Thomas Sanladerer has been doing stuff with 3D Printing for a long time and can be seen as an expert on the matter.

With his latest guide to build a Prusa Mk2 guide anyone can build a 3D printer as cheap as possible. On his guide he has the build items and where to buy them. He has also added some videos on the builds.

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The build continues and my parts are still in the mail. Ooh well it will happen soon.

If you want to learn robotics there is no better than Arduino. Get a kit and start exploring.

Sure the Mega can power a 3D Printer but with the Mega and UNO you can do so much more.

Playing around with a Sumobot design.

Having a blast at the MakerLabs club meetings.

When one tinkers with Arduino kits or 3D Printer kits it can be a tough process when you don’t have all the tools to make your alterations. I got to a point where my 3D Printer was just not getting past the calibration steps since going at it alone is hard.

I found a solution by attending a #MakerLabs event which is weekly with like-minded individuals all interested in building all kinds of weird things. As a bonus the location is at a workshop where one has access to laser or plasma cutting or CNC equipment. The guys there helped me figure out what was wrong with my printer and got it printing in two session where we fabricated new parts allowing mounting my new extruder.

The whole experience at #MakerLabs and hosted by #MadeInWorkshop was super exciting and one learns so much.

Now that I am past the initial issues of 3D printing is am making all kinds of things.

I had issues with fumes from my printer so I made a hood. Now I am safe and it looks amazing.

Lets see what to make next 🙂

December went past with a blur. Here is why 🙂

With my research requiring lots of processing and my PC not having enough memory or just takes to long I looked into how expensive it will be to build a Supercomputer @ home.
With the top 10 Supercomputers having from 7.235 to 125.436 Peta (1015) FLOPS (FLoating-point Operations Per Second). The Sunway TaihuLight @ National Supercomputer Center, Jiangsu, China costs US$273 million.

This would be something I would get when my boat comes in. For now I would have to look at personal computing clusters. This guide to build a supercomputer at home is a little over simplified but shows its better to get a rack and then mount all the hard drives and boards since server blades are expensive.

This is mostly not relevant but the tower rack is use full to add with normal cases since it takes less space and can have space to add fans for cooling.

This design does look a little un-neat so one can rather keep the rack enclosed in case wide blade mounts.

These mounts is about $96 so taking into consideration the cost of the CPU, GPU the cost will be around $1110 or 15,231.42 ZAR

• $97 – Server Case
• $150 – AMD FX-8350 FX-Series 8-Core Black Edition Processor
• $130 – ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0 AM3+ AMD 990FX AMD Motherboard
• $86 – 16GB DDR3
• $120 – 850W Power Supply
• $50 – 1TB SATA Hard Drive
• $200 – Radeon RX 470 4G GDDR5 PCI-Express Video Card

$833 -> 11,430.43 ZAR

That seems like a very expensive hobby to to play around with cluster parallel computing considering one would need at least 3-4 to have a decent cluster which will cost 45K ZAR.

To the rescue comes Raspberry Pi with the Tiny Titan Project. https://tinytitan.github.io/

“Tiny Titan is a $1,000 classroom supercomputer designed to teach aspiring scientists the basics of parallel computing. Unlike modern desktops and laptops that hide parallelism from the user, Tiny Titan makes parallel concepts explicit.”

The tiny titan in this project is full of Raspberry Pi B+ models but the performance of B+ to the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B t goes from single-core 700MHz ARM v6 to the new Pi 3’s 1.2GHz quad-core ARM v8.

Where I can get a Pi3 for R 642.00 at RS -> http://za.rs-online.com/web/p/processor-microcontroller-development-kits/8968660/ and the cover for only R86.18 (white/black)

The entire system will only cost R 6551.00 (ZAR) and that is way more affordable for a experiment. With Christmas approaching I hope Santa has my list.
With fibre almost in my area fast reliable internet will mean I can host all my servers myself. 2017 is going to be a rocking year!