Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:44:47 -0500

Here's my friend and collaborator Sunil explaining how to thread the belt onto the Y Idler assembly during the build process on a RepRap machine. This was done at Medialab Prado during Interactivos '09.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 20:28:06 -0500

This is a funky pumpy thingimajig that I made for an art show. It pumps, it pulses, and its glittery and awesome.

If you want one of these pumps, get yourself a lasercutter and head over to: thingiverse.com/thing:167

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:37:26 -0400

Laser cutting plastics that contain chlorine (aka PVC) is bad. It releases dangerous chlorine gas which is corrosive. Adam wanted to etch his laptop safely, so we needed to identify the plastic in his lid.

To do this, we used Science. There is a guide on how to identify polymers based on a series of tests. We used the copper wire test and deduced that his laptop was safe to etch. Yay!

More info here: chymist.com/Polymer%20Identification.pdf

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:15:19 -0400

We stopped at an unnamed vista along the Oregon coast. It was a cloudy/foggy day but it was still pretty.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, Jen Dunlap

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:38:24 -0400

Angel's Island is this kickass, sort of deserted island with a mysterious past. Its in the middle of the SF bay, you have to take a ferry out to it, and they only have 9 primitive campsites (well, 10 if you count the kayak only campsite).

After the day tourists leave, you're basically the only one on the island and its really rad and spooky with all the abandoned army / immigration buildings that are in various states of decay.

Plus, theres an old missile silo on the island. So. Rad.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, Jen Dunlap

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:32:53 -0400

A few minutes of the famous and gorgeous coastal Highway 1 in California. Make a promise to yourself to drive down it at least once in your life.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, Jen Dunlap

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:52:56 -0400

a freaky looking storm rolled across NYC the other day. here's the shot from the vimeo office. i got it on sd card.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:12:03 -0400

This is a new board I've made, called the Sanguino. Its an Arduino compatible board based on the beefy atmega644P chip. Its got 64k of flash, 4k of ram, and 32 GPIO pins. Its pretty sweet!

Check it out: sanguino.cc

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:12:17 -0400

I did some casting this last weekend with a mold that I made. Its a fun little process so I decided to make a timelapse of it. Check it out!

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:21:49 -0400

We did it! Arduino is fully ported to the atmega644: bootloader and core libraries both work great. I have a prototype board in production right now, and we just need to hash out the collaboration details with the Arduino core team. Once that is done, you'll be able to get your hands on an awesome, cheap, and powerful Arduino compatible board.

Yay!

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:01:57 -0400

My new friend online, Jordan Miller, has been doing a series of renderings in Blender of a RRRF.org logo. They look awesome and I wanted to share them with you.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:59:16 -0400

I'm in the process of porting the Arduino environment to the atmega644 for a skunkworks project I'm working on. This chip is awesome because it has 4x the flash (64k vs 16k) it has 4x the RAM (4k vs 1k) and 12 more I/O pins (32 vs 20)

Its the biggest and baddest atmel chip that has a DIP version that I could find.

Here is a video of my first major success where I wrote and uploaded an Arduino sketch to it.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:43:59 -0400

Me building an Opto Isolator board. More info: make.rrrf.org/oi-1.0

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:15:15 -0400

Its been a while, but I finally got my machine back in action and printing. Yay!

I ran out of time last night, but I'll have more videos and timelapses soon!

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Tue, 27 May 2008 10:27:05 -0400

Jen takes us on a tour through our new apartment. Woo!

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, Jen Dunlap

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:55:36 -0400

Warning: this board is completely awesome.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:49:34 -0400

My BFF and deskmate Sox made an amazing discovery: Chocolate Skittles.

Watch the vimeo and see our reactions.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, Andrew Pile, Soxiam, Ted Roden and Patrick Moberg

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:53:20 -0400

Its a syringe based extruder prototype I designed! Lasercut acrylic + off the shelf parts. Hell yeah.

Shh... its a 'secret' project though.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:09:52 -0400

One of the nice side benefits of our recent work into having the host output GCode, and having the Arduino process that GCode is that we can reduce the delay between line segments by buffering GCode to the Arduino.

Here's a video demonstrating the movement.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:21:51 -0500

Sign on with the NYC Resistors. You've got mail!

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:34:30 -0500

I had my first real visit to the FabLab as a fellow. Jon guided me through using the ShopBot software to create a CNC cut bed for my RepRap machine! Yay for computers and robots.

More info:
ssbxfab.org - Sustainable South Bronx Fab Lab
reprap.org - Self Replicating 3D Printer

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:02:03 -0500

My first 'real' shot at printing something. I dont quite have all the parameters perfected yet, so the print doesnt come out quite as I had hoped, but its a beginning.

Also, this is 2 separate prints rolled into one. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to film this and hopefully the next ones will be better. I'd love to mount the camera on the extruder itself =)

reprap.org

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:30:14 -0500

Here's my robot 'printing' its not doing so well, but its still on its baby legs.

ps. thats a weak 'sike' at the end.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:55:06 -0500

My first 'real' weekend at the NYC Resistor space. I spent it building a new robot for a friend while the other peeps started work on the loft in the background.

ps. sorry about the nickelback... its all i had ;)

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:56:16 -0500

I got the Canon SD 750 on Blake's suggestion. Mostly because i needed a camera that can do timelapse. This rocks so hard. Be on the lookout for many timelapse videos to come.

YAY!

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:36:28 -0500

I had to remix this video. So good!

Original: vimeo.com/413548

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:23:56 -0500

Here is the first run of my Darwin machine. Will it work? Watch and see

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, eD Sells

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:54:10 -0500

Ed gets bored at the lab and decides to do pullups from the ceiling pipes.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:52:43 -0500

We have to put a bunch of nuts on this studding and its a PITA manually. Bollocks to that!

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, eD Sells

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:49:23 -0500

Ed visited me and heres a video of us working in the lab.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, eD Sells

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 09:21:35 -0500

this is the new stepper motor driver board v1.1. It has blinky LEDs.

More info here: make.rrrf.org/smd-1.1

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:52:24 -0500

We're trying to find a standard stepper motor for the RepRap project. This one is a great candidate! Here is a video of it in action.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:40:20 -0500

Hell yeah! Jonny Tigertail takes us on an amazing journey into the heart of the Florida Everglades.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, Jen Dunlap and Mike Basten

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:33:52 -0500

She's shy, but thats also what makes her so beautiful.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:59:03 -0500

Here is my robot up and running... on all 3 axes!!!

Now I just have to write the code to let it talk to the RepRap host software and I'll be able to start doing test prints.

Woooo hoooo!!!

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:57:51 -0500

It works! Here are all 3 axes running at a decent speed.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 09:26:16 -0500

My stepper motors have 200 steps in one revolution, that is: You need to send them 200 'pulses' at a regular interval for them to rotate smoothly.

There are two ways to do this in software:

1. send a pulse, wait X microseconds, send next pulse. this is blocking, meaning you cant do anything else because all your time is spent waiting.

2. check to see if its time to send a pulse, and send it if you can. if you can, then step, note the time, and continue. this is non blocking, because you aren't waiting... you're just regularly checking. this means you can do things in the background, or control multiple motors. its also sort of tricky.

in this video, i finally got my non-blocking stepper code working!!!

more here: make.rrrf.org/smd-1.0

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 09:22:44 -0500

Here is a quick video of my DC Motor Driver board working and running!

More info here: make.rrrf.org/dcmd-1.0

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 15:55:43 -0400

Yay! This is the new stepper driver board. This thing is smooth like butter. Oh yeah.

More info here: make.rrrf.org/smd-1.0

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 15:51:00 -0400

Check this out, you can turn the DC Motor Driver board into a cheap stepper motor controller board.

Info on the board here: make.rrrf.org/dcmd-1.0

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:03:33 -0400

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 23:04:50 -0400

So in the past month I've been designing some new boards for RepRap. Here is an assembled and working one. This one is designed to drive stuff like fans, one-way motors, heaters, etc.

It has pretty indicator LED's and can drive some serious power to those outputs (up to 5 amps!!!)

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 23:01:41 -0400

A friend of a friend (and hopefully soon friend) has a laser cutter, and so Bre wanted to get his parts for his RepRap cut. He talked Phil into letting us do it for free if we bring our own materials to cut. Here's a little video

(its laser cutting in the background.)

lasers are so lazer.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:20:27 -0400

At the last NYC Resistor Microcontroller Study Group, this guy brought his robot project he was working on. its pretty awesome, and looks really cool. more info in the video.

check out nyc resistor: nycresistor.com

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:26:21 -0400

Found this awesome touch sensor project that uses LED's as both output and input. Very rad.

cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:52:24 -0400

Jmo gets seriously pwned in the office by Kevin.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, Kevin Corrigan, Josh Mohrer and Jake Lodwick

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:24:34 -0400

You know the video: youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA

Now, Jmo has done a lipdub of it. So sick.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, Josh Mohrer

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 10:09:47 -0400

The Z axis is the vertical platform that moves up and down, and is where the printed object takes shape.

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:12:12 -0400

(unsuccessfully)

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, Josh Mohrer

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:09:23 -0400

Cast: Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken, Justin Ouellette