Robots and Dinosaurs

Plastimake and Robots and Dinosaurs

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:36:38 +1000

You might have seen an unusual plastic called polycaprolactone, which also goes by the name of Polymorph, Polycap or Plastimake. It’s small white pellets of plastic that will melt in hot water and can be shaped like plasticine. When it cools, it’s rock hard and perfect for engineering applications.

The trouble up till now is that it’s quite hard to get a hold of decent quantities of it in Australia. But it turns out there’s now a local supplier, called Plastimake:

http://www.plastimake.com/

If you’ve used polycaprolatane before, you should check them out. In addition to being local and quite cheap, they’ve spent a lot of time making tutorials on what you can do with it. The roses are my favourite: (Pic shamelessly stolen from their site)

and there are loads more examples here: http://www.plastimake.com/examples

So, we put in an order for a bunch of plastic, and in addition to being very prompt, inside the box a freebie sample of colouring material, and also this drawing:

How awesome is that?

The image was made by the very talented Alice Caroll, who’s website is here:

http://alicecarroll.net/

Tuesday Toolsday! (17thApr2012)

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:58:58 +1000

Hi Makers and Breakers,

The space will be open from 5:30pm for some weekday shenanigans.

come along and get yer hack on!

<3 ,
+Pauline Koh
http://goo.gl/fnHY7

Robots & Dinosaurs has moved to Gladesville.

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:17:08 +1000

The new space is located in Gerard Lane, Gladesville. We’re located inside the same space as Quick-Fit muffers.

Here it is on Google maps http://g.co/maps/zbfve (Thanks Madox)

Go through the garage door to the right until you see Daleks!

Being about 50m from Victoria Rd, there are oodles of busses on a regular basis even past midnight, and it’s only 30mins from Central.

http://www.131500.com.au/ for info. (Hepburn Avenue, Gladesville is a good cross-street to use)

Stuff in the space:

Compared to the previous location, the new space is huge and pretty open, but it’s shared between 3 groups of people. Robots and Dinosaurs (RnD), the Sydney Robot Workshop (SRW) and the Beehive. RnD & SRW are both community clubs, and Beehive is a startup business specialising in digital fab.

Regular Hacking Sessions:

There will be several regular times the space is open:

RnD’s Saturday Hacking from 11am till late every Saturday

Wed night from 5pm onwards, the Sydney Robot Workshop have a regular build session which a lot of the RnD people attend as well

Sunday afternoon from 1pm onwards, hosted by the Sydney Robot Workshop.

And of course RnD Members can use the equipment (lasercutters, 3D printers, etc.), or just hang out any time the SRW or RnD have opened the space. Feel free to visit any session, but if you’ve got a particular question head to the main event for that group. (E.g. If you want to know about 3D printing, lasercutting & quadcopters, check out Robots and Dinosaurs. For advice on making a Dalek, stormtrooper costume or resin casting, the Sydney Robot Workshop are the experts)

And don’t forget to join the mailing list http://robodino.org/mailing-list to stay informed of the various things happening at the space and what people are working on.

Melbourne Maker Faire

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 09:17:03 +1000

This Saturday was the first ever Maker Faire in Australia. Maker faires in the US have been absoultely huge, with hackerspaces, builders, makers and tinkerers of all types coming together, so we’ve been chomping at the bit for something similar in Australia.

http://makerfairemelbourne.wordpress.com/

The place was absolutely packed!

There was a good representation of makers in Australia. The Robots and Dinosaurs (Sydney) and Creative Community (Melbourne) hackerspaces had booths set up and representatives from Artifactory (Perth) and Make Hack Void (Canberra) were running workshops. It was a load of fun talking with people all day about what they can make and what interests them.

There was an impressive array of things to see. Like giant LED cubes (details here)

Rubik’s Cube solving robots:

There were heaps of workshops going through the day for people to learn electronics skills, soldering and more:

The kids had a great time making cardboard mazes and houses out of scrap cardboard:

There was an impressive collection of circuit bent synths and repurposed objects:

Science was present:

As well as all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff like DNA copying machines, felted dolls, advice on wood framing, laser cutting & 3D printing galore, steampunk sewing, and much more.

There’s some more photos up here for the curious:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38462165@N05/sets/72157628870842515/

Big thanks to Paul, Amon, Andy and all the organisers and volunteers that helped make the day go amazingly smoothly. And congratulations to CCHS for getting their new hackerspace location!

General Hacking & Visit from the Artifactory

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 12:27:00 +1000

This Saturday was an absolutely packed day at the space!

Photos don’t describe the sensation of 20+ people crowded in the main room, eagerly chatting, bouncing ideas off each other and hacking away on their projects.

We were also visited by Daniel, Brett and Jenna from the Perth Artifactory. They’ve got an amazing community and huge hackerspace over in Perth, and they’re currently travelling all around Australia to various hackerspaces in preparation for the Maker Faire and Linux Conf in Melbourne.

Brett built a TV-b-gone and managed to fit it into the handle of a sonic screwdriver:

I had a crack at some fluid-filled coasters. Here’s the rough prototype, but the design is looking encouraging:

Tim did some prototyping on his Lasercut RC car. It’s certainly fast. In fact it was fast and torquey enough to break its own wheel off the axle!

Hackerspace Passports and the Big CNC now working!

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:05:06 +1000

You might have seen the Hackerspace Passport concept recently. Mitch Altman, inveterate hacker and noisebridge organiser came up with the idea, and it’s taken off like wildfire.

Make sure you get your hackerspace passport stamped next time you’re in the space! If you don’t have a passport you can:

• Get your notebook stamped instead!

• Download the PDF here and print your own

• Buy a passport from Seeedstudio here for less than $3

Next time you’re going travelling, you might want to check the list of hackerspaces to see if there’s a place you can drop in and see what they’re up to. It’s getting harder and harder to find a city where there isn’t one now!

Members from RnD have visited hackerspaces all around America, Japan, China, Europe and also been visited by people from all over the world in return.

It’s actually quite easy to make your own stamp, if you have access to a lasercutter. And it turns out common lino (easily obtainable at a craft shop) works like a treat with raster engraving.

Here’s the lino being laser engraved and cut: (Note: it’s important to check your rubber material doesn’t contain PVC or chlorine before lasering. Use the ‘copper stick in a blowtorch test’ for this!’)

The Big CNC:

A while ago Scott McDaid kindly donated to the space a large ‘Joe’s CNC’ he built. It’s a beautiful machine and has had many hours of work put into its construction.

The work envelope of the machine is huge, 600x1200 at least and it’s capable of milling wood, plastic and some metals.

We’ve just gotten it set up in the garage and got the cabling sorted out. Need to add some e-stops and things, but it looks pretty good so far!

Big thanks to Ada and Pauline for the setup.

Here’s a vid of the machine in operation. It’s cutting a depth-mapped version of our logo. Sadly we only had 6mm tools, so it’s a little like drawing with a crayon. But you can see the concept:

Testing the large CNC from Gavin Smith on Vimeo.

Luke's DIY Audio Fabrication

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 10:29:30 +1000

Here’s a project done by Luke Emrose this Saturday on the space’s CNC. It looks pretty cool and was made entirely with free tools!

Here’s some wiki info if you want to make a board yourself:

http://hackerspace.pbworks.com/w/page/48330990/Designing%20PCBs

http://hackerspace.pbworks.com/w/page/48331055/Cutting%20PCBs

Without further ado, I’ll hand it over to Luke:

Hi there!

Sorry for the big e-mail, but I was excited….

Thanks to some outstanding help from Gav and talsit and a few others at the space this evening, I used the CNC machine for the first time ever ;-)

Even better, probably just through sheer luck, it was very successful too!

Here is the PCB that I made:

The eagle layout and circuit diagram ( which I successfully proved “should work” using the free LTSpice circuit simulator - found from bits and pieces I’ve found online about the API 2520 discrete operational amplifier ):

First the copper etching stage:

Then the holes are drilled for the parts:

Then the board is milled out to it’s final shape:

Here are some “pose” shots ;-):

For those of you still reading, this is a discrete operational amplifier ( DOA ) board, which I designed out of necessity, because the “real-thing” ( an API 2520 DOA ) was too expensive for me ( my board is an alternative for the little square board in this pic ):

Also the “real-thing” is made from a double-sided board.

I wanted a cheaper and simpler alternative so I crammed the entire thing onto a single sided board that was designed to be easy and simple to CNC:

I’m going to use it as one of 8 DOA’s I am building to go into 4 channels of custom-designed compression for my home-studio.

The finished unit/s might somewhat resemble ( I hope ) 4 of these:

but I’m not sure yet, as I am still designing it….

However, thanks to the space, I’m off to a good start.

Next step is soldering the bits on the little board and turning it on and hoping it ACTUALLY WORKS!

cheers!

—
Luke Emrose
aka evolutionary theory
www.evolutionarytheory.com

Success! We got our new 'Up!' 3D printer!

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:38:10 +1000

Hi All,

As you might have seen we put out a call to get our own ‘Up!’ 3D printer. Well, we had a phenomenal response and got enough pledges in a just couple of days to order it!

The box arrived shortly after:

We got it unpacked and into its new home:

The plastic enclosure helps to keep the print at a constant temperature throughout. It’s not really needed, but we had it laying around and we figured we’d try and go above and beyond to ensure quality of prints on our new machine.

The Up is staggeringly user friendly and hassle free. We were up and printing in about 20 mins!

and we’ve been printing ever since:

Quadcopter parts:

Dalek model & cookie cutter:

And the obligatory companion cube:

RnD Halloween Party 2011

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:11:59 +1000

Very sorry for the lateness and after several bribes (Thanks Judit!) I’m posting the photos of the event now.

We had our Halloween Party the other day and it was a load of fun!

With our regular costume contest:

Our traditional Watermelon carving contest: (with obligatory LED illumination)

Malcolm brought his homemade Segway and we all had a ride:

Nick brought in his new Barbot and made drinks for everyone:

People brought in baked treats:

It was a blast.

More photos of everyone’s costume after the break:

Bec as a surgeon:

Me as Joel Robinson/Mike Nelson from Mystery Science Theatre: (Yes, those silhouettes are laser cut!)

Inggrid as Death from the Sandman series:

David as a mad scientist:

Scott as an outback hero:

Jaz busted out his awesome Ghostbusters costume again:

Jen as a faerie:

Alastair (from Make Hack Void in Canberra) as Battlestar Gallactica Guy: (Sorry, I don’t watch the show!)

Ruth (also from Make Hack Void) as a pirate:

Miklos did an astounding impersonation of Dilbert:

Julian as a vampire:

Chris as Tweedledum/Tweedledee:

Help us get an 'Up!' for Christmas!

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:48:56 +1000

Hi All,

As a few people have pointed out, the ‘UP!’ printer is on sale at the moment, and over a thousand dollars off. (now $2432). We’ve been toying with getting one for the space for a while, this looks like a very good time to try. For those new to the group, we succesfully funded the lasercutter, makerbot and the CNC via group pledges.

This is the revised Up! Plus - http://www.pp3dp.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=225:the-upgraded-up-comes&catid=43:blog&Itemid=55

The up is the most reliable printer I’ve ever had, I frequently do 8 hour or longer prints with no issues, something that’s almost unheard of on the makerbot. In addition the software is much nicer to use, you can load multiple parts and arrange them for building without having to open a 3rd party modeler, etc.

Additionally the resolution is significantly higher than the makerbot, and it microsteps like a boss, (meaning it’s smoother and less noisy)

For those that haven’t seen mine or Madox’s in person, here’s some pics of what they can do:

http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:5266

http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:15779

http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:15099

I’ll start by chipping in $300. Who else is in?

Here’s a google sheet to keep track:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AikXWCgB3DmCdFZDMUZoUlNEaFBXV2xqZGdPSkotNVE

Cheers,
Gavin

And here’s my same disclaimer from the last couple of times:
“To be really clear about this, chipping in will *not* be counted for membership fees or any other space privileges. It *will* however give you a warm glow knowing you helped the space become more functional and also quickened the pace of the upcoming robot revolution, resulting in a mercifully swift death for humanity. ”

——-

UP! your Xmas

Get the new revised UP! Plus for AU$2432 - Normally AU$3532.

Between 1st - 31st December.

Stocks are limited and a non-refundable pre-order of $200 can be paid to secure your order for delivery in the first week of December.

Excludes GST & Freight.

Visit to Make Hack Void

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:59:41 +1000

On Saturday we went to visit our sister hackerspace, Make Hack Void, down in Canberra.

The MHV crowd greeted us for a breakfast feast nearby, and then took us to their space.

Hackerspaces in Australia seem to have really taken off. There’s now one in almost every state and territory. They vary from garage sized, to warehouses. MHV is clearly on the big end of the scale. It’s simply huge!:

In addition to the size, they’ve got an awesome layout for tools and equipment. It’s very easy to get what you want, there’s a large communal hacking area where you can sit and chat, and there’s also plenty of quiet assembly space for larger projects. You can even pull up a car and do automotive hacking!

Alastair and the MHV guys have won a bit of fame recently with their MHVBoard arduino clone, as well as the MHVLib, an arduino compatible library that speeds up core functions a lot.

http://www.makehackvoid.com/group-projects/mhvboard-arduino-clone

http://www.makehackvoid.com/project/MHVLib

They’re currently running a Pozible project to get the next round of boards made, check them out:

http://www.pozible.com/index.php/archive/index/4050/description/0/0

Here’s a bit of quicky hacking we did down there, 3D printed a rotor housing for Lachlan’s automated NERF missile!:

Bec made a pantograph for duplicating drawings:

Here’s an awesome brass nixie clock:

Lasercut Menger Sponge

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:05:17 +1000

One of our members, Jaye, has been up to a rather special project in the last couple of weeks, a 3D Menger Sponge from lasercut acrylic. Here’s her writeup:

Hey there coruscating hivebrain,

As there was some interest when I mentioned it previously, I figured I’d write up my first attempt to build a Menger sponge with the laser cutter, acrylic sheet, and water-thin solvent based acrylic adhesive.

To test the assembly technique, I went with iteration M2 of the sponge in 3mm transparent red acrylic. Obviously, just cutting out all the little bits for the internals of the sponge and trying to assemble them one at a time in the right position would be fiddly and insane, so instead of doing that, I cut patterns out that could be used to assemble a whole layer of the sponge at a time.

The attached Plan image shows the cut file I used (and the cut file itself is attached as an Inkscape SVG). Black lines indicate cutting (laser settings: 40% power, 6mm/s speed), and red lines indicate engraving (laser settings: 40% power, 15mm/s speed). The idea was to include sprues in the cut design that hold the overall structure of each layer together, but to do deep engraving across the ends of every sprue so that:

The water-thin acrylic adhesive that tends to wick between layers by capillary action would be stopped at the edges of the actual sponge elements, but not spread into the sprues.
Once a layer was bonded and cured, the sprues should be easy to snap out.

This more or less worked. :)

Things that I learnt during the assembly:

Make sure that you let the acrylic bonding agent have plenty of time to cure before trying to snap out the sprues.
A chisel is handy for cutting across the engraving points, but you’ve got to be careful not to force the sponge pieces out of position.
A thin syringe and needle is the best tool for applying water-thin acrylic adhesive. Tilting the layers to catch the light lets you very easily see how much adhesive is going where.
Do tests to work out the right engrave settings for the laser cutter. If you set things too hot, the layers will disintegrate remarkably easily. Often during removal from the laser cutter. :)

Things that I’ll be changing for the next revision:

3mm acrylic, which, if you want the sponge to be a cube, means you’ve got a “cell” size of 3x3x3mm ends up being pretty fiddly during assembly. Being tiny, the resulting sponge shows up assembly inaccuracies to an undesirable degree. Thicker acrylic will be easier to make look more accurate.
Transparent acrylic probably isn’t so good if you’re interested in seeing the structure of the sponge. It just gets all overlaid and messy, and the layered assembly structure and slight angle on the laser-cut edges doesn’t help.
3mm acrylic and 2mm wide sprues, and engraving each sprue-end twice at a separation of 0.5mm means that the structure of some layers does warp a little when getting cut: there just isn’t enough volume for the heat to dissipate into without making the acrylic a bit melty. This means the structure of the sponge gets a little compromised. I figure thicker acrylic, with perhaps 3 or 4mm sprues should prevent this.
Engraving only twice at the end of each sprue, at a separation of 0.5mm meant that occasionally little fragments of the actual sponge would come away at the sprue end. Messy. I figure engraving across the sprue ends 6 times at a separation of 0.25mm will make the breaking away of sprues neater.
Using 3mm acrylic, the breaking force required to twist out the sprues that connect to the small 1x1x1 cell elements of the sponge that are in the corners was often higher that the solvent bonded joint between layers could handle, and the 1x1x1 element came away with the sprue. I figure that thicker acrylic and the subsequent larger bonding area for a 1x1x1 cell, combined with more and closer sprue engraving will fix this.

Build process photos attached.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. :)

Jaye.

General Hacking at the Space

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:57:16 +1000

The space has been very productive recently. Here’s some photos of various projects going on.

Macca and Luke got up to some aluminium anodizing for an audio project build. Here’s his writeup:

http://www.evolutionarytheory.com/2011/09/diy-anodizing/

Here’s the result after the dye had been set:

It takes a lot of courage to laser your laptop:

David (Talsit) designed up a lasercut holder for his logic probe clips:

Design here if you want to make your own: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11651

and Max made an awesome rocket ship:

Annual General Meeting & Gulyas!

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:37:20 +1000

Sorry for the really late update, here’s the pics!

We had our Annual General Meeting recently. We’ve survived another year as a group and grown significantly!

In addition thanks to member efforts we’ve now got every major piece of equipment we hoped for when we founded the group (lasercutter, CNC, 3d printers and much more). Time to focus on making awesome projects, teaching others and getting the most use out of our stuff.

The new board is as follows:

President: Gavin Smith

Vice President: David (Talsit) Morris Oliveros

Treasurer: Max Nippard

Secretary: R3becca Owen

Ordinary Members: Kean Meazles, Jason Ball and David Basden.

Big thanks to everyone who came, and especial thanks to Judit and Miklos for cooking us all some awesome gulyas in honor of a Hungarian holiday!

This Week's Tinkering

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 11:45:00 +1000

Just a few photos from this weeks tinkering.

Malcolm brought along his homemade self-balancing scooter:

(Details here: http://members.optusnet.com.au/a4x4kiwi/scooter/)

We did some 3D printing:

I made an Art:

And tried my hand at some laser cut intarsia to make a sign for out new office lab:

In other news, we’ve arranged a new controller for the lasercutter to stop the bugs we were seeing. Thanks to everyone who chipped in!

What can you make with a lasercutter?

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 12:39:07 +1000

Explaining to people that you have a lasercutter is one thing, getting across exactly what you can do with it is another thing.

Here’s some photos of Max’s new project, a slot-together lampshade, which is one of the best examples of what’s possible I’ve ever seen:

The prototype is made from recycled cardboard, but the final one will be cut from translucent acrylic.

Here’s a vid of it in operation, the organic curves are quite fun to watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPKCC4JQFEA

Some more examples and inspiration here:

http://hackerspace.pbworks.com/w/page/41180334/Lasercutter%20-%20Setting%20and%20Examples#view=page

Introducing the LightScythe

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:27:03 +1000

Hi All, Gav here. Here’s a project I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks and thought I’d share.

It’s called the LightScythe. It’s a programmable LED staff that can write out images and text in long exposure images.

And of course, it’s all open source :-D

Details, including hardware parts list and all the code here:

https://sites.google.com/site/mechatronicsguy/lightscythe

and some pictures captured here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38462165@N05/

Big thanks to everyone who came along and helped with the shoot. It’s not easy synchronising 4 cameras and running backwards and forwards in the cold for a couple of hours.

Space Cleanup and Painting

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 10:02:00 +1000

On the weekend we had a massive cleanup event. The craft room was painted, the junk room had a brutal cleanout and everything was given the once over.

Special thanks to Judit and Miklos for organising the painting.

The finished room:

How’s this for Recycling/Freecycling/Upcycling? R3becca converted the crate our lasercutter came in into a handy dandy tool shelf for the shed!

Also got some new shelves in the space and helped organise our tools for easy access. BAM!

Here’s a small portion of the junk we threw out. We took another 180kg of stuff to the tip as well!

The Lasercutter is here!

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 13:13:00 +1000

Last friday I arranged a ute and we got the massive crate to the space (It needed a forklift to load it on!)

We finally got the crate inside and got it set up (OK, OK. That video was us moving the empty crate out after we’d got it unpacked! But we fooled some people)

After a bit of a tussle with cabling, water cooling, disassembling the air compressor and other stuff, the laser is now working nicely.

Here’s Scott with some quadcopter frames he cut:

Instructions on how to use the cutter are here:

http://hackerspace.pbworks.com/w/page/41180361/Lasercutter

And some examples of what you can make are here:

http://hackerspace.pbworks.com/w/page/41180334/Lasercutter%20-%20Setting%20and%20Examples

The lasercutter was partly funded by Robots and Dinosaurs, but the majority came from member’s donations. Special thanks to Gavin, Jeremy, Vorn, Brendan, Max, Rebecca, talsit(david), Mitchell, Macca, Jason B, Kean, David B (shig), Tristan, Adriaan & Chris B for their support, and I’m looking forward to seeing what people will make with it.

Scratch Day at Powerhouse Museum - Game making for kids

Tue, 17 May 2011 17:05:23 +1000

I got contacted by the Powerhouse Museum and they’ve asked to spread the word about a workshop this Saturday to allow kids to make their own computer games and share them on the web.

Looks like a really cool program! Can’t wait to see what the youngsters come up with.

“When: Saturday 21 May, 10am – 5pm

Ages: 8 – 14 years
Cost: Free with Museum admission ($25 family, $10 adult, $6 concession, $5 child 4-15 years, members and children under 4 years free)

Young creatives aged 8-14 are invited to Scratch Day at the Powerhouse Museum. Using Scratch, a free computer programming language, they will create a computer game and share their creations on the web. Scratch Day is happening all over the world and young participants will get to connect with other Scratchers and share their projects. Activities will include

Building a computer game with Scratch: 1 hr staff guided introduction sessions.

Connections Lab: Exploring ways to connect Scratch to controllers (eg Pico boards) and motors (eg Lego We-Do).

Scratch Clubhouse: Sharing ideas and showcasing projects

Scratch Jam: Meeting up with Scratchers in other countries via Video Conference connection

As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

Scratch is a free programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art, and share creations on the web. It is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab.”

Lots more info and booking is available here:

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/thinkspace/courses/scratch_day.php