TOXIN LABS

My first more complex 3D-Print: Yoda

Jonas — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 15:58:26 +0000

Today I made my first more complex 3D-Print with ABS plastic.
I decided to print another Star Wars character to test the actual capabilities of the printer and the plastic filament I ordered.

After having some problems with printing more complex models using PLA I decided to try out ABS. It’s not natural like PLA, but it is said to have a better printing quality when you’re doing models with overhangs and fine details. If you know of any PLA sources of high quality that are also good for overhangs and more complex details please do tell. The PLA I was using before was from faberdashery and while it is of great quality (beautiful color palette, consistent filament diameter, sticks great to the heatbed) I wasn’t able to print models with overhang with their filament.
Using a part cooling fan improved the situation but it still wasn’t pefect. My ABS used in this print is from Fabber Parts.

Here’s a photo from the model directly after the print:

Afterwards I cleaned off the support material with an exacto knife:

Now it was time for the finishing. I put the model in an acetone bath for 3 seconds. You can see the effect in the photo below. Besides smoothing the model surface it gives a glossy finishing that might not be desirable for every print.
If you’re planning to use the acetone technique as well, please do it somewhere outdoors. The fumes are quite toxic.

The technical part

The 3D printer I’m using is an eMaker Huxley (I got mine from an indiegogo campaign, now they can be ordered from reprappro). It’s not Plug’n'Play and it’s definitely not low-maintenance yet but on the other hand if I was able to assemble it you might be too ;). What I’d like to see are affordable 3D printers that can even be operated by school children but that is still a long way to go I think. We are on the right track though!

The printed model is from http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10752. A great place for finding 3d models.

I used Slic3r 0.8.4 for generating the printer commands (they are stored in a .gcode file), you can download my config here. As you can see in the config I used a 0.2mm layer height for this model. I really like the outcome. There are still some thing that I have to tune but I’m getting there. Next thing will be to swap the printer firmware for Marlin in order to achieve even better print results.

My Experiences with Typekit

Jonas — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:17:56 +0000

Being able to embed non-standard fonts in websites is a huge step forward for the web. I’ve been using Typekit for a while and wanted to share my experiences with the service.

I’ve subscribed to the Portfolio Plan for $4 per month which gives you access to the whole Typekit Font Libray and lets you embed Typekit Fonts on an unlimited number of websites. You can have up to 500.000 Pageviews per month in this plan.

Setting it up/Technical Stuff

After you have added the fonts you want to use on your site to the Kit, you have to insert a small script in your html code (it goes into the head tag):

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://use.typekit.com/xxx.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}</script>

Then you can either add the corresponding font class to your html tags (e.g. «.tk-news-gothic-std») or you can use it directly in your css with the font-family property:

body {
  font-family: "news-gothic-std", sans-serif;
}

The first time I tried it out I couldn’t get it to work. Took some time to figure it out, the problem was the font property in css:

body {
  font: 0.8125em/1.692307em "news-gothic-std", sans-serif;
}

The font didn’t load at all with above code, at the end the code below made it work (don’t know why though):

body {
  font-family: "news-gothic-std", sans-serif;
  font: 0.8125em/1.692307em "news-gothic-std", sans-serif;
}

Workflow with Typekit

Here’s the catch: You can’t use Typekit in Photoshop or Fireworks. You have to convert your design into HTML & CSS, then you can try out the Typekit fonts in the browser. For me as a designer that’s a big issue. I don’t know if you have seen Bret Victor’s talk on «Inventing on Principle» (you definitely should, it’s great!), but designers and makers in general have to see the effect of their changes instantly to have an effective workflow. Imagine I have three different website layouts and want to test some Typekit fonts with them. Now I have to convert all three layouts into HTML & CSS before I can see which font fits best? Why put all the work into converting all three layouts into HTML? I’m going to end up using only one of them, that workflow seems very ineffective to me. More time should be spent on the design process instead.

I could buy and download the fonts in Opentype Format and do the testing in Photoshop or Fireworks. If this should be «the way to go» that is a real disadvantage in my opinion. Expensive as well. From my perspective there should be a Typekit Photoshop Extension or something similar. Extensis showed how it’s done and released a Web Font Photoshop Plugin to use with their WebINK Web Font Service. As you know Typekit was acquired by Adobe, I hope they’re planning something similar. I downloaded the Photoshop CS6 Beta but there is no sign of a Typekit extension.

Such a Photoshop plugin would of course have to download some kind of font file to the computer (at least temporarily) so that could be a problem with the Font Foundries. I don’t know about the conditions between Typekit and the Foundries but I strongly believe the Foundries want to be assured that the people can’t just save those font files and do whatever they want with them. Maybe someone has some insight about the possibilities and limitations of the licensing model in use at Typekit.

For now I will stick with Typekit but I really hope they will find a solution for this in the near future because I think apart from this workflow problem it’s a great service.

Update: Paul Heyer from fnctions just told me that there’s also a Photoshop Plugin from Fontshop. This Plugin doesn’t download font files, it downloads the already rendered type (I’m guessing as image-data) directly from the Fontshop Servers. So that’s definitely a technical possibility to consider.

Getting started with the BeagleBone on OSX Lion #1

Jonas — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:07:53 +0000

I recently got a BeagleBone and wanted to share some of my experiences with it as well as document some obstacles along the way. My first topic is the installation of the latest Angstrom version on the BeagleBone and connecting via Terminal.

So the first thing I wanted to do after unpacking, reading the README and hooking it up was to install the latest Angstrom Linux version for BeagleBone. You can find the latest images here. I chose Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-eglibc-ipk-v2012.04-core-beaglebone-2012.04.09.img.xz. If you want to run a XServer on BeagleBone you might want to download the heavier GNOME image.

While the file was downloading I took the microSD card out of the BeagleBone and inserted it into the Cardreader of my Macbook (I have an microSD adapter). Then i used Terminal to find the mount point of the card:

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *3.9 GB disk1
1: Windows_FAT_32 BEAGLE_BONE 74.0 MB disk1s1
2: Linux 3.6 GB disk1s2

In my case it’s at »/dev/disk1«. The next step is to do a backup of the SD card so that you can go back to the original image later if something goes wrong. I did the backup via Terminal as well:

First unmount the disk.

$ diskutil umountDisk /dev/diskX
Unmount of all volumes on disk1 was successful

The backup process. It might take a while.

$ mkdir bb_backup
cd bb_backup
dd if=/dev/diskX of=bb_backup.img
xxx records in
xxx records out
xxx bytes transferred in xxx secs (xxx bytes/sec)

Now we can copy the downloaded Angstrom image. Will take it’s time as well, you can lean back.

$ xz -dkc Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-eglibc-ipk-v2012.04-core-beaglebone-2012.04.09.img.xz > /dev/diskX

That’s it! We’re almost ready to connect. We just have to install the FTDI Drivers for BeagleBone to be able to connect via USB. I found instructions to get the drivers running with OSX Lion (there seem to have been some problems before). Since that blog post new drivers with version 2_2_17 have been released and after installing them it just worked, didn’t have to do more. You can download those drivers for Lion here.

Now insert SD card into BeagleBone, hook up the USB cable and power it up. After about 10 seconds you can try to connect via Terminal. Login is root and there is no password set in the default configuration.

$ screen /dev/tty.usb*B 115200
.---O---.
| | .-. o o
| | |-----.-----.-----.| | .----..-----.-----.
| | | __ | ---'| '--.| .-'| | |
| | | | | |--- || --'| | | ' | | | |
'---'---'--'--'--. |-----''----''--' '-----'-'-'-'
-' |
'---'
The Angstrom Distribution beaglebone ttyO0
Angstrom v2012.04-core - Kernel 3.2.14
beaglebone login:

Let’s try out the Cloud9 IDE! For this to work we have to eject the »BEAGLE_BONE« volume in Finder. After a while the USB-to-Ethernet interface starts up. I didn’t get prompted on my machine but if you do, set up the adapter for DHCP. Now go to »http://192.168.7.2« in the browser. Voilà.