RC Mini Helicopter + Lego Monkeys

Doesn't get any better than this, well actually, if flames could have been worked in. But no, that would have been too dangerous. I just started on Vimeo to see how it is.


Lego Monkeys + E-Flite Blade MCX from Lee C on Vimeo.




Started in on the setup of EMC2 with the Sherline Mill. Same computer as with the lathe. Unpacked the sherline rotary table and put the right angle base on. I will have to spend some time later setting it up on the mill table but for now just making sure it works.

Setting Up the Lathe, EMC2

Some Video of my goofing around setting up the lathe.


Jog mode can be set to continuous or at steps on the lathe in EMC2, .0001" is the smallest.


Running a sample part in EMC2, It is a chess piece, but I am cutting air. I am just setting up the lathe and running some sample gcode to make sure things are working. I actually don't have a cutter handy anyway.


This is from a couple days ago, I was testing the stepper motor speed and acceleration in EMC2's stepper motor setup. I don't think I was actually running the speeds and accelerations listed because I did have to change the settings later on.

Working on Setting Up EMC2 CNC

 
 
 

I decided that I would go ahead and install Ubuntu and EMC2 on the junker dell 900 mhz computer. I had tested the system with theUbuntu 8.04 live cd. The live cd ran pretty well and the latency test was good too (a test where you run the terminal to get the command line and run the command , it measures how well the computer will do as a stepper motor controller).

I did the install and started in on trying to run the xylotex controller and it didn't work. I figured out that I needed to run stepper configuration wizard. I figured out (I don't know linux very well or emc2 but am learning) that many of the features of emc2 are accessed by the linux command line which is accessed by the terminal application. As it turned out I didn't actually have to run it from terminal, it was also in the EMC2 run programs tab.

So far emc2 is pretty nice, not that I have much to compare it to. The stepper config had presets for the xylotex controller which was pretty nice, but if it had not been there it would not have been too bad to set up. There was a "test" button that allows you to run the axis to test the speeds and acceleration which really simplified finding the max speed to run the steppers, one thing though it defaults to a 15" sweep which would crash my sherline as it does not have 15" of travel. Just have to be careful, which is generally good advice around semi autonomous machines. I discovered that it was traveling .5" on the sherline axis when the settings on the stepper config were indicating 1". After going over the controller settings in stepper config I went to the xylotex documentation and discovered that there were jumpers (I never really understood this before) for microstepping. The xylotex board was set for 1/8 micro step and EMC2 was set for 1/2 stepping. I found a fairly decent explanation of stepper motors in a microchip applications pdf.

End of day I had the lathe minimally running on EMC2. All this was something of a boondoggle on my part. I have been putting off cutting chips. Partly the mess and partly that I have to finish shrink tubing the wiring. Another thing is that I am running turbocnc. I think it is okay but I have some problems copying g code, I have to use floppies and they are becoming a problem with the computers I have (the computers use win 98 and dos. At least with emc2 I can use a usb thumbdrive to transfer files, and there is a chance I can get wireless to work.

Another nice thing about EMC2 is that the GUI has a graphic view of what the gcode is doing. I am going to use it to help learn g code.

I might try mach 3 also, first I have to put the computer I set up back together.


Link on Stepper Motors and Drivers for CNC at otocoup.com

Helpful link on Make: CNC Buyers Guide

Hexapods, Dymaxions andn EMC2

I decided to try out EMC2, a linux based cnc machine controller. It runs on 2 versions of ubuntu with live cds available. I burned both to see how they are. I was able to get both to run and they look pretty interesting. I was not able to casually figure out how to get them to run my lathe. I didn't use any of the documentation. I will take a look later.

EMC2 mentions having control code for hexapods. Hexapods are interesting. I googled to see if anyone was running emc2 to control a hexapod and nothing came up.

On a search tangent to hexapod I found a link to the buckminster fuller challenge website, looks like an easy $100K to me, just save the world;-)

On a basic level I agree with a lot of what is quoted there. The movie on the page has the really neat dymaxion car which put me on a search on youtube for footage. And found some neat dymaxion video there.

I would love to make a skin for a honda that copies the dymaxion airframe.






http://challenge.bfi.org/movie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6g610buepo

CNC Unearthed in Basement

 
 
 
 

I was looking back at posts to get an idea of the timeline for the project of making a cnc workshop. It has been very stop and go. It was just over 2 years ago that I was first testing the lathe with turbocnc.

Back to now: I unearthed my sherline cnc mill this past weekend, and tonight have just dug out my sherline lathe.

I started both up and they and the computers are still working ok! I am trying to get a spare computer or two running to upgrade from the laptop (latitude 266mhz?) and a pentium 2 450mhz. They work with turbocnc but I think I want to try to run mach 2 and mach 3.

I started in on the trial version of deskproto 5.0, the short description is that it converts 3D CAD models to machine driving gcode. If it works out I can make a 3d model on the computer and convert it to a form that will drive the cnc mill to make a part. It seems capable but without a cnc to run the g code on it was only going so far. I still have not run any code from deskproto it does indeed spit out g code. I am not sure it will run on turbocnc. Mainly the little extras in deskproto like speed callouts and the like might hang it up.

I did run some code on the mill. I set up a 1/8 endmill and did cut some wood to finish setting up and verifying the axis. It did turn out that the z axis was running 2x distance wise, which was easy to correct in the setup. I still have a bunch of things to go over in the turbocnc manual.

I spent time trying to set up a couple computers to dedicate to running the cnc mill and lathe. I want to try the mach 2 and mach 3 demo but am making sure things work right with turbocnc. Makes sense to me to start with something that is proven before trying out a new package.

I am going to spend some time setting up a tool box and putting stuff into an organized way that if I have to ignore the cnc I can come back in a month or year and it will be that much more advanced. I might be able to get a good run of work done with it.

ice storm pics

 
 
 
 

Emergency Jettison of Cargo

I am continuing to "jettison" my belongings. I filled a dumpster and it they took it away. That took care of some big stuff. Furniture and windows and stuff.

I have to clear some space to move on my long term goals of setting up a shop, also I would like to be in a good situation if I have to move. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
 
We had an ice storm Friday. I woke up to go into work early and beat the traffic, but the sound of the furnace blower fan chugging greeted me. I went to the basement to see a flood. In the deepest spot (the basement floor is not level across the length of it) it was at least 4" deep. Enough to flood into the furnace and bog down the blower fan, but fortunately not enough to short the motor.
 

 
The ice was accompanied by lots of rain. The flooding was made possible because the house sump pump had a malfunction. A part of it that makes it turn on when the water level goes up had rusted out and and broken, fortunately a easy repair with some 10 gauge copper wire.

Over the last few days I have been throwing out boxes of papers and books that got soaked, and just now brought up 2 dripping rugs that I had in an area that should have never flooded.

All in all it is helping me "jettison cargo".

I am coming across a lot of neat things though. I put together a Cessna rc plane I got last spring. It was new in the box, a really cheap plane made in china with entertaining manual (the Chinese translations)
 


Also found a cool old reel to reel mini player I had gotten. I don't know if it works but it comes from a time when manufacturers of electronics put schematics on the products. Back then they were simpler and probably more likely to need a schematic so someone could fix it.

 
 

4x4 Training

I came across a interesting article about a 4X4 driving course in East Haddam, CT. The man who runs the course apparently does trips around the world for National Geographic and other scientific organizations, does his own trips (limit 14 people) the next being to Iceland. Just thought it was pretty cool. I couldn't find pricing on the web site. The link is to their gallery.
http://www.overlandexperts.com/gallery2.php?gallery=driving_school

Ginger Bread Lighthouse and RC Planes

We made the gingerbread lighthouse, it came out pretty good. S worked really hard to make the dough, roll and cut the patterns and bake them. Also she made frosting. Then she asked me to help assemble the lighthouse. I designed it on CAD and made the patterns for S. I started in on the baked pieces assembling the base. I had to figure out how to hold and assemble the lighthouse, it was getting a bit dicey. S may have mentioned out loud as much. It did work out in the end. I had to do some trimming of the side walls of the tower because it became apparent that they were really not the same lenght and the tower top would be crooked if left alone. We did have some buckling problems with the side but some gentle prodding and extra frosting glue fixed that.

S was to show the lighthouse at Thanksgiving diner and it made the trip without breaking.










Got to finally fly my Parkzone Trojan T-28. Had some trim issues on the first flight, it would want to nose up and seemed like it wanted to flip over but not exactly. I did adjustments to the trim on the control and more or less got it to fly better and I was flying better. I had some problems taking off and landing. The wheels just don't like grass path to takeoff on. I had to launch it from hand but it flew great that way. On the 3rd landing I clipped the wing tip on a pallet of pavers I had. It tore the wing off. Fortunately it only amounted to a little chunk of foam and plastic reinforcement for the rear wing connection. I had it fixed for today and got a flight out without wrecking it.

gingerbread igloo

Today S wanted to make a gingerbread igloo. There were no plans available so I made a 3d model on CAD, and printed out templates to cut the dough. The first try the cookies got burned, they were too thin for the 12 minute cooking time in the recipe. We tried building it just to make sure it would build. The dome was unsupported and it looked dicey. It didn't work, by the 3rd tier it was collapsing. We (mostly me) ate the less burned pieces and decided to try again. We made internal support ribs and built up on that and it worked okay. By the end of building we decided to frost the whole igloo. As a side note we are developing a feel for what the best consistency of the frosting should be. On the colonial gingerbread house we ran between too thick and too thin, mostly too thin around the windows. As for the igloo, next time we might try making some ginger bread polar bears.

With that done S mentioned that she would like to make a ginger bread lighthouse. I made up a preliminary model, I have not decided if I want to add a "house" to it. I think it kinda looks like a prison guard tower but S thinks it is a good lighthouse. (the CAD jpg is at the bottom)



 
 
 
 

Ginger Bread Houses

S suggested we make a ginger bread house today. I wanted to make one that was fancier than the run of the mill house. Found some links to some really cool projects. We made the "colonial" style house on bobvilla.com

 
 
 
 

Bob Villa's site has some cool patterns and good intructions

Here is a picture of a neat Star Wars AT-AT walker.

Lego Birthday

Last weekend was the Riverton Fair, the last and smallest Agricultural Fair of the year in CT. It is the best in my opinion.

The decorated pumpkins were pretty neat but a couple stood out. One was a Tin Man, and another was totally encrusted in candy corn!




N's birthday was Friday but the party was yesterday. It was a busy, busy week of cleaning up and it was especially busy at work. On top of that the roofers showed up Wednesday to do the roof without any warning. The contractor was supposed to give us advance warning but didn't.

It made for a hectic week.

N's party went good with family and a whole bunch of his friends over. The weather was great. A lot of time was spent raking up leaves for a leaf pile. This was especially cool because the kids did the raking, not me.


N is really into legos right now and got some really neat stuff. He is at the stage where he likes help building them, so I got to help building the lego Mars Explorer.

The main vehicle you build has tank tracks and is pretty neat. It can be upgrade with motors and a ir unit that control it.




I was researching using mindstorms to control it as a project to do with N and found this among other things.

http://www.leggor.de/content/spokeless/spokeless0.html

Pretty neat stuff the guy does.

Pirates Day

Argh, I am a disabled PIRATE! Heh, yeah eye patch, plastic hook, plastic peg leg, but I'm still smiling! No, it's not the rum.

Spent a few minutes setting up the RFID kit from parallax.com. It works and works with processing. It hooks up through a FTDI usb thingamabob and processing reads the serial input and prints it on a window. I will have to figure out what I want it to do. I really don't know processing but will learn, probably.
One small step at a time. Peg leg you know.



Had my impacted wisdom tooth cracked out of my mouth Friday. I'm feeling the ever loving pain of mortality. 2 more to go, but the Doc says they should be easy. Especially after this one. I ask him if the roots were twisted, he say "No, real heavy though." Actually I thought it went much better than the last, a lot less twisting and tugging this time. More grinding and cutting and chipping, I was brushing tooth pieces off my shirt after the surgery when I was getting ready to go.

On the bright side when the Nurse took my vitals my BP was 122/70. I asked her if they had the vitals from the last time, from a few years ago and they did it was 140/90 or somewhere like that. I had borderline high BP a few years ago but since I have fit up I am much better.

I asked the Doctor if I should cut back on any activities after the surgery. I was thinking of biking and uni cycling and generally beating the crap out of myself. His reply stuck me as funny, he said to use common sense. I pressed for details. He opined that I would not be going to the gym. After the Nurse was briefing me on the medications and was more specific that I not do any physical activity for the next couple days as it could cause the clot to loosen and make the healing slower and the pain greater. I did take the rest of Friday and Saturday off on physical activities, and stuck to watching movies and playing with legos. Though I did rassle a few tag sale deals that required me to move and such. The big one was I got a commercial Singer Sewing Machine. It is a double stitching machine. I have to get a manual for it. I was hoping to find a free online copy of the manual but no luck so far.

Was unhappy about the rain this morning but dragged myself out to do some yard cleanup, busted up some old picket fence for garbage collection, and the sun did break out, and stayed out. So with that the N and S and I did something we like to do but have not done recently, we took things apart. Usually they are broken but sometimes they are just obsolete. We took a tv/vcr apart, N had the idea that the plastic case would make a nice "box" to tote his stuff in. Mostly stuff from a lexmark printer and the insides of a keyboard we/he took apart. S took a free mountain bike apart, and spent a lot of time making jokes about "hey there is something wrong with my bike" while play riding the frame.

I learned how not to remove the cotters from a rusty old bike, (if you want to use them again" Fortunatey the bottom bracket was pretty crudded up so no great loss.

Oh I also got around to using the oxy acetylene cutting torch on the bolts holding the cab of the dodge to the frame. It was fun using fire and oxygen to burn away the bolts, molten steel is exciting. Turns out gravity and rust are big parts of holding the cab on also. Didn't get around to ripping it off with power equipment. I will try to gently remove it with large crowbars and breaker bars later, or at least loosen it. Small but continuous progress will prevail, eventually.

Bike Repair Stand

 

I am still trying to figure out what I am going to do in my garage to make it a shop. And I was lamenting that I didn't have a bike repair stand. I have a bunch of ideas on making one but I don't have the tools set up to do it. I came up with a plan to make one out of a beat up old drill press and a "universal" clamping/vise system. The drill press is a fairly sturdy floor model but is pretty ragged looking, however being sturdy I thought it would make a nice stand. I bought a "universal" clamping/vice system this weekend at a tag sale not knowing exactly what I would use it for. It was a bit expensive at $25 but looked promising for a myriad of tasks, I just didn't know exactly for what, it did have a lot of stuff in the box, and looked to be sturdy enough to be useful. It did have the flexibility to set it up to clamp in almost any orientation, and had a V-block plastic jaw. The pictures pretty much show it all. It works.

Anyway, I have a bike repair stand that will be good enough until I get things set up to make a "real" one. If it works well I may not need to.

The other reason I need a bike stand is that I have a bunch of bargain/free bikes that I need to strip down to salvage usable parts and chop up the frames to recycle the tubes. The tubes will become practice stock for me to learn mig welding tube, and to learn oxy-acetylene fillet brazing. I have done a little mig on tube and I think I can do a structurally sound weld, it is not an attractive weld yet. Once I get those processes learned I will try a minor project of some sort. Maybe a MIG welder cart.

Vacation Day 14 - Friday, Tube Notcher

I received the tube notcher today. I went for the JD Squared TN-100. I ordered it Wednesday night and upgraded the shipping to 3 day delivery, and received it today (Friday). I am really impressed and grateful that Medford Tool handles my order in a professional and timely way.

If the fabrication project I am working on (unicycle frame) goes well I would seriously consider their tube bender. It seems to be well liked from the forum comments I have read. But that is getting way ahead of myself. I need to perfect my mig tube welding skills (welded a practice part that took a hammering) and fillet brazing skills (have not yet tried it)

Vacation Day 6 (recap) Herkimer Diamond Mines

Went to the Herkimer "Diamond Mines" yesterday for a outing. S and N loved it. Basically the place was a big pile of stones and dirt and you smash rocks and dig and find doubly terminated quartz crystals.

 
 


You could miss the sign but it is pretty obvious!















Don't be disappointed when you see a big pile of rock!
















Sweet Corn at $4 a Bakers Dozen. Good deal compared to CT.


 


 

The Corn was excellent!