The Heads on Fire Community

Hi folks,

Here's an eyeglasses holder created from one piece of cardboard. It can be folded along lines to make a 3-D holder.

Brian set up the vacuum system for the ShopBot and used Brady Watson's explanation as a starting point, He reconfigured it to fit our needs but this definitely provides a great description:

(from the ShopBot forum: http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/messages/312/18079.html )

After the computers were moved around, the one connected to the Modela was having problems communicating with it. I called Roland's Tech Support and they first told me to:

- right click on My Computer
- select Properties
- select Hardware
- select Device Manager
- select ports, then double-click on COM1
- go to port settings and double-check that "flow control" is set to "Hardware".

It was set to Hardware on our machine, so that was not the issue.

We've been troubleshooting with the laser cutter and working with Illustrator in Windows, instead of sending our files through CAD in ubuntu.

Our first problem was working with a file that was exactly the size of the laser cutter bed. The laser was set to auto focus, and while attempting to focus, it would start cutting (We even focused it ourselves, and that didn't work). So we scaled the file's dimensions down just a bit, and that was solved.

We set out to do some research on cell-phone mesh networking to be used in emergencies/catastrophes when cell antennas are down and communicating becomes critical as it was on 9/11 and during Katrina. Mesh Networking works through connecting nodes, it hops from node to node, and can deliver data, voice and/or instructions.

This is located in the File system /usr/local/bin.

- Finish up milling tutorial (will try to complete it today)
- Write up a conclusion/findings on the Mesh Network Research
- Complete research on the 20x30 LED-Mirror
- the mechanism (how the parts communicate to each other)
- the circuit (charlieplexing)
- the programs (on the microcontrollers and on the computer)

We are using the Modela MDX-20 and cad to mill out circuit boards.

- Setup:

Since we moved the computers around (blame MakerFaire!), we needed to change permissions on the machine connected to the Modela by going into

usr/bin/dev

and we did a

sudo chmod 777 ttyS0

We had sent several jobs to the Modela and to kill it, we did a

ps -a | grep cat

to search for the process (it's called cat!) and then kill it.

Another thing was to double-check if move was green in the

/usr/local/bin

So, again, do a chmod to change the permissions:

sudo chmod 777 move

and do a

ls -l move

- This design team has developped mesh networking systems for the US military, check out the applications and technology page for different ideas.

     MD4455 Mobile Node with Mobility Scanner

- The LocustWorld All-In-One Flasher contains a windows installer which allows you to easily write the MeshAP image onto a Compact Flash media card.