Time lapsing...

Last week I've been a little busy, soldering two sanguinololus kits, and here it is, one gorgeous time lapse movie, filmed by my friend Pedro Moura Pinheiro

I'm not in the mood...

At least it's what she said! Violeta... the printer, I mean :)
From the beginning, tuesday it's meeting day at AltLab and I've discussed with Mauricio the possibility of using the Mini-Mendel with an adapter, a Pen Holder to write the pcb's layouts. The X axis carriage from the Mini-Mendel was disassembled and after I've finished assemble it, it looked a little wobbly, and we don't want a wobbly printer!
So, Thingiverse to the rescue, and we found the Mendel Mini-Carriage, and of we go... to the Makerbot!!!
This was my first interaction with a 3d Printer, and everything went well... until... when the print reached about 1cm of height, the extruder decided stop the extrusion... damn!
We started over, but there was a suspicion over the laptop, so we've tried using the SD Card to print... it didn't work! Now the suspect is the version 3 firmware... and the laptop... it's a cabala or lack of luck :p
Did we give up? No, of course not, we've selected a smaller piece of the Mini-Carriage and pressed "BUILD", and all went as expected, the first piece of the Mini-carriage was a success!
Let's try another... and all went well.. until the 1cm of height... the extruder failed again :p
It was getting late, so we've closed the shop for the day... err... night.
But not everything was lost, we've plotted a plan to develop a Gen8 electronics, just wait for it :)

RepRap Gen7 PCB... check!

Today went back to AltLab for a little learning experience. A great friend of mine, Fernando Afonso, came to Lisbon to the launch of MEO Kanal, a product he helped bringing to life.

Since he was here, he was invited by AltLab to give a small workshop on "PCB Making... The Fernando Afonso way". :)

The method used was Toner Transfer, where you print the circuit layout with a laser printer on cheap magazine paper (the more glossier is better), then, with the toner side over the copper side and woot... the "sandwich" off it go into a slightly modified laminator (around 10 times) and the it's submerged in freezing cold water.

The low quality magazine paper it's easily scrubbed off the pcb and it's ready to the acid bath.
We used Acid Cupric Chloride as etchant, when the pcb is submerged  it turns into a... kryptonite green... spooky I say!

In the end we've got a Generation 7 Electronics pcb for the Prusa Air... next step, buy the components and soldering it :D