Makerbot - an open source 3D printer

This week I'm attending a Ubuntu Kernel Sprint and my colleague Steve Conklin brought along a fantastic gizmo - the Makerbot 3D printer. It is most fascinating watching it print 3D objects by extruding a thin ABS plastic trail of plastic in layers. It can print objects up to 4" x 4" x 6" - the imagination is the limiting factor to what it can print. Steve already demo'd it printing a variety of objects, the most impressive being a working whistle including a moving ball inside the whistle. It's not too slow either - it took about 25 minutes to print the whistle, which isn't bad considering the complexity and size of the object.













It's a cool piece of kit - doubly so because it's completely open sourced.

Hacking the Arduino

I acquired a 16Mhz 8 bit Arduino micro-controller development board last week from my colleague Steve Conklin. The Arduino is a cool little open source electronics development system and allows rapid prototyping - ideal for hacking up small controller projects. I downloaded the C toolkit and GUI development environment from Arduino.cc and configuration was very simple and straight forward.

Basically, one can cruft up small C programs and download these to the board using a USB interface - the code is flashed onto the board so it can run stand-alone - sweet. Just compile, download and go!

Anyhow, today was my first opportunity to get some quality time to get hacking. I rummaged around in my loft and found a bread-board and a bunch of LEDs and resistors that I bought over 20 years ago and rigged up 4 LEDs to be driven from from 4 digital output pins. I quickly hacked up some code to enable the pin outputs and then drive the LEDs, see the video below:


The Arduino has a bunch of digital input/ouput pins and some analogue pins too - although I need to now read up about this to see what I can really do with this kit. Anyhow, thanks to Steve for getting this kit into my hands and walking me through the elementary stuff on how to select the right resistors so that I don't kill the LEDs and the Arduino; I knew I should have remembered all that basic electronics jiggery pokery when I did my Computer Science degree 20+ years ago...

My hope is to hook this up to various bits of hardware to enable me to do the usual debugging and hacking around. I've got various ideas of projects, such as an interface between my PC and my old Commodore 1541 disk drive, but I need to get some reference books out of my loft and do some more research before I get my hands grubby with real code.

What's neat is that I'm able to some relatively fast low-level 8 bit hackery without all that unnecessary OS nonsense making life more complex :-)