Wednesday Meetup: Jelly GC and Reprap

A successful day at the TechSpace:

  • The Jelly started at 8:30. Coby gave an impromptu intro to Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
  • Coby also fired up 3 of the 4 rack servers:
    • One has Windows Server already installed and happily running.
    • One had nothing on, so Coby installed Fedora onto it, and then overrode that with an Ubuntu install. (This machine has since had Redhat Enterprise Linux installed onto it.)
  • David T nailed the loose wall panels up on the centre partition using minimal nails so they can be removed for the electricity if/when it is put into there. He also hung Lucas’s masterpiece.
  • Lucas got his mini-bike running.
  • David T put a desktop background on the PC by the presentation TV, with instructions so hopefully anyone can log in, and use it, and/or create their own account on it too. It is good for general stuff: web browsing, emailing, IRC, mucking round with DTP or 3d CAD, printing stuff to the big printer, etc. You can connect it to the TV there too, to present stuff to an awestruck audience.
  • Viv turned up with a couple of cartons of PC parts and good stuff. They are under the white table in the North section. That table holds more cartons of PC  and Printer parts in more cartons. If anyone wants parts, that is a good place to look and help yourself. I will put the carton of cables there too, and hang a sign “Free For All” there. Don’t put anything there that you want to hold ownership to.
  • The reprap gave trouble in the heat sensor. At one point it seemed that the sensor was not indicating the full temperature, so the heater was staying on to try to bring it back up to 180, when in fact it was heading above that. Dave B and Viv pulled it apart and spent a while hunting down dodgey connections in the hot end. They think it is OK for now. It certainly seemed to be printing nicely. When running well, Dave had the temperature set to 190, and the sensor indicated regular swings from 186 to 192. Dave has put a led in the heater circuit, and it showed on when the temp was down until it passed 190, then off until the temp had dropped back down under 189ish, as expected. Its on-off cycle is roughly 15 seconds.
  • Dave B printed off one cluster of parts for a new reprap. The bearing cases printed were not the right fit for Triffid’s supplied bearings, but we think the rest of the parts printed are fine.
  • The old half-printed-half-stickytape PLA holder finally broke beyond repair.  Viv and DavidT built up a new PLA holder for the Reprap out of some wood. It is positioned to sit beside the Reprap and stream the PLA at the correct angle to the hot end. Hopefully soon we will be able to let the Reprap print long job unattended, and be confident that the PLA will always feed in cleanly.

A few pics from today: https://plus.google.com/photos/117903403161141413513/albums/5725170766160103057