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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Heddle Loom is finished!




It's been done for a few days, but my daughter used it for the first time today. We watched a few instructional videos on how to weave, and we figured it out together. I think she now has a new hobby. 

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Heddle construction.

Today, I glued to heddle with wood strips.  After this, its a matter of building the heddle mount.

Friday, January 25, 2013

Rigid Heddle Loom part 2

I've made good progress on the Loom. The frame has come together and I've got all the printed parts completed. What's left at this point, is to finish up the heddle and the side mount for the heddle. Hopefully my daughter will appreciate and use this loom to make something nice.
Two shuttles with a loop puller.

Spool holder.

Nothing too exciting, I received my spool of gray 3 millimeter ABS plastic. It was on a spool 100 mm wide, and I had to re-design and reprint a new spool holder to fit. I'm starting to give serious thought to a better multi-spool solution. I tend to swap colors quite a bit. For every new color I get, my gf insists I print her a pig.
My previous spool holder only goes a little mor ethan halfway through the spool  - causing it to droop and not spin properly
The 100mm tall spool holder in ReplicatorG

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Rigid Heddle Loom

What do you mean "Rigid Heddle Loom"? I thought this was a technology projects blog?! Well, a few days ago, after dropping off my girlfirend, I came home to find my daughter Chloe building something out of Popsicle sticks and tape. After my initial puzzlement, she told me that she wants to start weaving. She was trying to make a weaving loom.

She and I talked about weaving for a few, then started to browse eBay for a simple beginners loom. After going through many pages, I determined several things: 1) Any weaving loom in the price range that i was thinking (~50$) was only going to buy a toy - not suitable for anything other than learning and 2) a decent loom for her age and skill ability that was able to actually weave something nice was going to be 150-300$.

After putting the kiddos to bed, I started doing research on looms. The history of weaving, companies that made decent looms such as Ashford, Beka, Harrisville, Kromski, and several others. I took the time to analyze several popular designs, took note, and watched a few dozen videos on loom weaving  and loom use on YouTube. 

After sleeping on it, I started designing a 24x18 Rigid Heddle Loom that took the best properties from several designs. I made a few patterns, and started cutting wood for it today. I downloaded and started printed the heddle portion from http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11374 on my 3d printer. 

Printing some heddles
2 heddles are 7 1/2 inches



The 2 sides of the loom
I'm making good progress on this and expect to be done with it in the next few days. My 3d UV DLP printer is on hold for now. 

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Some Progress this weekend

I didn't get as much done on my project this weekend as I had hoped. I did manage to print and attach some handles to the cabinet I built. I also put together the polycarbonate build tray with some plastic glue. Hopefully this will be a suitable tray for build. I still have a pane of glass that can be used if the UV resin sticks to the polycarbonate plastic too much. I also started the assembly of z-axis that I printed from my Thingiverse "Generic 23 printed axis" object http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:37123 .

The Z axis being assembled
The completed polycarbonate build tray


Friday, January 11, 2013

More DLP Printer progress.

I made a case for my DLP printer. 3/4 inch MDF. With a walnut top. Also shown are a bag of the printer parts for the z axis. Additionally, I cut some polycarbonate plastic for the UV resin tank. Tomorrow, I put it all together.  We'll see what happens.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Infocus Dlp

I'm going through the process of removing the color wheel, wish me luck...

Update: Alright, the patient lived. I broke off the color wheel of the Infocus 2104 DLP projector (http://whatlaptop.techradar.com/2008/11/infocus-in2104/). From what I understand, the color wheel was blocking the frequencies of light needed to cure the UV resin I have. The picture now looks black and white. I also removed a suspicious pane of glass between the bulb and the DLP chip. It looked coated, and I suspect it filtered UV. 

I found some fairly cheap UV resin the that's used to resin cure surf boards, among other things. http://www.solarez.com/ .They have a ton of dirt cheap UV resin products, and I've been in contact with the company who is looking into a special UV resin for 3d printers and the 3d printing community. 

I did a few quick checks, curing resin at various distances, using the resin and a popsicle stick. I used my app to project a few images. The resin I have is fairly thick, and I suspect I will need to add a few power resistors attached to the glass tank to warm the resin in the build tray to make it less viscous.

I've calculated and measured that I need a 12"x18"x24" enclosure to hold the project, pc power supply, motherboard (TBD), Arduino, stepper motor controller boards, etc...


Tuesday, January 8, 2013

3D UV DLP Printer progress



I've been working on a new 3d printer lately. It's a 3d UV DLP printer that uses a photosensitive UV resin to create high resolution models. I've made some good progress lately and I wanted to show some results. I made a posting earlier to Thingiverse, sharing my first alpha build of my slicing and control software. You can take a look at it here:  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:40778 . I've also gone ahead and posted the source code on GitHub here: https://github.com/Pacmanfan/UVDLPSlicerController . I've very proud of the slicing and control application that I've created. Getting the slicing to work correctly and handle all the special cases was no easy task.



Saturday, January 5, 2013

Bus Blaster

I received my BusBlaster from dangerousprototypes.com today. I quickly printed a case out of ABS from a model on www.thingiverse.com .