1. Make sure you have all of the parts before starting the project. It makes more sense to build it all out to finish than waiting for more parts to arrive.
2. The extruder is the main thing to get right.  The designs for this part of the printer have gotten much better since we started.  We’ve replaced the original extruder with a more modern one and we’re getting smoother prints now.
3. Make the frame solid while building it, so there is no need to go back afterwards to adjust it.  I thought I’d need to “fine tune” it afterwards.   It turns out that all the fine tuning is mostly done on the height of the X axis and the print bed.
4. Everything needs to be in place before printing (endstops, heated print bed, etc..)
5. Metal pulleys are much smoother than the plastic printed pulleys.

I actually ended up selling the printer to a member who has luckily left it at the space for us to finish.  We’re planning on getting another one to build.  Suggestions are welcome as to which one we build next!  I am leaning towards the Prusa Air.   Be sure to stop by 3D Thursday to see the printer in action!

“Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present Transubstrational: As a Smartmatter of Nanofacture, our second solo exhibition by New York artist Shane Hope. Expanding on his explorations of emerging molecular nanotechnologies which could give rise to near costless systems for controlling the structure of matter itself, Hope takes us one step further with two series of incredible work made from the very cutting-edge open-source tools that are increasingly being developed for such research.

For his new series of lenticular-3D prints (titled “Post-Scarcity Percept-Pus Portraiture”), Hope has continued to customize user-sponsored open-source nanomolecular design software systems. He uses this software to modify, manipulate and design groups of molecular models. To build his painterly pictures, he assembles together tens of thousands of these models, resulting in fantastic compositions depicting organic, inorganic, synthesizable, theoretically feasible and nano-nonsensical molecules. The lenticular 3D print format presents holographic-like relief-sculptural depth, providing an extraordinary view into molecular design spaces and how hacking matter happens.

For his second series (“Qubit-Built-Quilted Scriptable-Species-Being on Graphene”), Hope built by hand open-source / open-hardware 3D printers (RepRaps) with the intent to literally convert bits back into atoms. In RepRap tradition, he used his first ‘parent’ 3D printer to print in PLA (polylactic acid) parts for subsequent ‘child’ printers; essentially printing printers. Named “Foglet-Fabber-Fidel, Percept-Pus-Pandora, Qubit-Quacker-Quinn and Borganic-Blobjecthoodlum-Beulah,” this family-printer-farm has also been used to materialize his huge cache of modded molecular models. Hope here exhibits an array of 3D-prints particularly representative of graphene, the new carbon structure experts predict may be that upon which we compute next.

Shane Hope received his MFA from the University of California San Diego in 2002 and has attended the University of California Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has exhibited at Virgil de Voldere Gallery in New York; Project Gentili, in Prato, Italy; iMAL (interactive Media Art Laboratory) in Brussels, Belgium, Rosamund Felson Gallery in Los Angeles and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects”

We’re doing some pre-planning in an operation we’ve dubbed RedBull Amoeba.  Get involved by joining our Google Group.

And now meet our crack commando A-Team:

Psytek, an inventor and engineer, began his career in technology and electronics at age two when he bit into an electrical wire. He put together his first computer with parts he found off the street and has more black hacker t-shirts than can fit in his urban apartment which naturally led to his co-founding of the hackerspace, Alpha One Labs. His current projects include a real-life flying saucer, 3D persistence-of-vision hologram display and a thousand other ideas for things that will make life easier like Grripz and NagNation

Robert is a software engineer by trade, and a hardware hacker by hobby. Robert has taken the lead on offering instructional classes at Alpha One Labs; teaching members and non-members iOS development, Eagle CAD, and basic electronics. He also was instrumental in launching Alpha One Labs first commercial product: the Carduino, a wallet-sized Arduino-compatible platform with integrated USB plug and prototyping area. His current projects include an Arduino-controlled BBQ smoker and a nixie tube calculator.

Ari Douglas is a recent law school graduate with numerous technical degrees, including one in lasers (photonics). After a decade of work in various technical fields, including running a sport-car tuning business, and inspired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation he decided to apply his experience to the legal realm. He hopes to contribute to their mission of fighting for cyber civil liberties.

Konstantin is an electrical engineer by birth, and a mad scientist by hobby. After earning his electrical engineering degree at Union College, he went to work at West Point where he mentors cadets to be better engineers. One of Konstantin’s projects was building a MAME arcade cabinet for Alpha One Labs, which required engineering a custom encoder interface. His current projects include designing a robotics platform, remote control solutions, and building an RFID security system.

We’re very excited to be in this competition and we hope you can be there.  One of the constraints of the challenge is that each team must bring in 200lbs of stuff to start out with. Since we have the home team advantage we want to get creative with our 200lbs of initial stuff by opening it up to you.  If you have a part or thing that must be in our creation, send it in and we’ll work out best to incorporate it.  We’re hoping to get a minimum of 10lbs of stuff from 20 different sources to have a good variety of stuff.

Send your box to:

Alpha One Labs – RedBull Creation
231 Norman Ave #312
Brooklyn, NY 11222

As boxes come in we’ll put them towards our 200lbs!

And as a side note, according to RedBull, we’ve already won 1st place for “amazing at following directions!”, that is just the tip of the iceberg. So watch out, we’re in it to win it and have fun!

Good luck everyone!

Beginners, cooks, food hackers, and people of technology!

Have you ever wanted to have a magical box you could put on any heating appliance that would hack it and tell that hardware exactly how to heat (up to .1 degrees accuracy)? Well now thanks to a bunch of smart Italians that crazy fantasy is now a reality!

All of the top restaurants in the world use sous vide to make make sure their proteins are perfect. It is a brilliant cooking strategy for so much more than that and it’s been hailed as the next microwave.

Come and make your own sous vide machines with Arduino based technology with exprienced food hackers, Q and Abe, from LowerEastKitchen.com, QandAbe.com, and MeatJacuzzi.com. In our class we will guide beginners from soldering to Arduino language and programming. Snacks will be served and eggs will be provided as your first sous vide meal.

Stay for an hour or the full class— it’s free! All that costs money are the kits if you should decide to make one. Kits are availabe at $80.

Q and Abe are experts in the field of DIY Sous Vide and Open Source Technology. Their invention and foods have been featured on FoodGawker, CNN, and TasteSpotting.

Brooklyn, NY 11222 – USA

Thursday, June 9 at 7:00 PM

Attending: 7

Details: http://www.meetup.com/alphaonelabs/events/20025181/

CadSoftUSA, Element14 and Newark - They gave us a whole stack of EagleCad Manuals, tutorials and stickers along with some Element14 T-shirts / swag.  They also sponsored the Great Global Hackerspace Challenge which we recently finished our entry in!  Not only did we get $900 to build an educational device, we’re also getting some top notch soldering irons, and a full Eagle CAD license.  And, if we make it into the finals, some additional cool equipment to use at the lab.

Instructables - We got an email from someone at Instructables.  Soon after, we were the proud recipients of a bunch of T-shirts, cool little foam robots (which we further donated to 2600 peeps), some stickers, patches, free pro accounts for members, and banner space on the site!

RedBull - One awesome invitation to compete in their Creation Challenge and 2 cases of RedBull.

AsyncLabs – donated a bunch of their older model WiShields

Voltaic Systems – donated a big box of white LEDs on cables and a few solar panels to hack on.

SunLED - sent us some samples of their cool SMT LEDS

Diligent / Microchip - Sent us a bunch of the new ChipKit Max32 boards.

Lego – Donated a Mindstorms NXT 2.0

Summercon – Our first advertiser on the site. Thanks for having another awesome con this year. The Locksport Hut was a lot of fun.

If you are not on this list and you should be, contact us now.

Thank you all!  We appreciate your generosity and outreach to our community.  If you are a corporation and would like to sponsor something or advertise on our site please let us know!  We have a great group of individuals eager to hack on things!