the shaft orientation of the Kossel clear.. I like that.. I was looking at the misumi site for details on the extrusion.  http://us.misumi-ec.com/vona2/detail/110300465870/?KWSearch=KHFS3-1515-2000

It looks like the corner rad is 1mm.  I looks like the misumi u-grooves are 2.5 mm http://us.misumi-ec.com/vona2/detail/110300424840/?KWSearch=v-groove

Hmm.. A v-groove won’t work because it’s 60 degree and I’m dealing with 90..
Ok.. Enough of this stuff.  I really need to focus on some other things at the moment.

My inclinations is to find some roller blade bearings and machine some custom pulleys to fit around them.

I couldn’t resist getting in on that $150 free for first time order deal from Misumi  I wound  up getting 20 2 meter 1515 aluminum extrusions  and some nuts and bolts   A guy at the hackerspace that I go to has a Kossel clear is really a sweet machine.   It gives giving me an itch to make another printer.    What I really like the Kossel in general is that it look pretty  cool.   I was really was impressed with  the Bowden extruders.  I really like the idea of getting the mass of the stepper driver out of the system..  supposed the down side of the system there is some springiness for the hobbed wheel being

My  Rockbot is working well but, I think would be nice to get everything moving faster.   I hind site I think it would  be nice to get get some of the mass out of the system so I could push the motors harder.   I had always intended for the rockbot to be a dual head extruder.. I’m wondering if I could use it to print out parts for the Kossell and then do a small production run on some Bowden type heads.

When I build my Rockbot I optimized on speed and quality, so I wasn’t paying attention to what it cost me to build.   I probably haven enough angle aluminum and 3/4 square material to build another 2-3 rockbots.

So.. In this iteration, since I have a functioning printer and no deadline, my basic optimization is quality and price.. Iow’s I think I’m going to take my time on this one.

So.. I was looking at the basic  Kossel.

I like the look but It seems like it has some high cost with the linear rails and the steel frame.
Then I was looking at the Kossel clear

It is a clever design,  Its either aluminium or plexiglas.. I like how they rotated the rails 45 degrees and mount the bearings.  Although, I wonder if I got some I got some square aluminium tube and glued some ptfe on it and slid it over the square aluminium,  I’d be curious how that would work..
I was playing around with the solid model with the Kossel solid and tried rototating a few things and I want to put a tapered Plug screwed down with the cap.  The problem with this is to clear the cap the belt the will be too far from the center line.  Another thing on my mind is I’ve been collecting a bunch of stepper motors and they are necessarily Nema 17  This as me thinking on a bunch of fronts.    I real tempted to mount some bearings and then direct couple a motor with a torque arm on it..

A couple of years back I was very heavily into GTD and was using it well.   I feel that it did have a positive impact on my life as far a getting organized, accomplishing things and doing it in a more or less stress free way.

Unfortunately my system at this point has collapsed.   I was using Tom Octvus tiddly wiki based D3 solution (which I really like).   It wasn’t a collapse as in Meteor strikes the earth all the dinosaurs die event, but more of the fall of the Roman Empire sort of deal.

So.. I’m getting a point in my life where I need to reboot my GTD.   I have new challenges in my worklife as well as ongoing and increasing elder care issues.  My stress levels seem to be increasng  and my bandwidth for fun stuff shrinking..  There are just way too many things I’m keeping in my head that need to come out.  On another note,  I had a line for getting some bee’s for  this season, but with the stuff that’s going one with everything this year,  I think I’m going to mothball that hobby for this year.. ;(  Something needs to give and at this point it’s that.  (Although  who knows with the equipment in the back yard and garage, perhaps I’ll pick up another swarm like I did a few years back)

My kid was up late yesterday, coughing up a storm for most of the night so we called off and I’m having a rare moment of inside the eye of the hurricane quiet that I can see where I’m at and where I want to go.

Reflecting on why my GTD thing collapsed…  Part of the issues was that with Tiddly wiki and the amount of stuff that I had loaded into it was pretty slow..   Another big problem I was having was GTD methodogy was the weekly review.   In hind site, I think that was my single biggest issue that I had I think.   Additionally it seems that I’ve been spending alot of time on my nexus 7 pad instead of my laptop.   There was no way to use D3 on that. It seemed that my office had gone into disarray.

Although in the last statement, there is a ironic twist.   My daughter who enjoys minecraft and cube world was frustrated over the lag that she was experiencing on her old laptop.   I had found Dell T8400 workstations on craigslist for a very reasonable price and I got her one..   They where so nice that I wound up getting one for myself as well.  This caused me to get my office cleaned out and organized for the new unit… And I find I haven’t fired up the pad really in a couple of weeks.  My mancave office is actually feeling quite nice (thank you very much)  I have dual quad core workstation driving it all and dual monitors…  Hopefully I can keep it from getting full of crap.   Now If I can get the workshop and garage under control, now we’re talking.

Anyway… back to the Gtd thing.. After consultation with some of my hackerspace associates I got the recommendation to take a look at Toodledo and Evernote

I seems that evernote is a good place to store stuff, and I think I can make Toodledo behave more D3 Gtd ish  I ran across this blog posting that seems worth looking at. http://30daysnewlife.blogspot.com/p/aprils-30-day-project-using-toodledocom.html

Hopefully there will be more posts as the re-boot progresses.

Ok… I wanted to see if can figure out how to spit out g-code using freecad and heekscnc.So.. I created a little test object here using freecad and I exported it to an Iges…

So… next this is to crank up heeks.
So… for reference

So… I  took a look at this video.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0shGe1daiSo&list=PL2C9F4BAA0CC1C3D4

And It seems like I manage to get some g-code to spit out…

That looks promising.

Oh my this what I get when I let my GTD fall apart. Too many irons in the fire and none getting hot. I have my cnc sherline project thats starting bubble up, but there’s also a functioning shapeoko that I have access to, that I want to play around with.
I hoping that will give me inspirations some to get the cnc juices flowing.
Sooo.. I wanted to find some cam software to generate g-code.

Well I was chit chatting with Dan Falk about some of the stuff he’s done lately in Freecad Cam and other things….
He gave me a bunch of links of some of his code snippets among other things… So I thought I thought I’d just apost up them when I get to the point where I can reference them.  I’m told that these are not ready for prime time… but I think there’s probably some cool stuff in there. This post should be neater, but I am some what I’m time constrained with a bunch of irons.

Well see what he sent me:

http://pastebin.com/5xCrkmD8
Contains parseGroups.py Ok… not sure what that does, but It looks like it parses groups 😉

http://opensourcedesigntools.blogspot.com/2013/11/parsing-solid-models-for-holes.html
Contains: FreeCADholefinder.py
Look like this parsing solids for holes.

http://pastebin.com/cWPb1AUX
Contains:cncOps.py
profile: profile milling function
drillholes: a drilling function
helical_hole: helical hole cutting

http://pastebin.com/bu4NJxUK
toolpathparams.py
Ok.. bunch of classes and stuff… this looks like a biggy.

http://pastebin.com/EEJu4Qkd
find_outer_wires.py: examples for the outer edges of a solid to do profiling on the outside

David Nicolls has been hard at work on the CAM workbench https://github.com/DavidNicholls/FreeCAD_sf_master/commits/nightly

lots of links here http://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5596

Older version of heekscad/heekscnc
https://github.com/danielfalck/heekscad
https://github.com/danielfalck/heekscnc

Ok… For the moment my main goal is to generate some g-code and cut some chips on the shapeoko…   Soo… I went to here and found a download script to get heeks cat running.

http://code.google.com/p/heekscad/wiki/UbuntuInstallation

Hopefully I can generate some joy with heeks for the shapeoko and then see where things are at with freecad cam…

So my young daughter has been want me to help her write her a computer came.. It’s been something talked about on an off.
So someone mentioned this cross platform game development environment called monkeyX.. http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/

I installed but apparently you need to do some stuff to get it working in Linux http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=7600&post=74490

Hmm.. This worked without too much pain.

So I’m still a newb at this app inventor but I’m starting to be some what dangerous one, since I sort of think I’m starting to know what I’m doing 😉

Here’s what’s I’m trying to accomplish on my project to create a custom app for hexy the hexapod.

The main screen fires up to see if the tinydb has been initialized, which should occur the first time the app is run.
Screen1 is supposed to send a startvalue of -99 (it says start “value”, so I thought a numeric might have been required) to frmWebmoves.
This value for some reason doesn’t seem to be passing. (I’m wondering if it has something to do with running in debugging mode)

Anyway… Here’s the issue..

And also here:

Nothing obvious jumping out at the moment as to why this is not working…
I ran across a tutorial on the subject. Time to slow down, drink some coffee (put on a pullover… its’ sort of cold here) and do some reading to see what’s going on,,
Hmm. screen1 can be renamed… I was wondering about that. I guess I should stop trying 😉

So, I’m writing code in the code and then connecting to my nexus 7 using AI companion… I’m wondering if that has something to do with it, since looking at this tutorial, I don’t think I did anything wrong?

I guess I need to figure out how to install an AI2 app.
Here’s a link

Oh dear… It seems that when I create a package and install it, the start value is passed. IOW, The issue lies in the IDE. That seems to make like more difficult for development but it’s good to know. Oth… It was really really easy to install the app on my tablet, so this isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Well, this isthe last day of vacation. ;( Well actually composition of post has bled into the first. second day of work My daughters school got cancelled (again) today since it’s currently -15.5F. -3.6F [Not so] Chilly.. I’ll be heading into work when the wife gets back home. (wed’s is going to be a very very rough day for me)
So till next December I’m going to be a bit more time constrained.

So here’s where things are at: It got the fusion table to download into a tinydb. One thing that I need to take into account is that there is only one tinydb per application and there is no is data in the tinydb. If I’m understanding this correctly there is no method that says the tinydb empty. The post that I’ve found said that most people test to see if a initialization value exists. I was using the tag as the move names thinking that I could have mulitiple db’s. So if I’m going to be storing stuff other than moves in the shared tiny_db we need be able to differentiate the moves from other data.

Ok.. No biggie… So What I need to do is to:

Just a side note.. I ran across this link for new feature for AI2 this is interesting reading.

I’ve run into a snag on the passing get start value from one form to another…. This is very very strange to me since it looks like it should work…. So I think this merits a seperate post.

So I spent a bunch of time(more than I would have like) on getting a tinywebdb service running locally on my machine.. What was appealing to me was that data structure as tinydb so thought I could copy the data over from the web to tinydb so I could run hexy without a web connection…

I thought initially that I could get the pomoco pipe into this and all would be well. Well I did a fair amount of googling an nothing is really jumping out at on how to do that.. I’m thinking that time it would take for me to figure this out isn’t worth it to me at moment. Ai2 is worth pursuing, it’s just a lots of irons in the fire, balls in the airs…ehmmm.

So… Basically I need a way to get hacked pomoco data into a tinydb. In my googling I ran a across fusion tables (first I ever heard of these things) You can import data into them from a CSV and perform sql like operations on them.

New/Revised goals:

I’m thinking the pain factor should be pretty low on this.
Lets.. csv

http://beta.appinventor.mit.edu/learn/reference/components/notready.html
To get the fusion API key you need to go file about in google drive…
But first you need to enabl the api key for fusion tables. http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/content/pizzaparty.html

Ok.. I might as well work through the pizza party, it’s sort of fun. Although I didn’t get the web displays to word properly.. P

Here’s the sql reference to fusion tables:https://developers.google.com/fusiontables/docs/v1/sql-reference

Here’s an interesting application of a insertion query from the pizza party.

Ok..Back to the fusion table table here’s what it looks like..

I have a main form that will fire moves that are stored in a tinydb. I want have a separate screen that will query the fusion table and see if there’s something that could be added to the tinydb handle that within the form. (That’s a few steps again, but at the moment, I just want to pull something out of the fusion table..

And pull something out of the fusion table I have..

This works but the results are a bit ugly.. When I’m looking at the data there are “(“‘s and “)”‘s wrapping it along with a couple of blanks. But hey… I’m qualifying that as a goal met..