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

There has been next to no progress on my robot; this has been due to buying a house and realizing I would need to do a lot of work on it. That aside; I now have a work bench coming together and the time and money freeing up to get back to it (yay!). There is some news; there is now a local Maker Space getting started up. This may provide tools, resources and people to work with. I am very excited since I live nearby (about a mile away); though there is no way I could currently afford the membership fee. We will see; as I plan to stop by one of their open houses. More exciting; I have purchased a part. I saw the part come up on my reader feed and realized it was cheap and would go quickly. I refer to the 1.8 inch 18 bit color TFT LCD display with microSD card breakout released by adafruit. At only $25.00 I knew they would be gone in an instant so I just went ahead and purchased one! My goal for this is to use it for output from the robot; debugging output in the short term and more

Well, working with Netbeans I have a problem occur over and over. One of those annoying programming tasks where you always make the change but are too lazy to deal with underlying problem. Today I decided to address on of them. Every time I create a class in Netbeans, there is a comment that appears at the top: /*  * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates  * and open the template in the editor.  */ My co-workers leave this in place; I am OCD about removing it every time. I don't like four lines of useless code at the top. This morning I decided to change this problem and maybe make my Java class templates a little better. I will walk through improving the class template, and adding the license file for display. This is a stub class created before the changes: /*  * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates  * and open the template in the editor.  */ package com.something.somewhere; /**  *  * @author GFrick  */ public class MyClass {  // class here.    }

I was browser my Google reader feed and a great site popped up. I've checked it out and once I get my work bench set up and get back to my robot; I'll definitely be ordering some things from here. I wanted to spread the word about the site: http://www.inmojo.com/ They have lots of RFID, Robotics and just Arduino stuff that I think would be cool to play with. I hope to get a full post up soon.

I had a bit of trouble installing the JDK via the shell; but I eventually figured it out. Seems a large part of the problem was differences in 64 vs 32 bit Ubuntu. I wanted to use the apt-add-repository, but had to figure out that it requires some python libs. Here are the simply steps if you have been looking: sudo apt-get install  python-software-properties sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner" sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk After that, you should have javac/etc.