My profession is in the fine art services, but that is not what this blog is about. I am now and have always been fascinated with technology and electronics, as a youngster I was always taking apart my toys, and reassembling the motors and switches, mostly I would just take things apart just to see what was inside, I wanted to know the magic that made things work. My first big device that I took apart was a broken VCR, "RISK OF ELECTRIC SHOCK" was too intriguing to resist.
After my father found the disassembled death machine he bought me an "Elenco MX906 130 in 1 Electronics Lab" and told me to play with that and stay away from TV's and VCR's.
This was my first formal introduction to electronics and how they worked, the kit included two integrated circuits, they were pretty advanced for the time. About 3 years ago I bought another one from ebay, my first one was long gone, and I was getting interested in electronics again after many years because of a loss of interest due to adolescence, high school, chasing girls, them finding a job and such.
I'm not exactly sure when I discovered the RepRap Project, I think it was around the time of the release of the iPhone 3G, I then had access to YouTube all the time and I was spending hours searching and learning about all kinds of things, documentaries, conspiracy theories, the zeitgeist films, RepRap, Arduino, etc. I knew I had to be a part of the RepRap Project. RepRap stands for "Replicating Rapid Prototyper"
RepRap was founded in 2005 by Dr Adrian Bowyer, a Senior Lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.
Adrian Bowyer talking about the RepRap Project at Poptech 2007
One day I was checking out my news feed on facebook, and I saw a instagram photo posted by Emmanuel Mota:
Emmanuel and our friend Robert Cordtz, were both building RepRap's when they worked together at SputterTek in Santa Rosa. They started a Facebook group called 3D Printing- Sonoma County, CA
Here are some pictures of us at our first 3D Printer Meetup that we organized on the Facebook group
We were trying to get the printer and the computer to connect.
It didn't work out that day, but it was awesome to see the machine in real life, from that moment on I was obsessed with 3D printing. I wanted to use the printer to build a robotic arm that would allow the printer to be more dynamic, to have a small automated manufacturing plant and assembly line on your desktop. This is when I came up with the name ArmaTec (Autonomous Robotic Micro Automation Technology) although www.armatec.com was already taken, so I went with www.armatecgroup.com, and later my current website www.ArmaTecGroup.org
Here are some of the first concepts for the robotic arm:
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| I thought about printing the joints as adapters and the extensions would be 1/2" or 3/4" PVC |
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| I became aware that this arm design would be too top heavy and under powered along with the flex problem of PVC would cause the arm to wobble like mad. |
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| So I scrapped that design. |
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| Here was another concept of using a drive chain, or transmission system like you have in a car, but I never solved how to make it work. |
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| I built a model out of 4mm PVC sheet, and it sat in my garage until I decided to recycle it. |
I was a little burned out on the robotic arm, because I was spending alot of time on it and I was accomplishing nothing. Soon after that I was checking my Facebook news feed and saw this post by Robert Cordtz:
Then this beautiful machine came into my life:
At first we thought that the machine had a clog, but it turned out to be something much more complicated. This was my first experience with the Arduino, and the RAMPS 1.4 controller for the printer. I learned (on YouTube) how to modify the Sprinter firmware, upload it to the micro controller and connect it to my computer at the correct baud rate, so we could run tests to figure out why it wasn't printing. This process was a serious pain in the ass! We finally discovered that the Arduino had a fried pin that was not sending voltage to the hot end, so we replaced it. That meant taking all this apart and putting it back together:
After that I learned how to calibrate the machine to produce prints with enough quality to begin the replication process. I began printing parts around July 30th 2013
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| PROJECT COMPLETION DECEMBER 22 2013 |
I printed some spare parts for a friend and he gave me $20 worth of Bitcoin, I gave Robert half, and two months later Bitcoin went through the roof in value, I had enough to buy this Raspberry Pi and still had more to spare.
I printed a case for it
Then I implemented it as a control computer for the printer. The Raspberry Pi is connected to the Arduino, and sends it the code to execute the printing of the 3D object. I use a VNC connection with my iPhone or any other computer to log into the printer remotely and print while I am wherever whenever. I also use a program on the Pi called Motion, that will take a webcam and stream the video live over the internet as an IP camera, that way if something goes wrong I can see it and shut it off while I am away.
While all this is pretty awesome, I still need to remove the part from the print bed when it is finished before I can print a new part. At this point in the project I Googled "open source robotic arm" and I found this:
uArm
At the time the team that built the uArm had not released any source files, many people thought they took the money and ran because it seemed that they fell of planet, nothing was coming from them as far as we could see. This was because they were insane busy trying to fulfill orders to pay back their backers with the packages they promised as rewards for contributing to the cause.
I tried contacting them on several occasions and I lost hope in them sharing the designs, so of course I did what I could to reverse engineer the uArm, and this is my first release (now obsolete)
My attempt in reverse engineering was to be as accurate to the original design as I could, but the original design was made for laser cutting out of acrylic. not for 3D printing. I left the design there and I decided to take creative liberty to improve the design and released iteration one of the "Lite Arm"
I new that my ABS filament was going to run out so I used what I had left to print an extra set of parts and I put them on ebay, they sold three days later and I had accomplished another goal of the project, and that was to have the project begin to pay for itself. I saw that there was an interest in this project, and in order to keep the parts available for people who did not have a printer, I encouraged all my followers on thingiverse to print out parts and put them n ebay because I didn't think I could keep up with demand. This action has made it possible for people to make some money from all the work I put into making the design and I think that is a good thing. I hope that there will be an abundance of these and people can share in code development and see how far this thing can go. My personal goal is to make the Lite Arm into a 3D Printer as well as an assembler of itself, to take self replication to the next level.
Here is a friend of the project supplying parts
you can find them here:
At this point in the project I am focusing my main effort on actually learning to program the Arduino.
I also am going to be experimenting with resin casting :)
Here are two videos showing a little evolution in my code. The first video is standard Arduino servo movements that are super tourqued jerky moves and the second is some smoothing that I am working on:
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