Meanwhile I managed to get a header cable and plugged my Mac into my Makerbot electronics. ReplicatorG-0013 fired up, found the serial port and started talking, yay (well, ok once I remembered to switch the power on the board on ! This was with the new 5V USB serial cable (I think the previous time I was using was the 3.3V one, maybe that had something to do with it). It offered to upgrade the Mendel’s motherboard firmware, then it offered to upgrade the extruder board firmware. I couldn’t get it to upgrade the extruder board until I plugged the USB cable directly into the extruder board though. It seems that if you want stepper motor extruder support you can use firmware 1.8 or wait for a firmware version 2.1 as mentioned in the comments.

It also seems that someone has produced plans for a lasercut Mendel (why didn’t we cut a fab@home in the first place?). A full parts set was available on eBay (or, one could bid on a full extruded set of parts, choices choices). Conveniently as one of us has just acquired a laser cutter it looks like we may soon have parts to put together a Mendel all being well, and can keep some of the business local So we might go from zero working repraps to (at least) two working ones inside of not very long. Meanwhile another lot of people have turned up with their Makerbot and begun assembly. There was a working Makerbot producing a black cube with 3mm tolerance there this evening.

Production of other equipment seems to be progressing, we may soon have a 4 degree of freedom CNC cutter, which can be used to construct augers, which can be used to produce the plastic feedstocks that keep the Mendels going.

By the end of the evening I’ve committed myself to 1.5kg of ABS feedstock (some of it red and some enamelled nichrome wire, plus shipping.

It really is beginning to feel like a tipping point.

Boo for buses stuck in traffic.

I think it’s a bad sign for society when your police incident ID number is 15 digits long.

Lots of new faces at The Artifactory last night, well, not so new as most of them had been at the Sun Fair yesterday.

Didn’t get the z axis drive belt working yesterday, the alternatives are finding a right sized belt and probably having to get new cogs, trying ball chain with reprapped sprockets instead of belt, or getting better belt splicing technology. And sadly having driver issues talking to the reprap from java on my machine, which IIRC are similar to the problems I had talking to the weather board on a different machine but fortunately I was able to fix those.

Can I argue I’ve been preparing for my Swancon panel for 8 months by building a reprap? Looking forward to getting there anyway and catching up with everyone.

Someone decided to check the contents of my glovebox by sticking their arm through the glass of the passenger side window. So my car now has two insurance claims on it…

Spent Saturday trying to get the Artifactory’s Reprap working, but it wasn’t to be in time for the Sun Fair. Got lots of people interested though, but there was stiff competition for attention from the arachnoid hexapod robot. Hoping we’ll be able to convert those interested people to paying members And hoping that we can get the Mendel printing so I can print parts for my Mendel, I’d like to get it constructed before I’ve been working on it for a year! But it will be the second one I’ve built, so hopefuly construction will progress more rapidly.

Oh, I hate it when I leave my headphones in my other pants.

iPads at the end of the week for those in the US. Meanwhile all the developers are struggling to make the iPad App store launch deadline. Good luck folks!

Not sure if the queue is because 4 buses just arrived at once, or because there are a lot of cars out of commission.

Fortunately today I remembered my headphones so I an catch up on TEDtalks.

Kind of annoyed that my poor overworked doctor requires me to make an appointment to renew the prescription I’ve been getting repeats for for the past 9 years or so. I’m sure that can’t be a useful use of his or my time. Does he get paid more if he talks to me about my diet and cholesterol for more than 6 minutes or something?

Otherwisee things seem pretty much back to normal. Except for my car. RAC website was swamped, but their
Mobile site had a quick ‘we’ll get back to you’ form. Still a few smashed windscreen in the QEII carpark, and a few cars with plastic wrapped around their rear windows.

Good time to pick up some stray branches as firewood for the winter months?

Bus driver os in the wrong lane, this Gould prove interesting outside UWA

The skyline is strangely different, with less dense foliage and missing branches everywhere. It’s like the world has been mulched.

Lovely sunsets though.

Why doesn’t the RAC online claim form offer you storm damage as one of the choices on their Motor Vehicle form? That’ll hurt their phone lines today.

Oh, we’re merging two lanes of traffic yay! And I just heard “UWA” and “deviation” mentioned. Lots of people abandoning cars, which is understandable as we just drove through a lake.

I imagine there’s a lot of free mulch going around this week!

Matthews basketball centre parking lot is underwater, which makes it tough for the Park and Ride crowd, unless they got a park on the uphill bits.

Looks like some pumps were deployed in the low bits outside paraquad. There usually seems to be some interesting stormwater/ sewage operations going on over there.

Firies just raced past from Daglish. I think every cop must be directing traffic this morning. Few cars without windscreens getting towed. Lots of cars parked where they gave up in the traffic last night I suspect. Road outside hospital cordoned off, due to downed trees, ironically diverting us along more tree-lined route. Kids out sweeping their playground.

Bus driver is now lost, and we are on a mystery tour through Shenton Park. So if you’re waiting for the 99 at Charlie’s you may be there all day. Kings Park blocked off. Back on Thomas St where traffic looks banked up all the way to UWA.