Una makes some Rockets

Una the Ultimaker is now really coming into her own. Especially now I’ve put the little blue locking device in the right way round on her print head so she doesn’t push our her Bowden tube half way through every print. I’ve found this super Rocket Retro on ThingUniverse and I’m working my way through the coloured fibres that I got from Faberdashery in their multi-coloured pack. They rather cunningly sent me some Jade Green translucent fibre along with my order, which looks amazing. It is a bit wasted on a rocket but I’ve printed a thin sided vase with it which looks really nice. So now of course I’m going to have to order some more.

Pi Powered Tabletop Gaming Machine

Firebox do this amazing “arcane arcade table”. It is basically a MAME (Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator) PC underneath a 26 inch TFT monitor and with a tricked out sliding joypad thing. It looks very nice. It also costs 4,000 pounds. Wah.

But a Raspberry Pi costs 30 quid and has MAME support. A monitor shouldn’t come in at much more than 100 quids (assuming I can’t find one lying around somewhere). IKEA do coffee tables at around a tenner, and so I reckon it should be possible to get something going for a lot less (how about a twentieth) than the cost of the “amazing” one.

Ever since I saw Jon Purdy’s tabletop Galaxian machine I’ve kind of fancied having a machine like this in the living room. Even number one wife kind of approves, as long as it is not too big and not in the middle of the room. The only tricky bit is making the bezel and inlaying the screen into the tabletop. That has to be done properly, but perhaps if a bunch of folks got together we could have some made.

Anyone fancy having a go?

Update on Monday, September 24, 2012 at 11:28AM by Rob

Right, that's the buttons and joysticks bought:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280937033145

I'm thinking about the Lack coffee table from Ikea:

http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/20011408/

- as long as I can find a monitor that will fit into it. Might need to buy two and stack the tops to get enough depth. Or we could go nuts and buy three so that I can make a platform at each end for the joysticks.

Such fun. Much more so than work....

Three Thing Game Autumn 2012

Followers wanted….

Three Thing Game is coming. With new Bank of Thingland money, improved auction action and all round added wonderfulness, including the MonoGame team who will be coming along for the weekend and giving some sessions on porting XNA games to Windows 8. Thanks so much to Lee Stott from Microsoft for sorting that out.

You can find out more by reading this wonderful blog, going to www.threethinggame.com (which in a strange kind of way links you back to this blog) or by following the all new, highly shiny, ThreeThingGame on Twitter.

And stay tuned for some riveting hardware developments for the competition which might (or might not) actually include riveting.

Una the Ultimaker Lives

I’ve decided to give my 3D printer a name. I’ve come up with “Una the Ultimaker”, because it is about the only name I know that begins with ‘U’. Ursula didn’t seem right and, like most people of my generation, I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Una Stubbs. Anyone who can make Cliff Richard movies worth seeing has got to be OK in my book. You’ll find her now doing sterling work in Sherlock.

But I digress. Last Friday Una got herself into a bit of a pickle. Her Bowden Tube (the tube that delivers the plastic fibre to her extrusion head) popped off the fitting when she was printing. This caused cable to her temperature sensor to come off and she got dangerously close to over heating. The problem was caused by a plug of plastic that had formed in the printing head. This is only the second time I’ve had a problem like this but it is a well known issue with 3D printers. Fortunately the folks at Ultimaker have been working on this and have just released a new “hot end kit” that has been specifically designed to address this problem. Anita at Ultimaker posted a kit out to me in double quick time and I spent this evening fitting it.

I had to strip down the entire print head and rebuild it, which was great fun. I first built the original print head just long enough ago that I’d forgotten all the little things you can do wrong, like forgetting to fit the fan cable before you assemble the whole thing and then finding that you have to take everything to bits again…

But the good news is that having put the new print head on it does seem to work a lot better. It has been designed with flanges that should reduce leaks as well. I celebrated by printing another twisty vase and it has come out better than just about anything I’ve ever printed. With a bit of luck I can now get on and make some new cases for bits and bobs.

This is Una in her natural habitat, along with a well earned cup of tea for me..

Reading your Gas Meter with Gadgeteer

One of my favourite cartoons when I was a kid was a picture of a bloke in a uniform wearing the logo of the Gas Company, with a notepad and pen in his hands and looking exhausted. Someone says to him “You look tired” and he replies “So would you be if you’d just done 100 meters”.

Funny eh? Peter doesn’t want to have to wait until his gas supplier tells him how much gas he has used, he wants to know instantly the effect of having that hot bath. You can find out how he is using Gadgeteer to read meters safely by reading this.