Sheffield Hardware Hackers

I recently found out that the [Sheffield Hardware Hackers] 1 group is still alive and well, so I went along to see how far along the group’s [RepRap] 2 is. Turns out that it’s fully working, and there were no less than four machines being tinkered with (three Mendels and a [Mendel-90] 4).

Despite working on several machines (a [Darwin] 5 and a few Mendels) I’ve never actually played with one that’s able to print! After cleaning and levelling the bed, I ran a test print using a g-code file that was already on the machine’s microSD card, small letter “G” about 0.01m x 0.015m x 0.5m in volume.

That worked well-enough, so I went on [Thingiverse] 6 and found an [STL] 7 for a [small bird pendant] 8, loaded it into [pronterface] 9 and printed it. It was annoyingly easy, considering I wanted something to tinker with!

Nevertheless, RepRap fever has caught me again, and before I knew what I was doing I’ve designed a rough sense of [proprioception] 10 which I now feel compelled to flesh-out and test.

I’ll try and post my progress and results.