Last night was a great turnout for the Public Meeting at Workshop 88. Over a dozen makers came out to work on various projects and learn new things at the space.
Our friend Tom M from the Fox Valley ASME chapter came out and had a small part for his project printed on the 3D printer:
Looks pretty sharp! We’ll be waiting to see the finished product.
We’ve been doing a lot of 3D printing recently at Workshop 88. Many times we just download models from Thingiverse, but more and more we are designing our own models.
Using Sketchup is one way that models can be created, but sometimes when you print a complicated model as designed in Sketchup, there are pieces of the model which are missing.
There is a tutorial available for this Sketchup plugin which allows you to find holes or reversed faces in your models. Recently, there was a model designed which failed to print correctly. When using the CADspan plugin, it was discovered that many of the faces were reversed:
The red faces are the ones that needed to be corrected. A few right-clicks later and the model was fixed:We’d love to know your tips and tricks for getting better prints from your own designs. Let us know!
Inspired by Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru, when Jim was faced with the near-impossible task of winding hundreds of turns of wire through a toroid core, he cheated.
By cleanly breaking the core in half and gluing one half to a spindle chucked in an electric drill, the winding became fairly easy. Super gluing the halves together afterward produced a magnetically and physically sound toroid again.
Several folks at the space helped Jim with his experiment, holding wire, counting turns, operating the drill, and of course taking pictures. Many thanks to Ti Leggett for his efforts and skills as the photographer. There are more details in Jim’s project notes, but here’s the video:
We would like to plan the March classes that we will offer at Workshop 88. What classes would you be interested in taking? Most classes would cost $25 (+ materials).
New members John and his son came to Workshop 88 yesterday for the Arduino 101 class. Before class they started printing a model of the Sears Tower that they had designed on their own in Sketchup.
The scale of the model is such that each floor is 1 mm tall. Pretty cool!
We had a great turnout for the electronics 101 class! It was so great to see everyone who came out to learn a bit about the fundamentals of electronics today. Big thanks to Eric, Paul and Bill who all helped out today with the class. Remember to sign up for the Electronics 102 class next week!
