John and I spent 3 or 4 hours Thursday night getting the printer up and running to where we could start the first print.

On Friday, John spent most of the day getting it calibrated and doing test prints, and some more time on Saturday troubleshooting a problem with the filament feed.

But the hard work paid off! We’ve got it successfully printing usable parts at up to 200% speed.

It’s the day after St. Patricks, but I’m still feeling the holiday spirit!

This will be coming home to the space tomorrow!

Free fun for the whole family today and tomorrow! Its at the Maverick Center, come check it out!

Hey folks, I just finished a couple of presentations to show how I’m using javascript to drive my robocar. I’ve got more to do on this, like adding support to drive a *currently* available car like the monster tc and also driving the lego mindstorm.

The talks aren’t online yet, but you should be able to see my flamebot slides.

One of the projects that was being worked on at the Transistor was a forge to melt and cast aluminum. I saw some interesting videos online that made it seem rather easy to melt aluminum in a regular fire. Well, we have fire at ProVolt regularly because of the wood stove, and I decided to finally try it.

The first challenge was a crucible. It seems like people had used regular steel cans because the melting temperature of steel is much higher than aluminum. I grabbed a spaghetios can from my car, and threw it in the fire!

Next, I had the challenge of putting the cans into this makeshift crucible at the back of the stove. I fashioned a curved tool out of wire, and was able to drop the cans by their pull tab into place. It has a droop in the center, that allows met to lift the top of the aluminum can higher than the door of the stove, and lower them on top of the previous one.

It was fun to see can after can disappear into a small space!

The steel didn’t hold up to the heat, and liquid aluminum came out the bottom.

Here’s a picture of the blob sitting on the stove after it’s cooled.

If so, you’ll want to stay away from the darkroom being built at ProVolt!

It’s got a real darkroom door!

And, as you can see from this picture of the inside, it’s really dark!

My daughter told me she had a dream about cars that drive themselves, and I told her I dream about the same thing. I found her this old video about the autonomous vehicle that I helped build at the University of Utah for the DARPA Urban Challenge, and thought it might be fun to show it here.

Back when The Transistor was going, I wanted to make a 4th of July float for the big parade here in Provo, and I’m thinking that ProVolt should look into trying to build a little autonomous float for the parade this year.

Should we do it?

There are so many things happening in Salt Lake City this weekend that I encourage everyone to head up there to either StartSLC and the UTOS hackathon, go to Salt Lake Comic Con, or check out a film at Sundance. There’s to much to do, and so little time. Also check out Make Salt Lake, they’re awesome!

This video I took at Make Salt Lake shows simply why I want to get a laser cutter at ProVolt so bad. You can Donate Bitcoins toward a ProVolt laser cutter here:

ProVolt will be having our first in a series of monthly classes on Saturday, January 24th, 2015 at 4:00 pm to learn about the water jet cutter we have access to in SLC.
We’ll be covering how it works, what it can do, and how to design parts to cut on it. We’ll be installing software and everyone will have the opportunity to design something to be cut. We’ll also be giving away 15 ProVolt key chains to the first 15 people who show up.

We’ll optionally be leaving at 6:00 and going up to the cutter in SLC and actually cutting things from 7:00 pm until everyone has cut what they want.

This class is available to everyone, and there is no cost.

ProVolt is located in the back of Provo Studios at 189 West 500 South in Provo.
The water jet is at an undisclosed location near downtown in SLC. You must come to ProVolt or call me to get the address.

I recently had the pleasure of touring the Bio Innovations Gateway at 2500S State in Salt Lake City. They received a huge grant a few years ago from Ustar to build a state of the art facility to support biotech companies here in Utah.

They support Utah businesses by providing technical resources and access to equipment and facilities that would otherwise be impossible or extremely expensive to get access to. Their facility includes a clean room, a wet lab, dry lab, and machine shop.

It’s the type of place that I hope to see ProVolt become in the future.