Last night was our first proper open evening since moving to the new Makerspace location. Instead of digging into our list of TODOs (build tables, benches, put up shelves) .. all the things we’ve been doing the past couple of months, we actually sat down at tables and tinkered.
Dave and Amy visited, with a model of a Turkish Drop Spindle (whatever that is!) they wanted to print, as Debjit and his mum (I fail at names!) turned up at the same time, Damian held an impromptu “Introduction to 3D printing”, to explain what all the various files and processes are for – the giant whiteboard came in handy here. The drop spindle was printed on our ole Prusa machine in blue PLA.
Turkish Drop Spindle printing on Prusa i2
Meanwhile Steve had snuck in and brought a TV board he wanted to de-solder an EPROM from, and some sort of Pi add-on board that has Surface Mount Technology (SMT) parts. He got on with that using the hot air work station while people were busy.
Scott wandered in and watched the chaos from a corner to see what we get up to.
Jamie had grabbed a blue fob and had himself added to the door, then had a go at printing with the new, tiny M3D printer, which we decided was the slloooowwesst machine ever – it felt like it took a good 20 minutes just “setting up height”, most of which was used moving the print head from top position to the bed. It did actually print two and a bit layers of a raft before we ran out of evening and cancelled it.
James extracted his oven from the car and started tinkering with it, the idea is to make an enclosed device which can do SMT.
The Joshes, April and Shroukie turned up, collected pizza orders, disappeared to get the pizzas and reappeared, I’m not sure what else they got up to.
Rob was actually in first, and mostly tinkering with arduino programming.
Joe popped up, registered as a new member, and disappeared again, I assume we’ll see more of him at some point.
I tried again to find a good answer to “what do you 3D print”, by demoing my cup holder, or rather getting Amy to try and figure out what it was, I think I need more props for this sort of question!
Josh was playing with a kinect sensor, trying to find out what sort of data you get back from the API and ran through a few of the provided demos using his laptop connected to the bigh plasma screen so everyone could wave at the kinect and see themselves on the screen.