Half-Baked Projects
I haven’t written in a while, and that’s because the attempts of the past weeks had nothing but problems. I moved from the Trotec laser cutter to the ShopBot to see if I could cut out parts from acrylic. Wood just wasn’t good enough. So in learning the software and the machine, I ended up [...]
Continue reading about Acrylic casing for Logical Engine modules
Behold, two sides for the casing of a bit slice, cut using the Trotec laser cutter into 1/2″ plywood. I wonder if wood is strong enough? If so, I could save a lot of money, since acrylic is much more expensive than wood. And wood can be stained to look 19th century The slots are [...]
Continue reading about Wooden casing for Logical Engine bit slice
My experiments with using the Roland CNC SRP didn’t turn out too well. Although the GCode program worked well, it turned out to be very difficult to get consistent heights for the parts. Out of every run of eight parts, I would have to throw away three on average for being too short. I suspect [...]
My local maker space, NextFab Studio, is running a contest, and the most popular project gets $1000 credit at NextFab. All you need to do is go to NextFab Award One, pick my project, and vote for it! $1000 will go a long way towards helping to build the Engine!
Behold! This is the standard table on the Roland MDX-540SA CNC milling machine, costing nearly $37,000. I took a picture of the table and then used Photoshop to eliminate distortion due to perspective and pincushioning. Then I grabbed some guides so that I could measure the positions of the holes. The Roland specifications show that [...]
Continue reading about Design of an Elevated Fixture for a Roland MDX-540SA
or, How an Event devastating to Morale resulted in a New Appreciation of Lasers. PART I: The Quote Question So armed with manufacturing diagrams of the parts I needed made, I first paid a visit to mfg.com, which was suggested to me as a good place to find manufacturers who would bid on my [...]
Got bored, so I played around with the book cover template in InDesign. What if Charles Babbage and George Boole had brainstormed together? And what if Babbage ditched decimal representation in favor of binary? And then went on to build the much simpler and cheaper Logical Engine? I think this would make a fun alternate [...]
Continue reading about How the British Hegemony was launched
Here are some of the promised drawings, which I drew in SolidWorks, and exported to PDF format. I’ve sent these out to eleven machine shops around the country, asking for quotes. I tried using emachineshop.com’s CAD program, which promises an instant quote based on your drawing, but for 1400 rods (each of which is a [...]
I found that adding a key to the Acme rod and sliding a chain sprocket on acted as a perfect driver for the module. The key allows the sprocket to slide as the Acme rod moves up and down, and can rotate the rod at the same time. The sprocket can be driven by standard [...]
Based on the plan in the previous post, I have completed and tested the spiral cam drive. First, I cut to size some aluminum round stock on the lathe, and drilled a 3/4-inch hole through, also on the lathe, for the Acme rod. This became my blank. Next, I wrote a program to generate GCode [...]
Continue reading about Completed: Spiral cam drive, intermodule connectivity
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