I’ve ordered a dozen arduino Duemilanove boards in assorted colors, for the upcoming Intro to arduino class at the space. Due to my travel it looks like the date will be Saturday, Oct 3rd at 5:00 PM or so. Final details and pricing will be settled soon –

Retail price for the Arduino boards is $30 – what I’d like to be able to do is charge the $30 and throw in some resistors and LEDs, a potentiometer, a USB A->B cable, and a nine volt battery clip with the power connector for the arduino. This will let everyone leave with something that they can play with later. If you want to bring your own, that’s fine. The class is free.

Stand by for more information

It was a great day down at the space – including a visit from a bunch of people from Maker’s local 256. I’m sure we’ll find a lot to collaborate on.

I wanted to reciprocate and stop by their place on the way home, but evening arrived I realized that I’m being beaten by a cold of something, and headed home.

I’ve been painting and building the makerbot for a couple of weeks, and finally powered it up today. After fussing around with various versions of software for a while, I hit a mostly working combination, and printed this:

The Makerbot coin was the first object I printed

I’m having a few minor printing problems, but most of them can be tweaked out I think. The one that worries me is the periodic halting of the print for a second or so, which causes problems, and the occasional hard motion stop during printing – although the extruder keeps going.

But – not bad for the first few hours under power.

The two hands project will be visiting Huntsville, and Antitronics, Sew-Brilliant, and Maker’s Local 256. We don’t know the date yet, just that it will be in the next month.

We’ve received our license, and can now operate as KJ4NXA.

Makerbot batch 5 ships today, and mine should be in that batch! I already have several pounds of plastic waiting to be extruded. I’ll post build progress.

Makerbot has made an announcement that they are going to try crowdsourcing manufacturing for some of the makerbot parts.

In Dublin for a Canonical development meeting, I grabbed a few friends and we visited the TOG hackerspace. We met some great people and happened to be there on their microcontroller night, so we saw some arduino projects in the works.
Here are some photos.
TOG is an exciting space. Here’s their web site.

During a week of vacation, I made very good progress on the brother knitting machine file format.

The wiki page has links.

I’ve also started a python class to interface with these files. That class is read only at this point, but I am also playing with an application to program custom patterns, and that will require adding writing capabilities. Links to that software are also on the above page.

I am posting these now because I am coming up on a period of a few weeks when I may not be able to make much progress on this, and I wanted to go ahead and get it out there.

Enjoy!

While we were at NYC Resistor last month, Susan and I spotted a knitting machine. It turned out to be Bre’s Brother Electroknit model KH-930E. We ended up making a deal and shipped it home. Sadly, both ends of the machine took some shipping damage, but it’s still functional.

I’ve been hacking and reverse-engineering a bit since then, and I’ve written a python program which emulates the optional external floppy disk drive for the knitting machine. With access to saved files, I’ve begun cracking apart the file format used by the machine, and extending the information other people had already gathered.

I’m keeping the wiki updated here.

I will release the emulator program very soon. I’ve put in some new functionality and haven’t had a chance to test it with the knitting machine yet. As soon as that’s done, I’ll post it.

UPDATE:

The external floppy emulator is available, link is on the wiki page referenced above.

Here’s another item that I mentioned over on my personal blog a week ago, but it’s worth repeating here.

Antitronics has a Makerbot on order. The Makerbot is a 3d printer that uses extruded plastic to print objects up to about 4″x4″x5″. Susan and I dropped in to NYC Resistor on a day when there were several of these running, and I was blown away by the possibilities.

Look for more about this tool when it’s built and in action – and come by and see it, it will change the way you think.