George Frick

The long journey to building a 3D printer has been underway for quite a while now. With the complete set of parts ordered and much of the construction finished I decided to share the progress; outline my frustrations, and post about how you can benefit from my mistakes. I have been building the printer for over a month; and the last batch of parts arrived early this week. What can clearly be said about this project is that you will underestimate it. The original plan was to get this working in six months. Once construction was underway; it seemed more like a month. It now looks like this could really take up to six months (to produce a quality 3D printed part). In this part of the coverage; I hope to outline the budget and basic build so far; finally going over some problems and warning points. The budget for this printer is quite high. It is a mid-range open source 3D printer known as a Prusa Mendel. You can find the wiki for it here . I chose to start with the basics (more on thi...

This is the first part of my post covering my creation of the line following Arduino robot. In this post I will talk about the costs; setup and preparation for creating the robot. I will also discuss a few different approaches to line following that I explored. We will get the sensor attached to the robot and retrieving data. In the next part, we will cover the final approach used; tour the code, and see the full video. The budget for this tank is quite low, because we start with Robot 1. I chose to add a single reflectance sensor to the bottom of Wandering Tank; and remove the wall avoidance equipment. So, the budget: Robot 1 ($98.00) [See this post for building Robot 1] Sensor - Pololu QTR Reflectance Sensor $2.49 + $4.95 S&H (est) So Line Following Tank has an estimated budget of $105.00 to build. Since there is no need for the parts from Robot 2, the cost is very low. I would suggest coming up with a few other things to order so that you don't pay more in shippin...

Well after a long break of working on the house; this blog will be returning to a primarily robot programming focus. My work on the house is shared elsewhere... So; I've resumed work on my robot and added a second Arduino to my arsenal; this way I can prototype ideas without disassembling the robot. I have used it to go through the tutorial for the TFT screen: The new Arduino is an UNO; they come in much more sophisticated packaging than their predecessor: That is a sticker sheet on the right and a EULA in the middle. The first nice thing to notice about the UNO is it auto switches the power source. You can see this difference and other slight changes in the comparison here: So; I will post about the robot again when line following can be demonstrated and the code is ready to share. I hope to share two versions (with and without TFT info printing). With that; the other exciting news is that I am building a 3D printer; which I will document here and share my proble...