Engineering…

I do this for work, but I enjoy making things and getting my head around new tools and techniques regardless of whether they’re needed for my current work project. My work related information is on my career blog.

I currently have the electronics and some related parts towards building a RepRap 3D printer sitting in my basement. Things have been busy so this hasn’t moved forward substantially in some time. I am hoping to get back to this sometime soon. This got started when I was trying to think of things to get my (then high school aged) daughter interested in things engineering related. I started looking at various little robotics projects and found that just about everything needs odd shaped parts to hold the whole mess together and manage the motion of aspects of the project. This headed me down the road to RepRap and various machine tools. I now own a drill press and a few other items that might fill this void, but the printer still seems like a cool project.

I’ve looked over various items related to casting aluminum with green sand (the gingery books got me looking at this). So far this is just looking as I’ve not tried to put together any of the necessary hardware to make this happen. I’m still very interested as this would complement the filament deposition ABS printer with coarser output, but aluminum rather than plastic.

Various software tools. I periodically find that I need something done that there aren’t off the shelf software tools readily available to do. I find myself creating (often rather throw-away) tools to address these needs. Perl often winds up being the default choice for quickly created tooling though I’m looking at Python and a few other options again at this time.

I’m back to looking at 3D rendering tools both for game-like software and for various visualization and cool demo purposes. I’d love to back end some code into my hosting here and make some simple board wargame like, multi-player networked games. The rub is always time.

Thoughts and Considerations…