LesHall

Here it is in printed form. As expected the tool is a bit wobbly but it's functional and will probably work OK once I beef it up and reduce tolerances a bit. Les Les be friends!

Behold! My creation, this device is intended to help you make copies of small objects in wax, clay, or other soft materials. I came up with it out of my age old brain, lol, ancient wisdom (or the lack thereof) going zany again! So someone told me about the Router Duplicator which is a big huge version of this little plastic thing. He showed me some youtube video s of the things making guitar bodies and such. But the one shown below is for smaller stuff and soft materials. Anyway, behold! That's the third print almost ready to test for mechanical motion and stability. It's parameterized in OpenSCAD and I'll upload the DupliGator.scad file soon enough on YouMagine. This third one I optimized for a quick print and I think I made the tool and rod parts too spindly and small. Maybe a little bigger will work best. Also I have a lot of tweaking to do. Les Les get to it!

My next iteration, complete with head, arms, hands, and of course boobs. i spent a lot of time on the boobs. Because everyone loves boobs. Men, women, even babies love boobs.. Les Les make it happen!

OK so Sander challenged me to be a winner not a quitter, so I put a lot of time today into this wayward endeavor and now it's time for a POW-WOW! Pictured are my first attempt, so slack that she cannot even stand up. Or maybe she's on substances and cannot even stand up! Lol that was me back in my drinking days (sober 1.5+ years now). So the one on the right stands but her feet are so big and gently tapered and smooth on the bottom and she's not balanced so she just snowski's down the ramp. What's good about both of them is that the hinges are print-in-place. Yep, no hardware or filament or pin or anything required! It uses the phenomenal bridging capability of the Ultimaker (a true luxury compared to my old Printerbot) to make hinge pins at the top of the bot's legs. So at least that is done right or nearly right. The reason I say POW-WOW is I'd like some feedback on what to do next? Les Les be friends!

Oh yeah, found a better (wood) surface on which to test the new custom robot, which only has an underdeveloped body and legs/feet right now and is a female robot! Its purple too so maybe it's a minority lol.

Grrr Sander, I am no quitter and I know when to cut my losses, but I have a new idea and I think I'll pursue it. I'm planning to design my own little robot!

powerful tool~

Yes, I feel robotically challenged! So I printed and buit the robot made by some skilled combatant in this competition - thanks BTW - and it did not walk, not for me anyway. I roughened up the bottom of his little robot footsies to get better traction and that seems to help. Actually after some fitting with the X-Acto around the PLA hinge the thing sort of walked a little but not really. Then i got fed up and quit. Sigh. Les

Yes, I feel robotically challenged!

Yay it worked... sorta kinda, but not really. See this photo shows that the support for the head and ears goes all the way to the ground. I want to see it grow from an internal spot to the place unside the top of the part where it is needed. Then later we can add it coming from an angle from a side wall, even better! Les Les make it happen!

I tried it and it worked! This will create a major speedup for me, thanks owen!!!

If you have been thinking of it and I have been thinking of it, I bet a bunch of others have too. Sounds like an idea that's ripe for action! Any Cura programmers around? Les Les make it happen!

exactly

Nyuck nyuck woob woob woob! No wait, boob boob boob! This is getting silly... Les

Dang, you are not playing around!

that's a good idea, I can use meshmixer to hollow out the piece, but how can I get the slicer, in my case Cura but really any slicer to create support inside of it? Do I have to remove the bottom? Or will using support do it? Alas, my cat Schrodinger disappeared in an ultraviolet catastrophe! So sad... Les Les make it happen!

Okay so I have made an attempt at testing this idea. What I did was kind of poor judgement. Long story short I thought the Ultimaker would fail in printing at the tippy top of this kitty cat model when printed with zero infill, one layer shell, and three layers top / bottom filament. Well the Ultimaker being as awesome as it is, managed to print the top with east, grace, speed, and agility as it always does! I was hoping to push the printer beyond it's limits then add my internal support idea and have it work, then finally to print with infill for a comparison of apples to apples. So that idea is shot but with a tougher print that actually does push the Ultimaker beyond it's limits, like a really long bridge, then I will be able to compare. Les Les make it happen!

OK, so anyway here goes with the story. I printed a kitten statue back about a year and a half ago on my ROBO3D and it had a hole in the top of it's head and some messy filament deposited across and around the hole. This, I reasoned, was due to the slope of the head and surrounding area of being like a flattened down sphere. Well I went to do a test of an internal support idea that I had, in which I put a rod from the throat of the kitten, running internally to the center of this dome, to help with the bridging. Long story short when the printing was done I found no difference between the rod sample and the unmodified sample. The Ultimaker was so damn good at doing it's job that the kitten was printed flawlessly with or without my help of the internal support! That goes to show you what an amazing printer we have. I feel so fortunate to have one. Les out! Les make it happen!

I had a ROBO3D as my first printer. They were just out of kickstarter and struggling to meet orders which they did and now they've got a decent product at an amazingly low price for all the printer quality and performance that you get. So its a great printer now, but back then sheesh! What a sucky printer. Hahahaha - funny how things change! Back then the wiring harness was a rat's next of cluttered mess trapping heat onto the RAMPS board, which got so hot it melted the bed heater connector among other failures. I'm lucky the thing did not go up in flames. So for that reason, I think the print quality was a bit off which is why I told you all that, so now we get to the point here, which is a tail of two kitties. Say what? Yes, a tail of two kitties. Wait I have a Skype call. More in a jiffy. Les out! Les make it happen!

Well as a newcomer, I'd rather see what Sander calls a "mature" forum than the opposite. Consider the ESP8266 forum - a wonderful technology so disruptive that people are flocking together to use it, well when I went to read it there was so much asking for help it seemed like the whole forum was filled with only that! No content! Now clearly that was and is not the case, just the nature of the product being so powerful, so amazing, and so new. Just wait ti Ultimaker releases a metal printer or somesuch, that'll crank up the heat (so to speak)! Les Les make it happen!

Boink! Went my brain when I suddenly realized this concept, the Internal Support, that apparently in retrospect has been nagging at me for some time. What if we changed our slicers to add support on the inside of the part just as we often do (when necessary) on the outside of the part? Wouldn't that boost print speed dramatically? OK, so we've been using infill since forever, and we have all watched with patience and acceptance that infill is usually necessary. We try to tweak the infill percentage and come up with all sorts of infills and infill only where necessary, which are all helpful techniques, so why use internal support? Well Im kind of wondering about that. Why is support external and infill internal? Why don't we use external infill and internal support? It seems to me that some sort of branching structural support, placed on the inside of the part, would be more efficient than a fixed pattern. In addition to that, we have support touching build plate versus support everywhere, how about support from lower internal surface of part to upper internal surface of part? These are questions that I'd like to discuss. Your comments/suggestions are welcome as always. Les Les make it happen!

Hhahahah! Funniest thing I've seen in a while, thanks for the laugh! Les Les make it happen!

Can you see what this says?

Hi Guy, thanks for your interest. Well, our initial goal is to work only with the minimum possible platform, at the suggestion of e-NABLE's founder and spokesperson - John Schull. So with Jon's direction I chose to make the device report it's own battery voltage up to the cloud server that Ro created just for this purpose. So that's for starters. Then after that are the super hero powers. OK that takes some explanation. You see, at e-NABLE we have noticed an amazing phenomenon which goes like this... Our recipients are mostly kids with limb differences, most notably a disorder which causes one in 2,000 kids to have no fingers on one or both of their hands. These kids have been teased into depression and sadness by their peers for being different. Well, when they get a hand or arm from e-NABLE, it's a real cybernetic device attached directly to this limb difference. To the kids this is major coolness. All the other kids want to know about their peer with the robotic device. Suddenly the kid goes from being unpopular to being the most popular kid in the class! This works wonders for their self esteem. Well, multiplying this effect is the fact that super heroes are so popular today. We have learned that making the hands have superhero themes really helps to further amplify this effect of popularity. Everyone wants to meet the kid with the superhero cybernetic hand! Well about a year ago I was thinking of this whole phenomenon and we were just beginning to make prosthetic devices that LOOKED like superhero themed appendages - superman, batman, wonder woman, all that jive. I got to thinking and it occurred to me: "We're engineers, technicians, fabricators, designers, CAD operators, and every aspect of technology pretty much is represented by our e-NABLE members, so why not utilize all that talent into making the hands REALLY do superhero stuff? Starting with electronics, and possibly later getting into mechanical stuff, I made an effort that I called "Spidey Sense" which gave the hands super directional hearing. Then I kind of left e-NABLE for a while to pursue a water project because I thought it was an opportunity to do the greater good, so Jon asked me to summarize my work in an Instructables article which I did. Then after some months I came back to e-NABLE and sometime after that I became enamored with the amazing game-changing IoT WiFi chip from China called the ESP8266. I made a wearable network scanner just for fun and being so excited about it I wanted to share with my friends at e-NABLE. That's when I posted a cheezy photo of me with the scanner. Well, in the process I mentioned that we could make the prosthetics "Phone Home" and I think it was Jon who asked how small one of these chips could be and how much would they cost? Then the project went from there. I started doing the engineering of the thing and don't you know the work was fast, easy, and fun. Sometimes in our work efforts it's like an uphill climb and other times it's smooth sailing. This was the latter, as if it were something that was meant to be. Well anyway, some folks like Chuck and Vikram and others made contributions and a guy named Ro who works with our servers made a simple cloud server at my request. We have since upgraded this server into an MQTT cloud instance. Well I have news of our meeting last night but that will have to wait a bit because someone is messaging me on Skype. I'll tell more of this tale and better answer your question, Guy, in a while. Les Make history!