When buying anything, buying in a pair is always better right? Not generally when it comes to 3,000lb pieces of equipment we’re finding out!
The good news? Sector67 owns two 3 axis CNC Webb milling machines:
The bad news? We have to move them across Madison 🙂
Really cool demonstration from Scott on injection molding, he fabricated a small hand driven injection molder using the book: Secrets of Building a Plastic Injection Molding Machine as a guide. The end result is a functional machine capable of injecting plastic into a variety of parts, all fabricated from basic tools and a small lathe.
Applying pressure:
Unfortunately the shear pins let loose while applying a little too much pressure to inject plastic, but he of course brought along some “production” parts that show incredible potential for so little cost.
Mold:
Product: (wheels)
Two shots with the injection molder or with two colors of plastic yields different color hubs/color swirls
Thanks for the pictures Scott!
Hackaday recently featured two newly started midwest hackerspaces, with Sector67 being one of them:
Of course traffic increased sharply:
We’re really happy to see hundreds of interested Hackaday readers from WI!
UW Students take note!
You have the opportunity to win $80k+ in cash each year with the student competitions put on by UW. If you need help building a prototype, building a team (you can have outside members on your team), gaining experience or learning how to do things required for the competition Sector67 is an excellent location to network and find interested partners/collaborators in the Madison area. Many people are previous competitors and/or successful entrepreneurs/inventors/artists/fabricators/etc.
Hope to see you in the competitions!
Andrew has been the official S67 photographer capturing a couple of events in the last 2 weeks:
CCCKC posted a video of the Kansas City Maker Faire showing the cool projects they had in attendance:
Nate and I have been hard at work getting Arduino microcontrollers ready for BarCampMadison. We first attempted to etch, populate, and solder up our own Arduino clone that could be made as cheaply as possible:
The problem we immediately ran into was populating headers on the bottom side of the board. Because a homemade board isn’t through-hole plated (connecting the top and bottom) we run into the challenge of soldering parts on the “wrong” side of the board to get electrical connection. The only solution would be to get wire wrap headers and flip the board upside down to hook it on the breadboard. Taking a step back, we realized that teaching people and having a good experience was more valuable than saving our precious few dollars so we bit the bullet and bought boards!
Adafruit Industries sells something surprisingly similar to what we were trying to build (we found out about this only after failing above) called the Boarduino. Using our hacker space discount (~10% off at minimal quantities) we purchased 10 Boarduinos to use with our CP2102 eBay usb->serial adapters, bringing a total per seat cost with breadboard to $23.
The next step was putting them together! Of course the header on the CP2102 adapters and the programming header on the Boarduino don’t play nicely, so we need to put an adapter cable in line:
Nate sat for many hours on Sunday soldering, testing, and more soldering to get these Boarduinos assembled:
But everything is working great. As a side note, you’ve likely noticed we’re using official Apple white USB extension cables, being Apple products they’re intentionally hobbled from being useful as anything besides what they were designed for, so they’ve kindly installed unique USB jacks to prevent their use as extension cables:
Note the tiny tab in the center of the top of the jack, prevents plugging in a normal USB cable
We can remedy this with a 800 pound instrument of precision destruction:
Everything is soldered up and ready to go for BarCampMadison, hope to see you all on Saturday, 10AM, US Bank Building!
Today we were greeted by soldering irons and assorted soldering tools from MPJA and Circuit Specialists. Why two companies and a variety of irons? Testing of course!
We’re hosting our first ever soldering session with the infamous Mitch Altman, there is no way all of the eggs are going in one basket. We’re also curious to see how the 40W versus 30W versus temperature controlled irons pan out, especially against the $300 rework station. . .
Our first resellers order with Adafruit was also placed today, we had no problem clearing the $250 minimum order with 10 Boarduinos for BarCampMadison!
Mitch Altman will be in Madison on August 29th and will be giving one of his famous workshops for Sector67 on the UW Engineering Campus. Mitch has taught thousands of people to solder and make cool things with microcontrollers at his workshops at hacker spaces and hacker conferences and schools almost everywhere. He can teach you, too, if you like.
If you have ever had any curiosity about making something with electronics, then please join us. Anyone and everyone can learn to make cool things. And it’s fun. And easy! You can learn to make something cool with electronics in one workshop, and take your cool project home with you! We’ll provide all the equipment and instruction.
*What*: Make Cool Things With Microcontrollers! workshop.
*Where*: Sector67, 1500 Engineering Dr, Discovery Center (basement).
*When*: 3pm-~7pm, 29-August, Sunday. (It is totally OK to come late.) Stay as little or as long as you like. Most projects take about 1 to 2 hours.
*Who*: It is fun to make things in the friendly community of Sector67. Come join us. All skill levels. Everyone is welcome.
*Cost*: Instruction is Free! If you use any kits, reimbursment for kit price is about $10 to $20, depending on kit. There will be plenty of cool kits available to build, including:
TV-B-Gone (turn off TVs in public places!)
Brain Machine (Meditate, Hallucinate, and Trip Out!)
LEDcube (cool cube of blinky lights!)
Mignonette Game (play fun games!)
Trippy RGB Waves (interactive colored blinky lights!)
MiniPOV (more cool blinky lights!)
MintyBoost (charge your USB enabled gadgets!)
and for the more advanced:
microcontroller programmers (program all your AVR family chips!), Arduino clones (make just about anything!), and more.
More info on most of most of these projects is available on Mitch’s website: http://www.CornfieldElectronics.com (click on the “maker faire” tab). If you have your own project, please bring it by and make it with us!
If you’ve been living under a rock, the US Federal Appeals Court recently ruled that jailbreaking an electronic device (opening it to “outside” software) was legal, however your warranty through Apple will be void. Following up on this, a website was created that could jailbreak your phone by just visiting the website and following the dialog.
Following up on this, someone decided it would be great to go into the Apple lair <sarcasm> where Apple products descend from the heavens and are placed in mere mortal hands to free a phone. </sarcasm>
I can’t imagine how Apple is going to block access to this website on all of the store phones without just reving the firmware to block the jailbreaking exploit.
Sector67 had the opportunity to attend the 2010 Detroit Maker Faire, along with several thousand other attendees, we had a great time!
Here’s some more pictures:
Flickr set on a hand built CO2 laser, majority of the parts are glass, masking tape, pipe fittings, neon sign transformer, JB Weld and some copper pipe. Really impressive capability too, video of it cutting through glass.
UPDATE: Another crazy build.
