New YouTube channel with first video online
You can now find us on YouTube with our own channel too. To start with, we have made a video about T-shirt printing: Play Video on YouTube
Blog
What gets built, repaired and tried out at our space.
New membership fees and opening hours
Sewing now on Tuesdays at Starship Factory too! As the sharp-eyed reader of our website may already have noticed, we introduced new opening hours at yesterday’s plenary. From now on Starship Factory is open every Tuesday and Friday from 18:00 to 22:00 That lets us take account of the increased demand for a meet-up on Tuesdays.
Pillars as support structures in 3D printing
In 3D printing, objects are usually created by laying several layers of plastic on top of one another, as with a hot glue gun. That works excellently for objects with a cube- or pyramid-like shape, but when the object has more than just overhangs (bridges between sub-objects and so on), it can become necessary to build in support structures. These are often generated automatically by 3D slicer programs such as Cura or slic3r. They are less pronounced plastic structures which cannot take much pressure (unlike the structures belonging to the object itself), but offer enough purchase for the printer’s plastic threads to hold on to, making the object printable.
Replacing the silicone layer on the B9Creator UV resin printer
When 3D printing with the B9Creator, UV resin is cured layer by layer with the help of a projector and so turned into a shape, which is lifted out of the remaining still-liquid resin after the print. So that the resin does not bond with the acrylic glass print tray (called the vat in the manuals) as it cures, a coating of silicone (PDMS) is used. Unfortunately this breaks down after a few prints and therefore has to be renewed regularly.
Workshop "T-shirt printing made easy" at Nähcafé Kiel
Now that the congress is over, our T-shirt printing experts are making a short stop in Kiel, where we want to spread our knowledge of T-shirt production. So there will be a workshop on T-shirt design at the local Nähcafé. There we will turn your T-shirt idea, or one of our templates, into a finished printed T-shirt which you can take away with you straight after the course. We will show you the basics of the open source program Inkscape (Mac, Win, Linux) and convert a template (a photo or logo, say) into a vector graphic suitable as a motif.
T-shirt production at 30c3
Until tomorrow we are present at the 30th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg with an assembly. Thanks to numerous interested visitors, the cutting plotter and the T-shirt press are running almost continuously, and people are busily developing, plotting and pressing their own T-shirt designs. The important part of the process is less the T-shirt itself than that visitors learn thoroughly how to print T-shirts themselves under guidance — from the graphic to the press.
Activating HeloCut5 for HELO cutting plotters
Along with our cutting plotter we also received software to drive it. In that connection we noticed that activating the licence for this software is sometimes accompanied by considerable friction, and that some people have difficulties with it. Since we recently managed to activate the software, we want to set out here how best to go about it:
3D printing with wood filament
If you like wooden sculptures but are not much good at carving, there are now alternatives. Instead of working sculptures out of a block of wood with a knife, we now also have filament for the 3D printer that contains wood and therefore gives a very attractive, woody look. That turns carving work into modelling work; the 3D printer does the rest.
Bring on the electronics tinkering!
Having tracked down a few new toys, we are now rather better equipped in general for people who want to tinker with electronics here.
It's bigger on the inside — fitting a lot into a small space
At the November plenary we decided to finally tackle the problem of overfull tables and overflowing boxes. So we have now bought a few extra shelves and been given another table. At the Monday meeting the time had come: we tidied and cleared out substantially and put up the new shelves.
Fresh from the T-shirt press
Today we inaugurated the cutting plotter and the T-shirt press. Now you can print T-shirts here too! With our plotter, Poli-Flex Premium film needs a contact pressure of 65 g. After that it wants to be pressed for 20 seconds with the carrier film and another 15 seconds without it, at 165 °C in the T-shirt press. Designs should be saved as vector graphics in SVG format. More information about T-shirt printing at Starship Factory is in the wiki.
Multi coloured full body iPhone4 case
Fresh from the Ultimaker: a multi coloured full body iPhone4 case from Thingiverse. Because the different colours have different material properties, the black-and-white part unfortunately turned out a little unstable. The GCode file’s temperatures were tuned for the main colour, turquoise.
Photography lightbox
To document all the great projects we make, we have built ourselves a lightbox. More about the build and the materials can be found in our wiki.
Update on the Elna disc project
Having understood the principle of the simple Elna discs, we made a disc with a simple wave pattern. The disc has a minimum on one side and a maximum on the other. Over the course of the 18 stitches — at stitch width 4 — the machine therefore uses the maximum stitch width in full during one revolution.
Printing Starships — logo design in 3D
Some of our logo drafts get modelled in 3D, printed out and painted without further ado.
Making ELNA Supermatic pattern discs yourself
In one of our projects we are trying to make discs for ELNA sewing machines ourselves on the 3D printer. To do that we first have to understand how the discs work, and be able to reduce them to a model ourselves. This article explains the current progress in analysing and making the Elna discs. The current state can always be found in our wiki.
Our equipment: 3D printers
Starship Factory currently has two working 3D printers: an Ultimaker and a RepRap Pro Huxley. On the Ultimaker we print only with PLA, on the Huxley so far only with ABS. That avoids constantly changing material and with it the risk of clogging the printer’s nozzle.
Starship Factory as a FabLab
Anyone who deals with 3D printing, CNC milling and laser cutting may already have come across the term “FabLab”. FabLabs, and so Starship Factory too, are makerspaces built on the basic idea that people there can make just about anything themselves. To achieve this, FabLabs rely essentially on three processes: 3D printing, laser cutting and CNC milling.
Weekly meetings: Fridays 18:00–21:00
Dear members of Starship Factory, interested people and the merely curious! From 20.09.2013 we will finally be meeting every Friday from 18:00 to 21:00 in Yvo’s studio at St. Alban-Rheinweg 62, 4052 Basel. At the moment we have two 3D printers on site and are building a third. There is also a sewing machine, a T-shirt press and, before long, a cutting plotter.
Loop scarf
28 °C in the shade too cold for you? Then sew yourself a loop scarf following the instructions by kangashona.
How do I build a sub-irrigated planter?
Harvesting vegetables successfully needs neither a big garden nor much work watering. In this blog post I describe how to build a planter with long-term irrigation out of a 30 l plastic container (a flower pot in this example), an onion planting tray, some fabric (from an old pair of jeans, for instance) and a garden fleece. A drill or a cordless screwdriver is a bonus, as it makes the drainage hole easier to make.