Ultimaker 3 PVA Experiment

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Nathan and Thomas (students) have been printing using the new Ultimaker 3 with the PVA water-soluble support material, and we decided to run a quick little experiment to confirm what we thought we already knew:  that warm water would dissolve the PVA quicker than cold water.

Ultimaker 3 PVA Filament Test

After 25 hours, 50 minutes, we pulled both sets out of the water to compare.  Turns out that our assumptions were correct, at least for this barely scientific test.   Even without any real proper measuring of the leftover gummy PVA on the prints, there was clearly less undissolved support material on the ones initially placed in hot water than on the ones places in room temperature water.  I think we’ll borrow a hot plate stirrer from the Chemistry department and maybe try to run a few more controlled and better timed experiments.

Ultimaker PVA Side by Side

Building Maker Culture

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I’ve been working a lot lately with members of Folsom Lake College’s Peer Mentors, a group helmed by the the great Juan Flores (fellow faculty member and father of my lab helper from the other day).  The Peer Mentors are working on developing tiles for the mosaic tile project, with the goal that they will in turn help their assigned mentees to develop tiles.  It’s our hope that involving new college students in a technical and very accessible project will give them a connection to the makerspace early in their college career, and that having a physical artifact on the wall will help them feel connected to the college. Jess (student, Peer Mentor, and astrobiology enthusiast) was the first student from the group to have her design ready.

Jess Changing Bits

The new rough/fine pass feature of Easel is a good one, and should help to preserve the tremendously delicate 1/32″ bits.  We actually ended up doing three passes with successively smaller bits,  and Jess quickly mastered the process, producing this really nice design.

KC Boylan (Communication and Media Studies) stopped by later in the day to cut her tile…

KC Changing Bits

and Kathleen Kirklin (Interim President) did hers a couple of weeks ago…

Kathleen Securing her Tile

The project is turning out to be a great way to foster community as we continue to develop the space, and it’s a maker skills confidence builder besides.  With nearly a dozen tiles finished, I need to work with Ian Wallace (Theater Arts) to get some time on the big ShopBot to route out the waffle frame so we can get these up on the wall!

Aquaponics Milestone – Data Display

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We reached an important milestone in the project this afternoon. The power trio of Nathaniel, Rebekah, and Nathan – the core of FLC’s Data Science Club – got the Raspberry Pi installed and working to drive the integrated monitor, displaying a rolling presentation about the science – chiefly the nitrogen cycle – that makes the aquaponics system work.

Guts

As with most prototypes, the presentation needs a few tweaks, but it’s great to see all of the system components coming together.

Tweaking the Monitor Rotation

Nathan is working on the Arduino sensor array, and we’re still waiting to swap the science fish with the aquaponics fish, the latter in the quarantine holding tank in the Innovation Center.  The plan is to swap the green arcade button with a blue one, to match the colors in the presentation, and the button subsystem needs some attention, but overall the project is finally starting to feel like it might one day be finished!

Nathaniel, Rebekah and Nathan Contemplating Raspbian

Ultimaker 3 – First Print

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Ultimaker 3

The new Ultimaker 3 arrived the other day, and Thomas Schmitt (student) unboxed it and got it set up and calibrated. Thomas has been designing a bobbin for fly fishing fly tying, and some of the project parameters, including a threaded rod and a hollow tube that serves as a thread guide, seemed to provide a good test case for a first print on the U3. The machine comes standard with dual extruders, and ships with a roll of PVA, a water-soluble filament.

Thomas Prints the First U3 Print

The first print came out really nice, and the water-soluble support material is a game changer, especially for printing certain fine details and hollow areas.  Some of the tricky biology models that faculty want to print are finally going to be within reach.

Kathleen Drives the Robot

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Kathleen Kirklin (FLC’s Interim President) took the robot for a spin in the library other day.

Kathleen Kirklin Drives Robot

I also had the chance to share with Kathleen and Gary Hartely (Dean) progress on the aquaponics project. The plan is to have the screen display some rolling information about the biological and chemical processes in play, interspersed with footage from the live fishcam that will be inside the tank. Pressing the big green arcade button will bring up charts and graphs of the in-tank (temp, pH, electroconductivity) and out-of-tank (temp, humidity, and perhaps one or two others) sensor data.

Robot Observation

Lots to do, but within the next couple of weeks there should be some serious development work on all parts of the project…

Photos courtesy of Tony Humphreys.

The Fish Keepers

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Fantastic progress this week on the aquaponics project.  The Theater Arts department finished the display, and FLC Maintenance drilled the holes in the raised floor under the unit, pulled the power and Ethernet, and bolted the whole thing to the floor to make it topple-proof.  FLC’s Data Science club, spearheaded by Nathaniel Adams (student) and Rebekah Keeley (student) have taken responsibility for the technical implementation, including visual and interaction design, front- and back-end Web development, database work, and getting the Raspberry Pi configured and working with the Arduino, which is doing the data gathering.

Meanwhile Taylor Zenobia (student) and Katie Stackhouse (student) have taken charge of the biological systems, selecting the fish species, and arranging the in-tank decor.

Adding Water

They washed and added the sand, rocks, and plants, then carried the water quite a distance from the Innovation Center to the Library. We’ve got inoculated filter media from the Science Fish (they’re currently living in the IC), which should speed up the tank start-up process. Taylor has been regularly monitoring the water, and once the water chemistry is stable, we’ll look at adding the fish, a few at a time.

The Value of Build Days

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Spent the better part of today building – or starting, anyway – the Rostock Max v3.  There’s tremendous cultural and social value in having folks take ownership of their tools.  We ordered this 3d printer in DIY kit form specifically so that we could build it together, following our successful building/bonding experience putting together the X-Carve (part 1, part 2, part 3).  Champion maker educators Diane Carlson (Sociology), Jennifer Kraemer (Early Childhood Education), and Max Mahoney (Chemistry) were were joined by students Nathaniel Adams, CJ Costa, and Alex Hartigan.

It sometimes takes a while to get rolling on a complicated build.  I’ve learned that one of the best ways to kick things off is to get all the participants doing something communal and simple, so we started by collectively picking out all the little bits left over from the laser cutting process.  A low risk/high reward opportunity for the group to gel, visit, socialize, and quickly develop a common purpose.

Rostock Max v3 Build Day

This kind of social busywork seems to scratch some shared primate itch, and reminded me of my favorite moment from last summer’s Making Across the Curriculum workshop, during which folks gathered around to chat and pick the protective paper off of Diane’s Wheel of Voting Rights project.

Collective Grooming - Picking the Sticker Residue off a Laser Cut Piece of Acrylic

That finished, we loosely divided up the work and got to building.  With this particular build, there are a lot of steps that can be completed independently and in no particular order – in other words, not a lot of serial dependencies – so folks were able to dive in and work in pairs and trios without (usually) having to wait for others to finish.  Despite a few missing parts (which turned out not to be missing after all), we made a good start, and will continue building later in the week.

Build day album on Flickr…

Failing at 3D Printing

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Some significant failures recently in the 3D printing department. Inspired by Steve Holzberg’s (Biology) cancer prints, Linda Abraham (Biology) found a model of a rhinovirus for printing. Given the complexity of the model, and the intricately folded surface detail, we decided the Form 2 was the printer to use. Loaded up the clear resin and let it print.  The result:

Rhinovirus in Clear Resin

Mostly it worked fine, but the top of the model had problems. A strange rupture appeared in the sphere:

Failed Print

The anomaly coincided with, was caused by – or maybe left? – this cloudy residue in the tray:

Form 2 Fail

The tray was fresh out of the wrapper, and it was the very first run of clear, so I’m not sure exactly what caused the failure. In any case, the model is still perfectly usable, after a little filing to smooth out the jagged edges of the rip.

Meanwhile Max Mahoney (Chemistry) and Alex Hartigan (Student) continue to work on their 3D printed free energy surfaces project.  After something like 84 hours, the intricate nested conical structure, our largest print to date, began failing, and we pulled the plug on it to regroup (with 105 hours left on the print).

Ultimaker Fail

The center part of the model printed beautifully, and after some careful calculations to determine where things went wrong, Max set out to print the remainder of the model – in pink, since we ran out of white filament – with the idea of gluing them together somehow.

Untitled

This one too is failing out on the margins. Support material configured as a tower seems to be the common failure point. Stay tuned…

Updates: Aquaponics and Mosaic Tile Projects

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With the fall show winding down, Cameron and the Theater Arts crew are trying to get the aquaponics system wrapped up, and brought the near-finished display up to the library for a dry-fitting.

20161115_150458

I’m told they’ll have it buttoned up within a week, after which all the other work – getting the tank established, setting up and calibrating all the sensors, connecting all that to the network, figuring out the display and the giant “get tank vitals” arcade button – can continue in earnest.

We’re also close to getting the nine tiles for the first pane of the Carvey project finished, inspired by Jeff Solin’s Mosaic Tile project. Nathaniel and Rebekah of FLC’s Data Science Club carved up a version of their club logo to add to the other faculty and student tiles we’ve got so far.

Removing the carved tile.

The plan then is to mill (on the big ShopBot down in Theater Arts) a 3×3 tile “waffle” frame, with recessed wells for each of nine tiles. That will comprise the first of hopefully many such 9-tile collections, as additional faculty, staff and students create their own tiles, and all that work will be on display, either outside or inside of the Innovation Center.

Carvey Totoro

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Carving Done

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X-Carve Carving – Lessons Learned

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With the floors finished, things are finally getting a little bit closer to normal in the makerspace.  Moved the X-Carve from the clean lab to the dirty lab, and tested out cutting some HDPE in preparation for a mosaic tile project.

X-Carve Carving HDPE (Finally)

Lessons learned:

  • Slowest router speed is best – less fuzz.
  • Even at the slowest speed, there was plenty of fuzz that needed to be cleaned up with an X-Acto knife.
  • Pause at your own risk. I paused the cut out of courtesy to the Data Science club, and the job never recovered. When I tried to restart, the X-Carve ignored my pleas. After a while I gave up, and tried to re-run the job using the previously established zero.  Things went bad quickly. Easel didn’t seem to care about my prior zero setting, and charged forward, about 6 inches off the mark. I ruined the in-progress HDPE blank, and shaved a little bit off of the waste board besides.

Even with those minor hiccups, I’m loving the final result!

X-Carve Carving