My Ultimaker just arrived here are some pics: (build pics to follow)
Top of Box
Control Board bottom (Arduino anyone?)
The End.
I am proud to present the first version of the Robotification Notebook. It is a pdf that you can print on your office copier in duplex book mode to make a notebook. It is ruled with checkboxes and date and heading spaces at the top and halfway down the page.
For best results select DUPLEX and Stable BOOK:
______________ | | [] | | | | | [] | |____________|
where
[]
is a staple.
A new set of generic ink cartridges for my ink-jet printer costs around $25 which is too much considering I only get about 10 (colour) pages from them as the printer uses up ink over time keeping the heads clean. So when I was at the supermarket and noticed that 50ml of food colouring is only $1 I had to try using it for printing. Also assuming it would work I bought some rice paper for edible printing!
WARNING: This may well destroy your print heads and thus your printer. Food Colouring may become toxic during the printing process. Try only at your own risk.
The first thing I did was inject my cartridges with water and then empty it out using the syringe. I did this a few times until as much as possible of the previous ink was removed.
I did one final flush with water to determine the capacity of the cartridges before I was working with the food dye. Its much better to have the cartridges nearly full than overflowing everywhere. My cartridges have an interesting micro/mini fluid network in them which meant it was only easy to half fill mine.
Fill the syringe with the measured capacity of ink and inject it into the corresponding color of ink cartridge. Then re-install them into your printer.
If you haven’t printed in colour for a while like me you’ll meed to run your printers cleaning cycle a few times to bring your print head back to life. I had to run mine about 10 times however if you print colour regularly this should not be a problem. You can check the print heads are clean properly by printing a test page. If you click my test pages image to the right you can see how the print head slowly comes back after many runs of the cleaning function.
Now that everything should be working it is time to print a test image. I chose a full A4 color wheel to test with to get an idea of how well the colours are produced by food colouring. I think you’ll agree from the images below it works fairly well. On my print the pink/purples don’t come out very well. I think that is because I used red dye for magenta rather than pink, unfortunately my supermarket was out of pink food dye.
I cut some of the rice paper to roughly A5 and put it in the printer. It worked the first time printing a chocolate flake pattern. However on subsequent tries the rice paper was too britle and broke up in the printer. To overcome this problem I taped the rice paper to an A4 sheet and then printed on it. This worked much better, however It still cracked a little when cutting it. I am sure a better rice paper can be found just not at my local supermarket.
Unfortunately was unable to sample it as I had not replaced my black ink with food dye.
This could be a great way to do custom decoration on cakes or other foods (Christmas/Birthdays/Halloween). I’ll try and put an update on this post a month or two down the track to let you know if the print heads got damaged or are still working.
It’s a pity we throw out a perfectly good ballast circuit each time a CFL globe blows. CFL bulbs should really be re-designed so that you can just replace the tube part. Alternatively a proper recycling program could make sure the circuits get re-used in new lights.
This year for Christmas I made an ‘Interactive’ Christmas Display. It is a simple JavaScript web page that lets you select and place animated gif’s on the page. We projected it on the wall as virtual Christmas decorations at the office. Passersby are free to add new images to the scene as they please.
You can try it out or use it in your office:
Merry Christmas!
I’ve just noticed this morning that Google has a new favicon icon:
Personally I think it is a huge improvment over the previous two favicon icons, however I also think it is a little to ‘artsy’ for google and they won’t keep it for long due its lack of corporate feel. In my opinion some of google’s products have the curse of the ugly logo for example the google desktop icon:
I am not sure how anyone could like it! With any luck this post or their new favicon might inspire them to change it.
Update: Apparantly this went live on friday and I am a bit slow of the mark… Ooops.