3D Printer - Bootstrapping the extruder

Last time, I mentioned that the extruder filament drive assembly was itself 3D printed on the converted CNC machine. How is this done without purchasing an off-the-shelf extruder filament drive assembly? In short, I used the CNC machine in its pre-converted state to create the first version of the filament drive.

3D Printer - The Temperature Controller

Before I say anything about converting my gantry CNC milling machine to do 3D printing, I figured I'd cover the controller I designed and built for the extruder and heated bed. Unlike most purpose built 3D printers, like one built from user-sourced parts, a kit, or even a pre-built unit, a CNC milling machine doesn't provide for controlling the temperature of the extruder nozzle and the heated build bed. This project describe that part of the conversion process.

So... Howzzit Goin'?

As I end my third week as a new Googler (a Noogler in Google parlance), I figured I would update those few folks that may still be interested even though I've left the RAD Studio/Delphi team.

A New Adventure

It is with sadness and excitement that as of yesterday, February 19th, 2016, I'm no longer an employee at Embarcadero/Idera. I will be starting a new position at Google (Alphabet) on Monday, February 22nd. This caps off a run of 24 years, 1 month, and 13 days at Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero/Idera. I remember arriving at 1700 Green Hills Dr. on the morning of January 6th, 1992, naive, nervous, excited, and just in awe that they picked me to join the Turbo Pascal team.

The Chronograph - Part 5

When developing the Ballistic Chronograph, I decided that I needed a way to have, effectively, a command-prompt. I also wanted to have a way to display text in an auto-scrolling view. It would be used similar to Object Pascal' Writeln, C's printf or C#'s Console.WriteLine. The Arduino libraries already have an abstract class for writing text, Print. If you've done any Arduino programming, you've already used this class indirectly via the HardwareSerial class.

The Chronograph - Part 4

The touch panel and touch keyboard were an interesting challenge. I picked this one up mainly because the price was well into the "impulse buy" range. I didn't really have a plan for it, but figured it would be interesting to play with. After a little bit of Google-fu, I found that the 4-wire resistive touch panels were rather common, and best of all, there is an Arduino library for it.  I also picked up the display because HSC claimed to have data on it. It turned out that used the relatively common T6963C interface. There is an Arduino library for that as well.

Cyborging a Cheap Laminator

I decided to take a detour from covering the Ballistic Chronograph and cover some tooling I use for creating my own custom Printed Circuit boards. Having the ability to go from thought, to design, to a working device, gadget or tool is what makes doing hardware these days so fun. In the in the span of a long, lazy Saturday or Sunday, I can build a project that would have taken several weeks or would not be nearly as clean and well packaged.

The Chronograph - Part 3

Now I'm going to turn my attention to the software for the stand-alone controller shown in the previous post.

Before I ever started working on the UI for the device, the first order of business was to get the code needed to actually perform it's primary function written.

The Chronograph - Part 2

In the last post I showed the electronics behind the ballistic chronograph sensor array, or using chronograph terminology, the "screens". The frame for the screens was built from 1"x.5" extruded aluminum U-channel, .5"x.5" aluminum angle, and 3/16" steel rods for the uprights. Various bits of hardware and some .25"x1" steel spacers from my parts bin, drilled out on one end to 3/16" and tapped to 6-32 on the other. The cross pieces at the top which house the sensors are actually plastic U-Channel surface wiring conduit snap covers.

Now I'll cover initial stand-alone controller I built. This part of the project evolved as I was building it. It started with a trip to the (sort of) local surplus electronics store, HSC Electronic Supply.

The Chronograph - Part 1

As mentioned in this post and teased in this one, one of the things I was going to write about was the construction of a ballistic chronograph. The intent of this post is to outline it's construction and my approach to building it. It's intended use and all the information surround that is beyond the scope of this post.

Teaser

Just a little teaser. Here's a video of a presentation I did with David I demonstrating the Ballistic Chronograph I built a couple of years ago. This is actually revision 2. The same screens were used with a new custom controller that linked via Bluetooth to a Delphi Android application.

As you can see from the video, Nerf guns aren't particularly powerful.

Projects...

Now that I've moved my blog to a more personal setting, I'm much more comfortable with talking about more than things related to my position at Embarcadero/Idera. While the dust settles around Idera's acquisition of Embarcadero, I'm going to focus on some things I do outside of RAD Studio and Delphi.

While some may know this as I've not really kept it secret, I started my professional career as a electronics/computing hardware engineer. I built and designed access control and magnetic stripe equipment. These devices were based on the 6800/6803 embedded 8-bit micro-controllers. Even while working on Turbo Pascal/Delphi/RAD Studio, I've continued to enjoy firing up the soldering iron, grabbing a handful of components and made stuff.

New home...

I've moved my blog from http://blogs.embarcadero.com/abauer to my own hosted domain. I've owned this domain for many years and had it redirect to the aforementioned address. I decided to move to this new location in order to ensure the content remains under my control. I've noticed that other people's blogs have been summarily deleted on the other site even though there was still some excellent content.

New posts will happen here... should I decide to actually begin posting more content. I'm still deciding... For now, update your newsfeeds to point here, should you be so inclined.

This is the last day…

In this office. I’ve been in the same physical office for nearly 15 years. After years of accumulation, it now looks positively barren. Beginning next Monday, March 29th, 2010, I’ll be in a new building, new location, and new office. The good thing is that the new place is a mere stone’s throw from the current one. It will be great to leave all the Borland ghosts behind.

When being "objective" is being "biased"

I did the most unconscionable thing a few weeks ago. Something I've resisted for a very long time. I bought a Mac. For the first time. Ever. I'm not against Macs or Apple in general (I own an iPod and a Zune), in fact I find them very quaint and highly capable. Ever since they succumbed to the Intel juggernaut, my interest was piqued. They are no longer tied to what had become a "boutique" CPU, the PowerPC, but rather to a tried-and-true, mainstream, continuously developed and advancing architecture.  Say what you will about all the flaws (and there are many) with whole x86 architecture, it is here to stay, is getting some serious industry investment from both Intel, AMD, and even VIA.  Remember the whole IA64 (Itanium) phase?  This just proves the point that even Intel cannot stop the force they created.  AMD, recognized this early on and created the AMD64 extensions to the existing x86 architecture.  Eventually, Intel realized that they're only reasonable course of action was to jump onto that bandwagon.  It is the biggest example of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."  Apple finally realized this when the powerPC just wasn't able to keep up in terms of raw CPU power and the onslaught of the multi-core CPU. Apple had to cut costs, and the easiest way to do it was to join the commoditized-to-the-hilt x86 industry.  Yes, this is old news.

I'll get to the real motivation for swallowing my pride and buying the Mac in a moment. This article popped up on my RSS feed and it really resonated with me.  Regardless of the comments, which all too painfully only served to prove the author's point (and which I'm sure there will be comments to this post which will do the same thing), it was interesting to see something I've long suspected, actually put into words.  It was also so apropos since I've, sort of, joined the ranks of Mac owners. The gist of this article and the book from which it is excerpted (from what I can gather), is that we're all very passionate, like to "belong," and want to feel validated and sometimes even lauded for our choice in car, home, clothes, spouse, occupation, religion, computer, etc... Yes, I admit that I sometimes feel much the same way as the stereotypical Apple-fanboy when confronted with valid, well-reasoned, unbiased analysis.

This hit home all too well lately because, well, this new Mac is not really mine.  Yes, I was involved with its purchase, but I don't actually use it.  See, my wife has decided to return to school and formally pursue something she's come to really enjoy over the past few years, graphic design and layout.  It started with doing monthly newsletters for the local Mothers of Twins club (my daughters are twins), then on to doing other various projects, and finally culminated in doing the entire Scotts Valley High School annual Football program.  She's already committed to do it again for the Fall-2008 season. She has used PCs (natch) for many years and has a very nice 17" notebook. Now that she's back in school, which is where she's at while I write this post, it became painfully obvious that there is a very clear bias in this particular field toward the mac.  Sure, the same applications are available for the PC, but to be truly "accepted" shouldering a mac really helps. Most printers happily work with raw files from these specific applications and will actually charge hefty fee if you submit work using certain PC-only applications. It also makes the professor actually want to talk with you.

Here is where this whole Mac-fanboy, "Apple can do no harm," attitude really hit me.  As relayed by my wife, this professor unequivocally stated on the first day of class that you must use the Mac version of the applications.  The pure shock and horror on the professor's face when asked if one could use the PC versions had to be priceless. A similar attitude was expressed when my wife submitted some homework which had a few things marked off.  The professor actually told her that she must not have used a laser printer because a laser printer would have printed correctly.  Well, that chapped my hide to no end... I wanted to load up my nice COLOR laser printer into the truck, drag it up to her class and plop it into the middle of the professor's classroom and insist that they prove to me that this is not a stinkin' laser printer! (no, it is not one of those dye-sublimation or "melted crayon" printers) That lasted for only a few moments as I stood there speechless and dumbfounded.  Upon further examination and obtaining more information, it turns out that it wasn't printed on the same brand and model laser printer that the professor used.  See this is a design and layout class for printed medium, and to grade the work, it is not about the content (which is usually that funky fake Latin text), but about its layout and presentation on the page.  So where things are is more important that whether or not you spelled some word correctly.  Ok, that makes sense, she'll have to use the school's laser printers instead of ours.

The whole purchasing experience was just too surreal.  You walk into an Apple store, and it is literally like being a voyeur to this whole cult-like Apple... thing...  I just cannot explain it.  We'd already researched exactly which Mac we're going to get and we'll use my wife's student ID for a discount.  It was simply a matter of walking up to the machine we wanted, point to it and grunt a few syllables about how we're going to pay for it and instruct the resident drone to walk back through the stainless steel door at the back of the store to obtain said box of Jobs' magic.  The top-of-the-line 17" MacBook Pro is certainly a sexy bit of hardware. You just cannot deny that. That was nearly four weeks ago. At about two weeks into this, things started going a little south on us.

Once some of the applications needed for the class arrived (after getting some nice deep student discounts), it was time to install them.  I get this frantic message from my wife saying that the machine won't recognize the disk, and now it won't even boot!  Hmmm, ok...  not. good.  Oh, yeah, the whole "see I knew it!" flags started popping up in my head all over the place.  They do have flaws!  Eventually, she was able to eject the disk, after making some really horrendous noises and still never recognizing the disk.  Less than two weeks old, and the Super-drive is dead.

You gotta love this, you can make an appointment at the "Genius bar" online.  So we did.  Drove back to the store and met with the "Genius" (yes, I'm snickering here...).  We explained that we've had the machine for barely two weeks and only now had an occasion to use the drive and this is what happened.   They tested it and, sure enough, no workee.  Just nasty noises.  I was ready for what happened next.  I asked if they're going to "send it in" for repair.  I was all ready to explain that if they went down that road, I'd be a little irritated because, to me this was a failure that left the factory in that condition and why should we be without the machine for however long it takes to fix it.  Also, I'd just be inclined to return it for a refund.  Luckily, they saw the logic agreed to simply replace the machine.

Yeah!  They're going to replace it... not so fast, there buckaroo. It turns out that we'd bought the machine only a few days before Apple decided to announce some minor changes to the whole MacBook line.  New things like LED backlit LCD, multi-touch track pad, newer Penryn-based CPU.  That all meant they were out of stock.  Rats.  They said they'd call once the new machines were in.  (I've heard that song and dance all too often) For the next week, we called the store several times and still no shipments. We contemplated simply getting a refund and ordering online, but that would mean not having the machine for school.  Finally, yesterday, they actually called. A new machine had been set aside and to come in anytime.  After arriving, we explained why we're there and they walked back through those sterile stainless steel doors, and returned with a box to which was affixed a post-it note with my wife's name on it.  Nice.

After about another hour as they transferred the documents, settings and applications, we were on our way.  And, yes, I did have them test the drive to make sure it worked :-).  All-in-all, Apple's service was pleasant and understanding.  I'd have to say that the hardware is no higher or lower quality than a solid ThinkPad or some of the newer Dells (older Dell notebooks had, ahem, some real issues).  They're certainly more "artsy" looking than a pure utilitarian PC notebook. And OS X? It's just different. Some things I like about it, and others just make me want to scream. I can say the same things about XP or Vista.

I'm sure many will see through my "unbiased" view straight to the obvious bias in this post.  And for those Apple-haters, I hope this redeems me; sitting next to me here in my home office, is a new, home-built, overclocked quad-core, 4GB, Vista x64, 512MB nVidia 8800, 1TB raid, PC rig that I had to build to seek forgiveness and cleansing from committing  Apple-adultery ;-).

Delphi, Adelphi, & Flickr

Back in March of this year, you may recall that I'd traveled throughout Australia and parts of Asia.  While in Australia I visited Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.  While in Melbourne I stayed at a rather eclectic hotel with the rather apropos name, Adelphi. It was very much a "bohemian" place to stay.  So much so that I had to take a few photos of the room.  Throughout the trip, I'd uploaded some of these photos to my Flickr account.  Thinking of it no further.

Then on October 24th, I got a rather odd email through my Flickr account.  Normally I'd have disregarded it as spam since I didn't know the sender, but since it was specifically through my Flickr account I looked into it.  It was from someone associated with a site called Schmap.  I manually navigated to the site and looked around.  Looked legit.  Apparently they troll through Flickr and other photo sites for people's vacation photos associated with many of the highlighted locations on their site.  They contact these folks asking for permission to link to their photo and to use it in their online promotions.  I read through the online agreement and it seemed reasonable.  I retained all my rights to the photo, and I only grant them specific rights to use the photo.  When the photo is displayed on their site it links back to my Flickr account and proper attribution is given.  It was only one photo of the room I stayed in at the Adelphi hotel, so I figured it couldn't hurt.

Last week, I got word that the photo had been selected and was live on their site.  Here's the link that contains the photo.  You may need to scroll through the photos on the right, but mine should be there :).  It looks like their site is a just a clever mash-up using Google maps, links to Priceline, and Google adwords.

Driven to Distraction...

Yeah, yeah, yeah... It's been a while since there has been any activity on this blog. Now that school has started, the summer is officially over and, hopefully, I'll be able to get back into a regular schedule. I had a very full schedule, both here at CodeGear and personally throughout the summer. I was able to take more time off throughout the summer than I've been able to in the past. Spent a week in Las Vegas at our vacation property, and a week in Hawaii (Kona) where my 16 year-old son, who is on the Scotts Valley High School Varisty Football (American) Team, played the Kealakehe Waveriders Varsity Team.

Earlier in the summer I broke down and bought my own XBox 360. I rationalized the purchase by telling myself that I'll work with some of the other Delphi team members and get Delphi for .NET working with the managed XNA framework... yeah.. yeah.. that's the ticket. The truth of the matter is that Forza Motorsports 2 was my real motivation. I bought the system and the MS Force Feedback Wheel. After playing for about a week... I determined that you can't just use the wheel just by sitting it on your lap.... I needed a racing chair! I researched online all the various different chairs and they all were either too expensive (nevermind the fact that my wife was already rolling her eyes at me...) or just cheap looking. So I decided to build my own. I went to Summit Racing and purchased a cheap racing seat and adjustable sliding tracks. Then headed down to the closest Home Depot and purchased some 2x3, 2x2s and some 5/8” (16mm) plywood. Here's what I built over a weekend:

This is after the first day I had the base completed and the seat mounted. The base consists of a plywood sheet with 2x2s framing underneath that provide rigidity and raise the bolt heads that attach the seat rails off the floor.



It took a bit of planning and thinking to get the wheel and pedal mounts the way I wanted. I knew I wanted the height of the wheel mount to be adjustable and to be able to swing out of the way to easily entering and exiting the seat. So I created a simple moveable parallelogram mounting table. I mounted the pedals onto an angled platform between the “legs” of the wheel mount table. Here's the final result:

To limit the movement of the table and to allow for adjustment, I just simply placed extra blocks of wood on the bottom. The uprights will wedge against them and rest there with with its own weight to hold it in place. Since these photos were taken, I've revised the mounting of the wheel by eliminating the need for the provided clamp (which is somewhat weak) and screwing two blocks of wood to the top of the mounting table that overlap the “wings” that stick out on the sides of the wheel housing.

Now, I've never really been what one would call a “hard-core” gamer as I've always preferred to take the game apart and figure out how it works rather than actually playing the game :-). However, with this setup, and the big screen TV I must say that the racing game experience is on a whole different level. So when we went to Las Vegas earlier this past summer we went to the NASCAR Cafe that has an excellent linear accelerated roller coaster called Speed-The Ride and the Cyber Speedway. The problem is that when we first started visiting Las Vegas regularly about 7 years ago, I remember being totally blown away at the level of “realism” that the motion controlled cars provided... that was late '90s technology. I must now say that short of having a true motion-controlled experience, the graphics and detail of the racing in Forza 2 makes the Cyber Speedway feel like playing the old Pong video game.

So if you've got an XBox 360, my gamertag is “kylix rd” I've yet to sign-up for a full Xbox Live “gold” membership, so once I do maybe we can race :-).

Ok, so it hasn't been all vacations, and fun and games... there actually has been some things going on here at CodeGear. If you haven't noticed there's been a lot of information regarding Highlander, the full release of what is was once the Borland Developer Studio now called RAD Studio 2007. The betablogging program is in full swing and there is a lot of excellent information flowing about this new release. I suppose for the folks that view the language as a critical piece of the product, you'll be pleased to know that we'll finally be releasing full support for generics on the Delphi for .NET side. The next RAD Studio release, codenamed Tiburón will include support for generics on Win32 as well as full support for Unicode throughout VCL, the RTL top to bottom, left to right. Nick has an excellent post with links to the various betabloggers out there. If you know of others that Nick hasn't mentioned, make sure you contact him with a link and he'll update his blog entry.

While not specifcally Delphi related, it is CodeGear related. We've just announced the availability of JGear. JGear allows you to purchase some of the excellent JBuilder specific “mojo” and integrate it into an existing Eclipse or Eclipse-derived 3.2 installation! You no longer have be a JBuilder customer to get access to the features that make JBuilder the most powerful IDE in the Java space. Of course if you want the best experience, you should consider moving to the new Eclipse derived JBuilder.

Over the coming months, I'll try and get back into the swing of more regular blogging by helping to chronicle our move to Unicode with VCL and the IDE itself. I plan on beginning to highlight some of the little gotchas and things to watch for now so you can be best prepared for the switch when Tiburón is released next year. As we encounter these things and solve them, there will be things you can do today to your code to make sure the transition is as smooth as possible. Details will follow throughout the coming months.

Another item of note is that supposedly we're due to move to some new mo-betta blogging software sometime soon... I'm hoping that it will go smoothly, but just in case there are a few burps, I hope you will be understanding while the dust settles.