Whither the Fiber Arts?; or, Making is More Than Just 3D Printing and Robots

Where are these sewing machines at maker faires?!

I’ve now been to three Mini Maker Faires, and they all had a very different slants. The attendees were largely the same demographic (kids, parents, more kids), but the makers presenting at the faires were all over the place. The NoVa Mini Maker Faire was a 3D printing and Robotics show. There was a bit of fiber art and other stuff sequestered off in another part of the Faire, away from most of the action. The Greenbelt Mini Maker Faire had just a handful of 3D printers – mine and maybe two others – and it had a Rubik’s Cube solving robot, but it also had a lot of handicrafts, a guy designing his own custom dice games, a vertical gardening setup for small spaces, and a silversmith, to name a few. A silversmith! How cool is that!?

At the DC Mini Maker Faire, we were mostly back to 3D Printing and Robots. Not that 3D Printing isn’t super cool and takes up most of my free time because it’s awesome, but 3D Printing isn’t Making. It’s just a really, really useful tool that makes new kinds of Making easier and more accessible.

So what is Making, then?

Making is Doing It Yourself. It’s producing something, instead of consuming it. It’s design and manufacture with your own hands, agnostic of tools or end results.

Much like solder joins, broken plant stems can be repaired.

The break is under the lower section of red tape. Snapped cleanly in two. Bugger. 

I broke it. I broke the bell pepper plant. The stem snapped clear in half as I was trying to convince it to stand up straight and tie it to a stake.

Fortunately, there is hope. I joined the two broken ends together and wrapped it bandage style with electrical tape. Then I grabbed a nearby stick and taped the stem to that to function as a splint. Hopefully, the two cut ends will grow back together and the plant will survive. The section above the break is quite wilted, but it may recover in a few days. If not, well, I did plant 6 of them.

Why electricians tape? It creates a stronger seal, keeping water in. Also, it’s quite stretchy and will allow the stem to continue growing. Ignore the bit of masking tape there; it was an experiment that didn’t work and will be replaced with more electricians tape posthaste.

Baby cayenne peppers with new bamboo stake

Yummy

These are golden cayenne peppers, just starting to fruit. The plant is about 1′ tall, and I have just staked it with bamboo to help it stay upright during thunderstorms.

This plant has already put out one full size pepper, about 4″ long, when the plant was only about 6″ tall. I picked that one early to convince the plant to put a little more energy into growing tall. It has been on the counter for a week and is starting to ripen as it dries.

Also, photography is hard, especially when using a phone camera with no focus control. This is going to be a reoccurring theme.

Just-in-time Learning; or, Soldering for Noobs

Oops!

I admit it, to my great shame: I do not know how to solder.

I never learned. I never had a reason to. Here I am, the daughter of an electrical engineer and a rocket scientist, 28 years old, and I do not know how to solder. Children run around me at Maker Faires with flashlights and pins that they soldered themselves; it’s not a hard skill to learn. It’s just one I’ve never needed.

Until now.

Hobby the second: Gardening and Spicy Things

I also have a garden. Because my mindset is very utilitarian, I’m not growing flowers. That’s not to say that flowers aren’t pretty, or that pretty things aren’t worth striving for; it’s just not my priority. I do have some Azalea bushes that were here before I bought the house. I don’t go out of my way to care for them, but they have survived and thrived anyways.

3D Printed Things: Gallery 1

Danger Will Robinson: Heated Bed and Induction Probe Interference

I installed my induction probe, and everything was magical.

Then I installed the heat bed, and things were more magical.

Then the auto leveling started getting weird.

Adventures with Heated Beds

I wanted a heated bed for my 3D Printer. Because I wanted one. That’s really the extent of my justification.

I found an aftermarket supplier (there are now several) that made PCB Heat Beds in the right size (6″x4.5″) and bought it. I also had to buy a thermistor, which is a thermometer/resistor; this has a bead that measures temperature and provides resistance accordingly. It got taped to the bottom of the heat bed with electrical tape.

Auto-leveling: For fun and profit awesome

A probe for auto bed leveling is the single best $7 I have spent on my printer. Seriously. A cheap probe and some free firmware fix some huge problems.

My probe, installed and functioning. Look at that smooth first layer!

Auto-leveling is something of a misnomer. It doesn’t not actually matter how level your bed is (levelness being defined as the plane of the bed perpendicular to the force of gravity). What really matters is how parallel the motion of the print carriage is to the bed. If your print carriage was completely level in its motion, than these two things would be the same, but they are often just slightly different… slightly enough to be a problem.

The importance of print surfaces

When 3D Printing, the print surface is critical. You need something smooth and flat and something that your thermoplastic of choice will stick to. This makes proper print surface a multi-step problem: You need a solid bed for the smooth and flat part, and then a coating of something else for the stickiness. Getting your print to stick to the build plate is a) critical, and b) the single most common point of failure.