Picked up a copy of Starcraft 2 at the weekend played some of the missions and so far it’s been pretty good some light rpg elements to the campaign ala Dawn of War 2 and a good solid RTS game. They may have taken their sweet time making the thing but it seems to have paid off. The single player is pretty good, often in games like this it gets short shrift to the multiplayer aspects but in this case the missions are varied and pretty fun, the story rolls on and is mostly forgettable but it’s clear effort has gone in to getting a good single player experience, bungie et al take note.
This weekend was also Fishcon where a bunch of people haul a load of computers and junk food down to deepest darkest Norfolk to the middle of nowhere to a converted water mill and play computer games for three or four days straight. This year the trip for me would have been that much more extensive some 6000 miles instead of a couple of hundred so I couldn’t attend in person. Now as people that have lan parties know internet is becoming more and more an essential thing to have. It used to be you could just get by with a local network but more and more games require online authentication to run or their servers only work through the steam interface. That far out in the sticks they struggle to get phone let alone broadband so usually the place was essentially cut off from the internet and anything that required it either had to be done without or require elaborate tricks to make it work. Recently 3g coverage got far enough out that a netbook equipped with a 3g modem could serve as a gateway out to the internet to sort out these sorts of issues. Since they had that connection out to the greater world I could dial in as well. So I did and played some Left 4 Dead 2 with them for a bit on Saturday. For a transatlantic link to a local network running over 3g it was surprisingly lag free my ping was something horrendous but the gameplay was pretty smooth.
The rest of Saturday I spent assembling continuing to assemble my Makerbot I had it put together but the evening and ready to fire up. After some difficulty with loading the latest firmware and then some learning curve on the machine I managed an initial test print which got a bit mangled but seemed to come out reasonably well. The machine has no endstops and relies on manually positioning the start point which after having been used to the repman which automatically homes takes some getting used to.
Next day I tried some more prints but started getting some feed issues. It seems the tension on the filament was not right and the motor was jamming unable to push it into the heater barrel. I had a few goes at fixing it with no luck so I removed the extruder so I can dismantle it and get a better idea of what is going wrong.
I had to put that to the side as I had a metalshop class down at Techshop. It was a pretty fun class we didn’t really make anything but the instructor took us through all the machines and the basics of shaping and forming metal. We used sheet metal cutting and forming machines as well as the more manual tools like bag and hammer English Wheel and the shrinker rotex punch bead maker folding machine as well as the more hardcore plate metal cutting tools like the vertical band saw and the horizontal saw. He got a lot in the class and it ran to nearly 8pm when it was supposed to stop at 6:45 he did get pretty good coverage on everything.
Today I have a laser etching class which should be good fun and will give me the option to make some spares for my makerbot.
Anyway a pretty fun weekend and now it’s back to the grind.
Comments
It was good to get you online, if only for a short period. I'm sure next time (now we know it cann be done) we shall be more organised.
Just been looking at the Makerbot photos...looks like a funky piece of kit. With that and the workshop classes, how long before you are making aircraft out of the house?
Yeah it was good fun and surprisingly playable given the cobbled together link and distance.
Makerbot is a fun toy very similar if a smaller build area to the machine I left in byrnie's care I have some more tweaking to get it up and running and I also have a kit to add a heated build platform which will help with the plastic warping problem (as thermoplastic cools it shrinks slightly so if you have multiple layer all laid down one on top of the other it tends to bend as the first layers cool while fused with the subsequent hotter layers, the heated build platform just keeps the temperature up so that it all cools more or less at once) that has some tricky surface mount soldering so I left it till I have the machine ready for it.
I took the laser cutting/etching class last night so I just need a few more tools then I could start building planes and jet engines ... maybe the milling machines and the plasma cutter or perhaps the cnc mill.
I'm not sure I'd have the confidence to have a kit-built 3D printer, but if/when you can buy a decentish one pre-built (perhaps from this sort of thing) I can see many applications for wargaming models and scenery. Even funnier (if they got faster) would be having a necron army printing out as you played them :-)
yeah it's still very much in the enthusiast territory that chinese machine is a step in the right direction even if that outfit seems a bit too fly by night. The outfit that made the kit to build the machine byrnie has also do a preassembled machine aimed at schools which is quite pricey but has some pretty hardcore features like multiple print heads.
With the current machines the print process is still fairly slow as well and the limitations of the technique and lack of support material limit you a bit on shapes but both are areas they are working on improving. An interesting half way step is the people (like shapeways) who offer for a cost to print objects out for you some of them will even do metals now.
But this is how the home computer got started in kit form first then gradually more and more user friendly.
Found the idler wheel that presses the filament against the pinch wheel (that drives the plastic into the heated nozzle for extrusion) had snapped and shifted so the filament went down the side.
yanked that out put the spare in cleaned things out spent a while getting the pressure right. Eventually got the thing going again and after a few attempts got it to print a test shape a 20*20*10 square. Used a set of calipers to measure it and it was pretty close the shape looked good too no sign of z wobble or belt slips. Will need to do some bigger prints to truely check for any alignment issues but so far so good.