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Makerspace for the Win!

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I had a great evening at the Ipswich Makerspace last week. For a while I had been pondering a broken sellotape dispenser, so I decided to do something about it. The sellotape was held by a large spool, with a smaller tapered spool inside. The smaller spool has two prongs which are supported by the main dispenser. The problem, one of these prongs had snapped off.

So i took the spool, a vernier gauge and drew it up in Autodesk Fusion 360. Exported the stl file and with help from a few of the others at Makerspace got the 3D printer going. The print was not perfect, the printer needs a bit of tuning, but it worked and I now have a fully functioning sellotape dispenser again.

Makerspace for the Win!

OpenTech 2015

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On 13th June just gone OpenTech 2015 happened. It was an event sponsored by the Open Data Institute.

The event hosted talks of various kinds, all relating to Open Tech and open data particularly. Although I did not go, or even realise it was happening, looking at their web site it looks like they had a good selection of talks. Some of which have been made available in either audio or video form.

So if you want to learn about some great open data projects this is the place to go. Unfortunately the talk about The Great British Public Toilet Map is not online, but I’m sure there will be other things to take your interest.

Ryanteck Debug Clip

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The Ryanteck Debug Clip allows the Raspberry Pi serial console to be controlled over a standard USB cable from another computer.  This is great where you have a headless Pi and are unable to get it on the network to SSH in.  Ryanteck have provided instructions for using the Debug Clip with the Linux and Windows operating systems.  But I use OSX on a Mac so I thought I’d give it a go to see if I could get it to work.

Debug Clip

It turns out Ryan picked the Microchip MCP2221 IC as the brains of the board and this IC does not require any drivers on OSX 10.7 or greater.  This is much better than the generic console cable I have been using to date where the driver needs to be re-installed after every OS update.

It was really easy to use, if you want to see how to use it yourself, take a look at this video I produced.

CamJam – Report

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On 6th June the CamJam team held their latest Raspberry Pi event.  Once again it was at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. I had the opportunity to attend this one and dragged the family along.  Although I could not stay for the whole event I had a great time.

Some of the key highlights were:

    • Andy Proctor gave a very inspiration talk on why the Raspberry Pi is not just for kids.  Andy has been involved in the Ipswich Makerspace for the past few months and has now taken up the challenge of hosting the Ipswich Raspberry Jam We shall be offering Andy all our support and you can see his talk CamJam talk here:

    • Jimbo Uberscuba, who also visits the Ipswich Makerspace regularly gave a great talk on programming with Java on the Pi, his talk can be seen below:

  • Other things of interest, a USB key which can be programmed easily on a laptop with wifi or LAN settings, so that it can be inserted into the Pi and upon booting the Pi’s wifi or LAN settings automatically update. Making it easy to connect a Pi to a network without needing a monitor, great for headless setups.  It was called PiConfig and the website is here
  • PiWars 2015 was also announced, but I will post separately about this.
  • If you are interested in seeing any of the other talks from CamJam June 2015, they can be found here.

Camera tracking in Blender

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So I decided to give camera tracking in blender a try, It works really well, setup was easy enough, but the render took forever! 500 frames at 10 samples (Not that many.) took over 6 hours on two different computers (150 on main: ~ 2 hours, 350 on laptop: 4.5 hours.), result is good, but the shadows are not brilliant, still needs some work. (Model used is my bench design for product design.)
by Byron Theobald
from Ipswich Makerspace

Ipswich-Makerspace@googlegroups.com via IFTTT

Kickstarter 3D scanner by Phil Willis

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This looks interesting and may be a reason for (me) buying a 3D printer.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1545315380/atlas-3d-the-3d-scanner-you-print-and-build-yourse

However not sure how the laser modules work as they appear to be fixed to the device and unmoving yet they manage to cast lines on the target, does this mean the devices have tiny mirrors inside them?
by Phil Willis