RepRap Research Foundation

RRRF meeting

Date
19th December 2008, 20:30 GMT, via Skype.

Meeting called byZach Hoeken

Present
Adrian Bowyer (A)
Zach Hoeken (Z)
Vik Olliver (V)
Ed Sells (E)

Apologies
Simon McAuliffe

Agenda

1. Financials
2. Salary
3. Future

Financials

Z reported the current financial situation…

Generally: doing really well.

In 2008, 1200 orders grossed a revenue of $108,000.

Z estimated 1000+ customers/rappers out there.

The bank holds $12,500, and the RRRF currently holds significant random stock.

This is a fairly good representation of the profit made over the last 18 months.

This is approximately $3.3 billion dollars more than GM this year.

Z thought that the RRRF runs from 1st Jan.

Z has hired a professional accountant.

Zach noted a sales trend increase. This trend is boosted by milestones achieved in the project.

After the first 12 months, revenue was only $14,000.

Salary for Z

Z proposed a salary for himself to continue the administration of the RRRF…

Z wanted to declare the salary as optional, and proposed that it should be full or part time to enable the opportunity for freelance. Z suggested $24k p.a.

It was resolved that the RRRF will pay Zach Smith a salary of $3,000 per month for the year of 2009. If, in any month, Zach does other work, then he will subtract the number of days spent doing that from the number of days in the month and pay himself pro rata.

The future

Zach wanted to see the community participate more, wrt development. He proposed that people should be able to submit designs (PCB, lasercut etc) RRRF would then purchase the hardware for the good ideas. Probably no more than one solution would effected per week (rough estimate).

Suggested format might be: person suggests idea, voting (non-binding), RRRF makes part.

All agree that submissions should be free. Everything should be submitted under the GPL, as per the RepRap project. Designs should be fully documented as part of the submission.

Design rules to be discussed further over email.

AOB

V noted that things are hard to get hold of in NZ, particularly stepper motors and round steel bars.

Lasers over 1mW banned in Oz.

V wanted to make things more accessible outside the States. Suggest another RRRF office somewhere outside the US.

A suggested locations: Europe & NZ.

This implies administration manpower for each office.

Z is of the opinion that this good idea. Implementation questions of course will be raised wrt scale and capital.

V: where are the current orders coming from?

Z to find out.

Further details should be discussed through email.

Z spends 5-10 hours per week completing orders.

The RRRF doesn’t have many girls. But as V/Z points out, they’ve already got most of the self-replication equipment.

A: We’re obliged to have another meeting in April. This one doesn’t count.

E: Congratulations Zach!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!

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One of the reasons for my fairly sporadic posts on this blog is that I’ve been busy in the lab working on new boards. Here are 2 new designs for the RepRap Project.

Sanguino Breakout Shield
This is the Sanguino Breakout Shield board. It is primarily intended as a shield for existing Sanguino boards, but we’ve also included the footprint for a full Sanguino on the PCB as well. Its up to you as the builder to decide what shape the board should take: You can build it as a single board with an integrated Sanguino, or you can add headers that allow you to plug an existing Sanguino into the board. its your choice! You can buy both the full kit or the bare pcb from the RRRF store.

GM3 Noise Suppressor
This circuit will suppress electrical noise generated by many small, brushed DC motors. It was designed to fit on the GM3 gearmotor that the RepRap project uses as its extruder motor of choice. This noise suppression helps keep the noise down in the electrical system, where it might cause bad effects (such as reading quadrature signals, i2c signals, etc.) Nophead has done a nice evaluation of the board on his blog. You can buy both the full kit or the bare pcb from the RRRF store.

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Oh man. I just realized its been a few months since I’ve posted here last. I apologize for that, and I’ll try to start posting more frequently. Back to the topic of this post: the RRRF store is back up after being down for a few days.

Unfortunately, I was running what may have been the oldest version of OSCommerce in the history of the universe. So old that it required PHP4 to run. Well, it just so happened that my host discontinued PHP4 in August, and when I edited the domain, it was permanently switched to PHP5 this past weekend. Well, that broke the shopping cart software beyond repair.

So, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded the software to Zen Cart, which is a fork of OSCommerce. Luckily the import from OSCommerce to Zen Cart was fairly painless and all the product info, images, order info, customer info, etc was all successfully transferred!

The biggest pain was getting the store setup again. I lost all the configuration options during the upgrade which really sucks. Hopefully I got everything back to normal and functioning properly. There are bound to be little things here and there that are not quite right, so please let me know if you find anything funky.

Thanks for bearing with me.

Cheers,
Zach

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I got back from vacation on Sunday. I had a fantastic time driving through the Pacific Northwest. Lots of gorgeous scenery. Anyway, I’m finally almost caught up with things. I only have about 19 / 50 orders left to ship and those are all just waiting on out of stock parts. I ordered nearly $7000 worth of electronic components, motors, pcbs, plastic, etc. Pretty much everything should be back in stock within a week or 2.

There are some things that are back in stock *now*:

60 new Sanguino kits are available.
15 more 5lb coils of ABS are available.

I’m doing RepRap stuff full time this week, and my freelance gig with the New York Times starts next week. I’ll be working part-time there, which means I’ll be able to put in 40-60 hours a week on RepRap. Lots of good things are in the pipeline. That freelance gig is probably 2-3 months, and after that its back to hacking full-time. Things are looking good. =)

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Good news!

Today is my last day at Vimeo. While I’m sad to leave such a fun and awesome company, I’m even more excited to be able to devote quite a bit more time to my true passion: building self-replicating 3D printers. It may not be obvious, but I’ve been extremely busy lately. On top of working a full-time job, I’ve been running the RRRF. This in and of itself is a full-time job. I think I’ve been averaging like 80 hour weeks or something crazy like that. It’s okay though, because I’m following my dream. Somehow in between orders, I’ve even managed to squeeze some research in.

The coming months are going to be very interesting, and I imagine that quite a few amazing things are going to come out of it. Obviously I’m going to be able to devote lots more time to research, and I have a list of things that I’ll be working feverishly on:

• lasercut extruder design (by Ian Adkins)
• lasercut darwin design (by Ian Adkins)
• new generation 3 electronics based on the Sanguino
• new stepper driver (cheaper, better, stronger, opto isolated)
• new opto isolator circuit design
• combined PWM / DC motor driver w/ MOSFETS and built-in opto isolation
• cool sanguino breakout shield
• hot new RepRap software and drivers for both Arduino and Sanguino

Basically, I’m really excited to have the chance to follow my dreams. I’d like to thank all the people who have ever bought something from the RRRF (all 800 of you!) Please stay tuned: the revolution has only just begun.

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Opto Endstops

This is bad news with a bit of good/optimistic news. The bad news is that we’ve bought out all of the H21LOI chips from every North American supplier. Lead times from the manufacturer are about 34 weeks. The good news is that we managed to buy about a thousand opto isolators, and the RRRF is doing great. Our project is strong.

If you have a source for these parts that doesn’t charge an arm and a leg (ie: overseas suppliers) please let me know!

In the meantime, here is our solution: we’re switching to the H21LOB which is the H21LOI’s brother, but its output is inverted. We’ll be doing a new rev of the board as to eliminate confusion. It should be out within the month.

Complete Electronics Kits

I managed to order the last 87 H21LOIs from Digikey. Unfortunately we will have to start rationing the opto switches until the new board is out. We will only be sending out 3 endstops (instead of 6) for each order. Once I fill the outstanding orders, I’ll double check inventory and post the remaining ones on the site.

Lasercut McWire Cartesian Bots

I must apologize because it is taking a while to get the parts lasercut. It’s been nearly impossible to get to the FabLab to lasercut lately, and life has just been busy. Fortunately, NYC Resistor, the local hackerspace that I helped start has bought a lasercutter, and its being installed this week. Expect to see many new and exciting lasercut items coming out soon.

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Hey Boss,

I’m going on vacation! I’m leaving NYC on Saturday, August 16th. I’m flying to Portland, Oregon with my wonderful girlfriend, Jen. We’re renting a convertible, and we’re driving down to San Francisco over the course of a week, camping and enjoying ourselves along the way. We fly back Saturday, August 23rd.

Basically, what this means is I’ll be out of town for a week, and no orders will be filled during that time.

The cutoff date for getting your order shipped is Wednesday, August 13th by 7PM EST. Any orders after that will be shipped Monday, August 25th.

I’ll explain the reason for the vacation in a follow up post, but I have good news for the future of RepRap and the RRRF.

Zach Smith
Director, RRRF

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I’m really really really excited to announce this new product. This one was directly conceived, funded, and produced here by the RRRF as a direct result of the kind souls who have supported us so far. To get to the meat, the Sanguino is a new microcontroller board inspired by the Arduino. We took the biggest baddest 40-pin DIP that atmel makes and made a board with it. Its based on the atmega644P which provides 64K of flash, 4K of ram, and 32 GPIO pins. The best part: its compatible with the Arduino software, which means all of your code should run on it no problem, and you can program it just as easily.

You can buy a kit from the RRRF for $25 or check out the Sanguino website.

Sanguino: Arduino’s Big Brother from Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken on Vimeo.

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Magnetic Rotary Encoder v1.0

I’m proud to announce a new kit today that is the result of a couple of months of solid work. It is called the Magnetic Rotary Encoder, and it is awesome! When assembled, this board provides positioning feedback in multiple data formats. It uses a magnet, so there are no moving parts to wear out and its fairly tolerant of mis-alignment. Its also very precise, offering 10 bits of positional data (1024 different positions in 360 degrees.) This board sets a few new firsts for us at the RRRF:

1. First surface mount kit/pcb.
2. First board intended primarily for experimentation.
3. First board to use IDC headers!

You can buy it from the RRRF store for $20, and read all about it in the documentation.

Donations!

I am now accepting donations from the RRRF shop directly. A couple people have expressed interest in donating a bit extra on their order. Also, someone wanted to buy me a beer via the store, but I was unable to do so before. If you’d like to buy me a beer via the store, you can now simply add a donation to your cart. You must specify that you’d like the donation to go towards beer, otherwise I will spend it on PCBs and other stuff instead. Thanks!

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After a little hiccup, I re-ordered some more GM3 gearmotors, except this time, these motors are 12v, instead of the standard motor designed for 6v. This means that they will be more reliable, last longer, and just generally be more awesome. I forgot to get a picture of the new ones, but they look exactly the same, but with a much cooler looking black motor.

The only downside is that the 12v motor costs a bit more, so I had to raise the price from $6.50 to $7.00

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