If you’ve been following Midsouth Makers you know that we’ve been building. using and tweaking our 3D printers for a while now. Well thanks to a kind donation by LulzBot we now have a dedicated 3D printer at the space for member use! The printer is an AO-101, a MendelMax 1.5 variant.

The AO-101 currently uses 3mm filament and can print in ABS, PLA, Nylon and even Laywoo-D3 wooden filament.  We  have it setup to allow for remote printing on the LAN, using either OctoPrint or Repetier-Server. We recommend Repetier-Server due to it’s stability.

The AO-101 will be using a donated a 1U server as the host computer. Repetier-Server will allow you to load a gcode file and control the printer. We will be exploring webcam functionality for use in monitoring and in generating time-lapse print videos.

We will need the following items to get our new 3D printer setup and functional:

• Filament- Currently setup for 3mm:
  • ABS
  • PLA
• Webcam- Logitech C110 or C270 preferred (we’ve already tested and confirmed stability)
• 120mm silent PC case fan

AO-101 Specifications

• Build Area – 190mm 200mm 100mm
• Hot-end – Budaschnozzle 1.2
  • Extrusion temperature range – 180C – 240C
• Filament- Currently setup for 3mm and can reliably print the following material types:
  • ABS
  • PLA
  • Taulman 618 Nylon
  • Laywoo-D3 Wooden Filament
• Heated Print Bed (65C-110C)
• Borosilicate Glass Bed  with PET film on one side for printing with ABS and bare glass on the other side for printing with PLA
• Integrated Filament Mount for either loose coiled filament or spindles for spooled filament

Current AO-101 Modifications

• Nozzle Fan for printing in PLA installed but not hooked up
• RGB LED lighting (white for now)

More information on the new 3D printer can be found in our wiki.

If you’d like to use it, please contact Claudio, Ben, Dan or Cliff- more information will follow. In order to have access to the 3D printer without one of us present you will need to have had verified prior experience with a RepRap 3D printer, or attended an upcoming class on running & troubleshooting 3D printers(TBD) or be able to demonstrate the appropriate knowledge.

Please show our thanks and appreciation to LulzBot and the RepRap community!

We are slowly and painfully making progress with learning to fly our 3D Printed Mini Quadcopters. Cliff has helped us out with some tweaks & balances. Hopefully some more members will be interested in building their own, and will help add to the swarm.

Recently Ben, Cliff and Claudio have built Diametric’s Mini Quadcopter. We met a fellow RepRap user- Diametric- at this years Midwest RepRap Festival in Elkhart Indiana. He brought along a 3D printed quadcopter that he designed and built.

The quadcopters are remarkably inexpensive, the design, models and bill of materials can be found on Thingiverse. They are easy to build and easy to get off the ground. We’re still learning how to fly them however. While all three have taken flight, we have had some accidents and damaged the frames on 2 of them, twice. We’re not too worried when that happens, for we can always reprint the frame within about an hour and a half on one of our 3D printers.

My wife and I will shortly be moving into a new house. This house has nice side section on the side that is fenced off and I think will make a good vegetable garden, so I figured I’d keep a project log.
There are a couple of facts I need to make the reader aware of
1) Here is how this area looks now:

As you can see, it has been pretty neglected and left to run to seed.
2) The closest I have ever been to growing things has involved an animal-shaped pottery and some slimy seeds (http://www.chiapet.com/index.php/original-chia-pet). Since when it comes to growing things I am a complete dummy, it should come as no surprise that I will be using this book:

To guide me along.
My ultimate goal when finished is to have a garden of different types of vegetables (and maybe some fruit here and there) to supplement our groceries, help us eat healthier and make things more convenient than having to run to the store all the time for different items.
The first step (and most likely the hardest) is clearing out this area. Complicating things is that there is no telling what is hidden in the overgrowth, so until I clear the space out I will list the “treasure” I find each day.

DAY 1
TOOLS:
1 Gardening hoe (no jokes!)
1 Garden Fork
Based on the images above, I made the assumption that everything was dirt from the shed to the far fence. However, once I started, this is what I found instead:

Bricks and paving stones!

It might be hard to see above, but click the image to see the large size – there are bricks and paving stones covering much that area. So, I will need to pull most of these up before I start planting. I will probably leave a small area for a path and place to put a small table and chair under the awning.
Even with the little surprise, I was able to accomplish what I planned for today – I cleared as much of the overgrowth from the fenced in section as I could and enough on the other side to allow both gates to open and close freely.
GOAL: Clear out fenced in section of overgrowth
Status: Mostly Complete, with a surprise!
Treasure: A 5ft long post hole digger(handles intact and metal in excellent shape), bricks/paving stones, a decomposing Croc, and some empty aluminum cans, vintage indeterminate
OTHER THOUGHTS: I should have brought a large blade straight edged and a curved edge shovel and a couple of shears/loppers of various sizes. Those will be included next time as I go to work on the saplings and brush that has sprung up in and around this section of the garden.

Recently Roy and I set out to build set out to build a better headphone amplifier for our higher end Sennheiser headphones. A headphone amp simply boosts the power to the headphones a bit, this results in better sound on the bigger headphones. The design is built around a know design over at Diy Audio Projects. It is a Class A amplifier with a 12AU7 tube. We ended up puting a spin on the project and added a PCM2704 USB DAC (sound card). Sweet glowing tube action pictures are below.