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. 

Heddle construction.

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

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

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. 

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

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.

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...

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.

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 .

Completed Inkshield kit.

The goal here is to see if UV resin can be sprayed through an inkjet nozzle.  This may allow construction of an Objet-like printer.

Inkshield kit

I finally have all the pieces for my ink shield kit. My intent is to see if I can use to and shield kit for a UV printer. I'm going to have to experiment with the UV resin to see if I can use the ink cartridge to emit it.

Up and running.

My CNC machine appears to be working great! A few more tweaks and it'll be perfect.

An idea for a 3D Printer

Ok, an idea...

The idea here is to create a printer that uses an x/y stage like an FDM machine. On the Z-Axis, there will be a mechnism for depositing a UV-curable resin. This resin can be cured quicky by the placement of a UV light source pointed from the deposition head. The depositor can be comprised of one or more piezo print heads. These print heads can either be re-purposed from inkjet cartridges, or built independantly (Parameterized Printable Inkjet Head

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5194 )

Design Goals

One design goal is to have a very accurate and fast X/Y stage, while the Z-stage needs to have micron accuracy(hopefully). The real question is the emission rate of the UV resin from then depositor/emitter? The UV polymer liquid I have is very thick at room temperature, but becomes very viscous when heated. I need to investigate the frequency and amplitude of the driver circuitry to be able to vary the rate of deposition of the polymer. I also need an accurate measure of material consumed.

Hardware

I may need a heater element to pre-heat the UV resin in the emitter

I may need a peristoltic pump to pump the resin into the emitter.

I'll need to either alter my makerbot, fix up my rep-rap and reprogram it, or hopefully build a new Type-A machine that I've been waiting to cut.

Software

I will need a way to activate/set the rate of this emitter.

Can it be done through G-code commands.

For multiple emitters, can I specify a line's worth of data and an origin/vector with parameters such as dpi and have the firmware do the rest?

I will have to write my own slicer or modify an existing slicer program to support he new Gcode commands.

Color and format

If I go the route of using inkjet printer cartridges, I can support full-color printing with the addition of multiple print cartridges. It may be worthwhile to reverse-engineer a print head that supports multiple colors and multiple line emitters (8x 16x 24x) for each color.

If I can devise modifications and additional commands to G/M code, then I can specify commands to define a line of data in a format, the format of that data (Dots per inch, number of samples, color format of each sample, UV resin deposition can be treated like another color channel, deposition rate )

Interface

I could write my own firmware, or modify some other FW for Arduino-based devices.

Additionally, I can use my Raspberyy Pi computer at a front- panel compter. This RaspPi will control the Arduino or printer controller card that interprets the gcode.

This RaspPi could act as a print-server, controlling lights, camera, prividing a front-panel GUI on the composite LCD with a control button panel. The RaspPi cound be a network print server over TCP/IP

Raspberry Pi

I'm in the process of setting up my RaspPi device with a composite lcd. My intent is to configure this to be the onboard computer for my next 3d printer.

Mill is fixed.

I fixed and attached the motor for the x axis. The Z Stage needed a motor swap as well. I think everything is 100% now. I'm going to find a good gcode file to made this machine run through its paces.

Zombie Cookie Cutter!

 Last week, I was chatting with my friend Andrea, and she asked me if I could make a zombie cookie-cutter. She does a lot of baking, and said that people would pay a lot of money for something like this. I went ahead and found an image of a zombie cookie cutter, traced it in Inkscape ( http://inkscape.org/ ), and turned it into a vector that I imported into OpenSCAD (http://www.openscad.org/).

A half hour later, I had a new Zombie cookie cutter, ready for use.

Z-axis successfully rebuilt

Now I've gotta fix the x axis and it'll all be good.

New Z Axis

My CNC Mill

Well, I'm finally getting back to work on my CNC mill. The Z axis has been broken for sometime. I used my 3d printer to make a few new needed parts.