Matt Daubneys Blog

After a couple of weeks of  evenings working on the frame and mechanics of the RepRap, last night I finally got to the point of printing something! A few notes I’ve made about building the frame, placing the motors and other assorted lessons from the construction process.

Finished RepRap

Tools Make a Difference

The first lesson is to turn an old adage on it’s head. I’ve no idea how many times someone has said to me that “a bad workman blames his tools”, but that belongs in the bin with the same saying as “every tool is a hammer, except a screwdriver, which is a chisel”. A decent set of tools, and more importantly the correct tools, can really really make your life easy. Trying to pin down a hex nut with a pair of pliers while turning it with the only spanner you have get’s really really frustrating after a while. Invest in another spanner! Seriously, it will make things easier! Trying to level all the parts without a spirit level is a mugs game. You can get a good enough spirit level for a few pounds if you look around. This again will make your life so much easier.

Always try and think a few steps ahead

A few times while building the frame I got to a point where I then had to go backwards a few steps because I didn’t think it through. A good example of this is when putting the x-axis together. I’d already put the plastic mounts onto the z-axis for the x-axis smooth rod and then promptly realised I hadn’t reamed out the fixings for the x-axis smooth rod. Twenty minutes of swearing ensued as I took it all back apart to ream it out properly. If I’d thought ahead I could have saved myself this pain and hassle.

If in doubt, ask.

Again, a simple mantra, but one worth repeating over and over and over. Being an Open Source project, the RepRap community are pretty awesome, the TVRRUG doubly so. If you hit a problem, chances are, someone else has already hit it and knows how to fix it. If they don’t they might know how to guide you to finding a new solution or someone who can.

Don’t give up!

A RepRap is a moderately complicated machine. I might do another blog post on the assorted parts and what they’re actually for, but for now take it as read, with so many components to put together, it’s easy to get frustrated. When you reach a point where the frustration makes you want to hurl the thing out of the nearest window (normally without wanting to open it first), go and make a cup of tea, kill some dragons in Skyrim or blow up a mountain in Minecraft. Feel better now? Good, time to sit back down to the RepRap.

RepRap Printing a Bracket

Your first print won’t be awesome.

It’ll probably be a not very cubical cube that is immensely ridgey and slopes in places. That’s fine! What’s more awesome is that IT WORKS! Time and patience will improve your prints. As you get to know the calibration settings in all the software and get everything else straight and tight you’ll get better and better prints.

Now seriously, go out and make something amazing!

(Title taken from the awesome 1931 Frankenstein film, clip here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSCBvu_kijo Sometimes you can’t help but feel that way when things work!)

I’ve finally finished the controller for the TVRRUG Open Motor Controller with a few really stupid mistakes.

Completed OMC Board

The mistakes I made are all dumb, the simpler one to fix was that I misread a brown line on a resistor as a red line. Much swearing and de-soldering ensued and 3 resistors where taken off and replaced. The one that caused me the most headaches was the fact that I started soldering down the long IC socket without checking all the pins had passed through. Stupid! Taking the socket back out I managed to break the socket. After getting a second socket I managed to rip one of the pads off the board while clearing the old solder out.

Luckily the TVRRUG are quite handy at solving awkward problems and with all the boards being open source I discovered (with some help) that a simple jump wire could resolve this problem (Thanks Mike the Bee).

Ooops

Once the fix was in place I ran the electrical tests and all was fine! Now I just need to think about how to mount all of these together and build the cabling for it.

A little over a month ago I decided that what would be really useful to have in the workshop would be a 3D printer. I’d been looking at these for a while and seen several more commercial variants, but I’ve been more and more taken with Open Hardware since I’ve been at the Hackspace and finally decided that a RepRap would be the best thing to build.

But why? Why build a 3d printer of all things? Well let me explain. Over the past couple of years I’ve been getting more and more into working with hardware, and specifically electronics. I seem to have gained an urge to make things that (to me) are awesome. My home sensor network project is one example of this, though from some time ago my bluetooth doorbell is another. Making things seems….. right in many ways. When I started programming I was always told that you needed to find your “itch” before you’d have a project that was successful, but all my itches seem to be in the physical world, not inside my computer.

Things that are functional but could be a little bit better are everywhere! A good example is the desk I’m sat writing this at. It’s really designed for a desktop PC, not a laptop, and is a bit small and… well… not great. Importantly it was free… however I think I can make this better (much much better) with a little thought and a little work. Back to 3d printers specifically, there are things that could be made a little better with some thought and a bit of printing. On the back of my workbench is a piece of board covered in little holes, what would be immensely useful would be to have some bulldog clips (or somesuch) that could be attached to that board to allow me to pin plans of what I’m building to it. Another useful thing it could do with is a few spools to hold my various reels of wire. on my desk in work, I could do with a few nice looking little things that keep my cables on top of the desk neat and out of the way. The brackets on my bookshelves could do with a little improvement too. These are all small things, and not massive in their own right, but if I could sit down, design the thing, and then print them when I needed more, how amazing would that be? The other driving force at the moment is the fact that I can’t for the life of me cut enclosure boxes correctly. I really suck at it. With a 3d printer I could design the enclosure and just hit print! Again another improvement.

Most of all though, at the moment I have a bit of a drive to make awesome things, and making something that can make more awesome things seems like a no brainer to me!

Making my life even easier, is the fact that there is a local group operating out of the Hackspace (amongst other places) that have designed all of the various reprap bits and assemblies already. The Thames Valley RepRap User Group (TVRRUG) have already done a group buy and build of a version 1 system and are now on the version 2 system. I’ve signed up to be a builder in round 2 and have now received my control electronics to piece together. After a morning at the Hackspace, I’d managed to assemble the first of the two motor controller boards, and a few hours at home got me the second. I just need to piece together the Motor Controller board on Tuesday evening at the Space and then it’s a waiting game for the frame assembly to arrive

TVRRUG Motor Driver Boards

All of the guys involved with the TVRRUG build should be congratulated. They’ve made building a RepRap not only easy, but fairly convenient too.

More updates to come as I finish building things.

Simply apt-get install libnotify-bin and then add the following to your crontab

*/10 * * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 XAUTHORITY=~/.Xauthority notify-send “Don’t forget”  ”you’re awesome”

Then every ten minutes, this will happen:

Just to cheer yourself up after a really rubbish few weeks.

All of my music and my images are backed up onto a small NAS I have at home. Simple! I thought daftly. Mount the NAS, copy the files into My Music and carry on. Again, so very wrong. Copying a single folder works, trying to copy all of them at the same time doesn’t! This is very annoying! How would I go about mending this in Linux? 3 lines of bash, or… rsync!

Googling around, I found that windows has a command in the command prompt called robocopy (I’m on windows and forced onto a command prompt, go figure) The command seems to be “robocopy z:\ c:\Users\Matt\Music /MIR”, and this seems to be working!

Windows Media Player seemed to pick up all of my MP3 files relativley quickly, and found/retrieved the album art where it was missing as well. However, all of my Ogg files where not found and not playable. A quick google around for an ogg codec for windows finds vorbis.com and a codec for “DirectShow based players”. It seems to imply WMP is one of these, so I grab it, install it, and can play my Ogg files! Although it doesn’t show the total running time in the playlist like it does MP3s for some reason. Never mind!

The only other music I tend to listen too is from Spotify. A quick trip to their website to grab the Windows client, and that wors straight away. Nice and easy

Photo’s are a completley different kettle of fish. I have a total of 56.7GB of photos on my network storage. When I’m in Ubuntu I tend to only keep a smallish selection of these on the laptop. So for the purposes of this experiment, I’ll just import the ones from this year. At a mere 6.67GB, this should take about an hour off the slow network storage. I left this to copy, came back and tried to find some photo management software. Windows 7 seems to come with the “Windows Live Photo Gallery”, so trying to use the default software I fired this up. It asked me to sign in with my Windows Live ID (which I have courtesy of my XBox 360) and the quite quickly shows me all the photos I’ve just imported.Helpfully it also throws me a message saying it can’t open some file types (namely my Canon RAW files) and I need something called a “codec” to view them. It then takes me staright to the Canon download site for the raw codec. Quite handy. A 28MB download later and a reboot, all my pictures are now visable and viewable.

This seems to be just as usable as Shotwell, I can tag pictures, browse by dates, see the various metadata for each image, there is a small amount of editing possible. It feels a bit clunky though. Occasionally you can’t double click to preview a photo, you have to right click then go preview. Otherwise it seems more than capable for my mediocre photo managing tasks.

Tomorrow, I’ll attempt something a bit more taxing. I’ll try and get the printer working and have a look into application development in Windows.

My fight against distractions has carried on further. This brief episode is brought to you by the theory of “scratching your own itch”.

There are a lot of things that annoy me with various tasks I perform every day. This past week I’ve been taking note of each one, and I count 78 in total. Each one of those 78 things could probably be fixed very easily, but because I’m generally running around like a headless chicken trying to get things done, I don’t even think about fixing them, I just put up with them and carry on. A fair few of these are things that take a while to fix, like the office being short of physical space because of all the orders coming in/out at the moment. Other issues are easy to fix, like the fact that it takes me 30 minutes to an hour to do a quick analysis of some testing data. This is a problem I can solve easily with a smattering of python and a little concentration. In fact, I’m intending to tackle this on Sunday by going into the office when it’s quiet, and just making this problem vanish.

A few other problems on that list of 78 can also be solved with code, some easily, some not so. Some can be solved by a few simple changes in my work routine, like the fact I constantly go to do a task, get pulled away by something else, and then forget what I was going to do. Keeping a simple log book of what I’m doing during the day would solve this easily. It would be better if this was digitized in some form, but for now a simple notebook will probably make a huge difference. This distraction on its own has probably caused me to lose my train of thought more times this week than any other on the list.

So how id my fight going? I’m much more aware of what causes me to be distracted after the past week or so. It’s taking me time to come to terms with each of those distractions and to deal with them, but ultimately, I am becoming more productive in a given period of time. The next big thing I’m going to have to tackle is project methodology. Since I don’t even have a passing familiarity with any of the standard methodologies, this is going to take some research, some thought and  a lot of conversations in order to find the best one to suite the needs of my team at work. As always, any pertinant reading material suggestions are always welcome.

For a little while now I’ve been getting quite annoyed with myself for being very easily distracted (be it with llamas, badgers, narwhals or whatever). This has meant that my general level of productivity has been somewhat…… low. I have a list of running projects as long as my arm, none of which get enough attention because I flit form one to the other almost hourly. The situation as is obviously needs addressing.

From what little intelligence I can bring to bear on the problem, this should be able to be broken down into a few different variables:

1. Environmental
2. Physical
3. Grey-mushial (?)

Environmental

Fixing environmental problems is relativley easy. If I want to concentrate on a task now I use my Mac Mini. Not because OSX is any more productive than Ubuntu I hasn’t to add, but because it is in a room on a desk with a comfortable chair in a comfortable working position. There is no television, no games consoles or anything else around to take my attention away from what I’m attempting to do.

In the office at work, I try and keep my desk clear of clutter. When there is a lot going on, or a lot of noise around, the twin help of Spotify and a decent pair of headphones can help keep me inside my own head and in my comfortable work zone. Anything I would sit and watch constantly for updates or results is now being reworked to email me or notify my some other way so that I can carry on concentrating on the more important tasks rather than waiting for something else to finish.

Physical

With this I refer to my general physical fitness and general wellbeing. I am quite aware that I don’t get enough exercise, but have yet to generate a plan to resolve this. Until recently I had no idea how well I ate. Throwing together a nasty hackey database in Django (code), I actually discovered I don’t eat too badly… but can binge on chocolate when things get a bit stressful! This is quite easy to rectify by stopping buying lunch and making it in advance. I still crave the chocolate quite a lot during the day, but hopefully this will fade away given some time!

Grey-mushial

This is what’s going on in my head and possibly the hardest part of the whole cycle to change. When I get frustrated with something I lose the will to carry on with something. This is normally the major factor in why I jump from project to project, task to task without completing things. I get frustrated and annoyed that I can’t do something so move onto something else I can do. This has a lot of negative impact as it means that sometimes I struggleto learn something new and overcome certain issues. This is quite hard to change, but I’m attempting to bring some positive re-inforcement to bear on the problem. Craving chocolate when being frustrated isn’t helping things, however, if I now manage to solve a problem that’s frustrating me then I can have some chocolate. This helps me motivate myself to push through the problems that keep me stumped, frustrated and annoyed.

Actually keeping my mind on task is another seperate problem. This, at the moment, I have no idea how to solve. I’ve started reading around this and started reading up on Zen as a lot of Zen practice seems to be based on either keeping your mind on a single thing or emptying your mind of all things completley. This may help, this may not help! Anything I struggle to concentrate on I make a note of what it is, hopefully some kind of pattern will emerge from the mess over time. For some reason, one thing I really can concentrate on without being distracted is painting my 40k models. I have no idea at all why this specifically is so easy to concentrate on, but an interesting observation none the less.

Why bring all this up on here? Well, for a start this place is one of my projects that gets overlooked quite frequently, and secondly so that if anyone does have any dealings with myself where I start something and don’t necessarily stick to it for a period of time….. let me know in case I haven’t noticed. There is a lot of Ubuntu stuff I’d love to do if I could just get over these daft concentration issues!

Today I’ve been mostly teaching myself the oddities of C++. Now C++ is an object orientated language that’s an extension of C. This has led me to a revalation.

Recently at work I’ve been doing masses of OO stuff (as a change from the previous stuff I was writing which was largely linear) and as a result of that I’ve started seeing the world in terms of objects. Now in order to achieve what I needed at work, I ended up reading up on the theory of objects and what they actually are. In times past when I’ve been “taught” how to program (rather than teaching myself) , the content of the classes where more designed for a specific language on how to solve a specific problem. I think I only once sat in a computing based lecture that talked about the more abstract issues in programming. Whenever I start designing a program I always go back to that single lecture, and a few books that have a higher level stance on problems (such as Design Patterns)  and then once I’m passed that do I go to the language specific things.

The reason I digress this far is that after learning all this meta-stuff, learning another language is actually relatively easy. Now everything is falling down to syntax rather than subject. Going back to the title, I think that those lectures that taught me to do this in this language because it does that has got things backwards. They were doing the training first in the hope it would teach you something. What they should be doing is teaching you the concepts (all the “meta”) and the train you in the language.

Teach and then train, not train and then teach. Something I shall have to try and follow more often in the future.

(Many thanks to Alan Bell for the inspiration in the title )

Having seen other peoples success of growing chillis from seed (specifically theopensourcerer) I thought this year I’d have a go. So in what could possibly be said to be a familiar style…..

Packets of Chilli Seeds

I’m only attempting three types of chillis this year, cayenne long hot, navaho and scotch bonnet. In the interest of science I’m trying theopensourcers method of germinating the seeds, and tomorrow evening will be attempting some in plain pots with compost in a heated propagator. This may mean I end up with an absolutley enormous glut of chillis, but I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Here are the seeds ready for the airing cupboard.

Seeds Ready for the airing cupboard

I’m also in the process of building an automated watering system for these once they’re in the greenhouse using arduinos, and hopefully connecting to a server in the house using an easy radio link to report the conditions in the greenhouse Many thanks to theopensourcerer for the information he’s posted on his blog.

Friday marks the beggining of a new year under the gregorian calender, so it’s a good time to reflect on various things from the last year, and suggest some changes for the next.

Last year was, for 6 months at least, a rubbish year. With Uni going rapidly down hill, being diagnosed with depression, and everything generally going wrong, I’d rather forget most of it. The last few months have been significantly better. Acquired myself a CCNA, and a job doing things that I enjoy.

So what needs to change next year? Well, in no particular order:

1. One of the downsides of having a job that is largely programming is that I don’t get that much exercise any more which has led to me putting on some weight. Ideally I’d like to turn this around, but would initially be happy for it to be stemmed. Hopefully a bit of Wii fit every other night will help this while it’s dark in the evenings, and as it lightens up I’ll try and start doing some walking or some such.
2. Start putting away more moneys, now my debts have gone (hooray) I can start to put away some pennies for the future.
3. I intend to increase my participation with Ubuntu community in the coming year as well. Hopefully culminating in gaining Ubuntu membership. In order to achieve this, one evening a week will be dedicated to contributing to Ubuntu, be it through support, bug squashing, testing or whatever. This will probably be aimed at Wednesday evenings, but will shift around a little as real life things will undoubtedly get in the way.

I think 3 is enough to be getting on with. Hopefully this year will be better than the last