YAB Yet Another Blog

[RepRap] Mechanical machine and Wii hacks
on 22/01/2008 - like it?

Great news today for RepRap at Las Indias: the mechanical machine has just been ordered from BitsFromBytes, and it should arrive in Madrid in 3-4 weeks.

Fully assembled and tested, in a wooden crate for easier transportation, I’ll hope to have the time to make some demo at the end of the month.

What’s missing:

• electronic: we already have all electronics, but it has became a bit obsolete over the last few month, it would be great to upgrade it to Arduino platform;
• experimenting: we’ll need to melt stuff then, and see how it reacts. Faboroni, another fabbing project, has made a recent experiement with various cooking material (chocolate, cheeze, …). And I’ll need to find a source to buy some plastic polymers, or make our own.

Then, will it be possible to plug your wiimote in RepRap?

Johnny Chung Lee has release a lot of really cool wiimote hacks, and the Reprap Forum is now looking how they could be used

Tags: bitsfrombytes, hack, mechanical, reprap, robot, wii

[RepRap] Moulded parts ready
on 06/12/2007 - like it?

Reprap parts are now available on www.bitsfrombytes.com and ready to order!

From the Reprap Builder blog post, a complete kit with motors will be available in next days for a 300£ + VAT price, it’ll surely help a lot of reprappers who already have all electronic ready and just need all these parts to finish the cartasian robot.

There are some interesting options if you choose to buy the moulded parts kit: you can ask them to be prepared if you do not have necessary tools to drill the holes, and you can choose the resin color to customized your own reprap.
The scope of supply provided for each kit will be a great help too for people who already have some parts (like the extruder) from the RRRF store, and just need to order the cartasian robot parts.

Order will be placed this week to Madrid, hoping it’ll arrive next week to build it before Christmas.

Tags: catasian, kit, moulded, parts, reprap, robot

[RepRap] Completed Shotbot at Metalab
on 22/11/2007 - like it?

Few people in Vienna have just finished a RepRap Shotbot:

“This was a collaborative effort with a lot of people at the metalab, grl vienna, and monochrom!”

This machine will print out shotglasses this weekend at roboexotica.org

This is near the RepRap Holy-Grail, I hope it would print some RepRap parts soon! The hardware in use is 2 Arduino Board, and the new electronic parts from parts.rrrf.org.

Photos by Brex

Tags: cnc, electronic, fabbing, hardware, reprap, robot

[Robots] Feed hitting
on 13/11/2007 - like it?

rFeedReader got recently few complaints about people hit by our Feevy robot, and I discovered today it was not the only bot hitting my blog.

After looking at my blog stats since the beginning of the month, I got this feed hunters list:

All major news portal need the last posts from the most popular blogs, and as long as your webserver is fit enough to receive all this free load, nobody will care. The only problem is these 6 bots are doing the same job many times a day, we’re looking for a refactoring master to solve this problem.

More info about each of these bots:

• Msnbot, they have 2 bots, one with fewer requests is called ‘msnbot-media‘: http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm
• Google Feedfetcher: http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html
• FeedTools, which can be considered more as a rss-reader, and not just a bot: http://www.sporkmonger.com/projects/feedtools
• Bloglines, the agent signature also gives you the number of subscribers: http://www.bloglines.com
• rFeedReader, I discovered it was called as rFeedFinder, it’ll be corrected soon: http://rfeedreader.rubyforge.org
• Soup.io: http://soup.io

Tags: blog, feed, robot, stats

Mars: 3 amazing years of exploration
on 22/05/2007 - like it?

Take care, it’s not science-fiction.
Last 3 years, robots have been exploring Mars, sending back large amount of fantastic photos and data.
All these scientific experiments are directed by Humans, doing a great job upgrading robots from another planet, and producing an incredible month-by-month presentation of the robots life on Mars:

• View the presentations

Tags: exploration, jpl, mars, nasa, robot, rover