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Fabrication Station, Done! Ish…

It’s done! Ish…

I need to mount the PSU for both printers outside of their enclosures, they are pretty big parts that need printing but that’s what Chonk is for after all.  

In order to make both fit I’ve removed the Multimaterial Unit from my Prusa, I need to give it time to figure out how to actually use it still so figured it’s better to just get this done and do that in the future when Chonk is more stable.  

After all, perfect is the enemy of done and I need to be better at remembering that.  Now that it’s done I can forget about it for a while but take advantage of it making my office much tidier.  

Also, exciting news, I’ve just passed the point where all you lovely people are paying for my robotics training!  I’m a member of Robot Ignite Academy who have excellent online training for ROS (Robot Operating System), this is going to make a big difference for sure!  

Thanks again to you all 🙂

Fabrication Station, Part 2

Now I’ve finished rebuilding my old printer so it actually works I’ve a printer that can print big things fast. That’s because it has a 0.8mm nozzle, most printers have 0.4mm, and an E3D Volcano hotend.

This thing really shifts!

For context, the parts for the first half of the dual enclosure would’ve taken about 22 hours with my Prusa and the stock nozzle, with Chonk (seemed a good name) it printed the lot in 9 hours!

The top enclosure will take longer as it has a hatch top on it to handle the multi material unit. Still, it should be around 40 hours rather than 70 at least…

To finish this section I need to get the acrylic walls and doors fitted, they’re on order, and a spool holder sorted.

Slowly getting this room together, likely I’ll finish just as the new workshop is ready to move in to…

Printer Ahoy!

My projects are like a logic puzzle at the minute and I’ve finally got one bit in place. My old POS printer is reborn! I needed to design a new carriage to hold the extruder which was a pain but only took a few days and I’ll release that file soon.

Now this is done I can print the parts for my stack of enclosures, this’ll let me organise my office better (or at all) and everything should hey easier from thereon out.

NE-1 now has Bluetooth as well, I’m writing a simple keyboard interface for that so it can be remote controlled so progress is ongoing. Hopefully things will settle more that I’ve one project or of the way at least!

Getting (Re)Started

Picking up where I left off around a year ago, the battery is screwed so rigged up to the charger from MacFeegle Prime to power it for now.

First up I’m getting the motors working again and after that I’ll get the encoders on the wheels working. The encoders will allow me to measure the speed they are turning at so that the two sides match. As the motors are simple DC motors we give the controller a percentage and they spin. With feedback from the encoders we can implement greater control.

Another use for the encoders is odometry, we can keep track of how many rotations have occurred and coupling that with the circumference of the wheels we can measure how far the robot has moved. This is incredibly useful for mapping and navigation.

Fabrication Station

A staple of the 3d printing community, Ikea Lack tables make for excellent enclosures. I’m waiting on a third to be delivered and a whole bunch of parts need printing but my workspace is slowly coming together.

Tomorrow I crack on with the Roomba!

The legs are straight by the way, a very weird lens effect going on there.

Robots, Printers, and… Toilet Sensors?

Much has been a’doing!  

I’m wiring up the chassis for NE-1 at the minute, just using breadboard, jumpers and hot-glue at the minute.  Once I get things working I’ll switch to perma-proto board and an actual lid for the chassis.  Also just running off AA batteries at the minute, I’ll make the new battery pack over the next few weeks too.

My project to rebuild my old printer is going brilliantly!  I used my Prusa to print the parts, designed a new holder for the bed sensor and managed to get it to print first time!  The photos with the cubes shows the best I could manage before in red with the old printer (after a lot of hacking too), and the orange are the first two prints with the rebuild!  The quality is already much better and nothing has been tuned yet.

Unfortunately the extruder carriage isn’t ideal for this new setup, the nozzle can’t reach all of the bed and the sensor hits the cable cover at the rear of the bed.  Plan is to design a new carriage as I’ve not found anything online that’ll fit the Titan Aero I’m using, this means I can upgrade to the E3D Volcano hotend too.  As I’ll be printing big things with this the Volcano will let me run filament through it *much* faster so it’ll be able to keep up.

Finally, the long mentioned occupancy sensor for The Castle Tap.  I went to install it last weekend, worked late in to the night to fix a bug in the radio code and somehow just broke everything.  It’s been a pain for a while so I’ve changed tack and switched to ESP32 boards for the controllers.  The have a wifi chip built in so no need for external modules, the biggest benefit is the ESP-NOW protocol that ExpressIf released for the board.

I wired them up, dropped some code on to test the mesh networking, and it worked.  

It. Just. Worked.  

After fighting the damn radio modules for a few months it was kinda anti-climactic but a hell of a relief.  I’ll get the sensor code and logic ported over and hopefully that’ll be that up and running.  The boards are a bit more expensive than the Arduinos I was using but as I don’t need separate radio modules it works out cheaper overall, also, they actually work!

Next video for the NE-1 robot will likely be Monday, I’m hoping to have it driving around over Bluetooth and being able to use the encoders for distance based control too. 

Previously On, Project Bumblebee…

I’ve been looking at the Roomba today and remembered that back when it still vaguely worked I did a series of short videos where I reverse engineered the internals to the point where I could remote control it.

I’m not going to lie, it was quite janky and I never really got it working properly as non of the sensors were rigged up so it couldn’t work autonomously.  The video above was taken last year when I decided to apply for PiWars, I figured if I could get this vaguely working I’d prove to myself I would be able to build a bot for PiWars.

The full playlist can be found here, I’ll cover bits of this in more detail as I get it back up and running:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETrgVm1tFTk&list=PL4HAiVK8OXQrntvT2TwVWvxU145qkvjUu&index=1

Thankfully past-Keegan reminded me that the battery is shot, thankfully I’ve parts to make a new one so all good there.  It’s saved me some troubleshooting at least!