Meetup 2018-05-31

1 Jun, 2018 maker meetup
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Knock sensors, ATTINY85, Satellite antennas, huge 3D printers and some drawing machine stuff.

Successful lissajous test

Last week

First, a quick report on last week: Steph did the Arduino knock sensor tutorial, but it looked like his piezo element was not working. We tried a few of mine, but most were actually buzzers, which don’t work in this application.

Evert came by: He’s interested in an IOT project with remote sensing, so we talked through the options, paying attention to the power requirements of the different technologies. This is very dependent on the data rates and radio technology used.

I messed around with the 3D printer and started getting my drawing machine going.

This week

Hard at work

Otto worked on his portable 3D printer, getting some misalignment sorted out. He had prints on the SD card, but most of them were sliced with ABS filament settings. PET-G needs a much slower first layer, otherwise the extrusion just gums up the nozzle. The few PET-G prints he had were either too long (time-wise) or just simple calibration prints.

Sorting out the printer

This is a really neat little printer.

Neat printer

Steph got the knock sensor working using one of my (many) scavenged piezo elements. Yay! He then started setting up some of the ATTINY85s that he bought from me, getting the bootloader onto them using an Arduino as an ISP. He got the first one working by the end of the evening, nice!

ATTINY programming

Jan had some soldering to do. He is building an azimuth/elevation satellite tracker to get satellite coverage in a big chunk of the southern hemisphere for SatNOGS. Awesome project: https://satnogs.org/documentation/projects/

image

Cassidy came by and chatted about the maker ecosystem in Stellenbosch, as well as a HUGE (2.4m square build volume) 3D printer he’s been developing for a client. Some interesting problems you pick up at that scale: 6 kW heated bed, getting things straight and squared up over those distances, and making sure that the multi-day prints can be stopped and resumed if needed. Very interesting.

(Also had some interesting sports scoring application, nice project to work on)

I got the drawing machine working again. The whole setup is a bit finicky: It depends on the order in which things are connected and started. I really want this to be a bit more solid.

Tracker soldering

All in all, a very enjoyable evening.