Month: May 2015

3D Printer Part 3: Y-axis motor and testing

Following from building the Y-axis assembly of my 3D printer, this post covers the fitting of the motor and the circuit boards to test, using the pieces in issues 7 to 10 of the 3D Create and Print magazine.  It’s a good job that, even though this is a “weekly” magazine, the issues arrive in sets of four as otherwise I imagine it could be very frustrating waiting, not able to add to the printer, until issue 10.

I don’t actually see why this stage was any different to the earlier steps – if the pieces had been delivered in a different order then there would have been no need to wait until the 10th issue before starting.  I can only assume that someone may have been tempted to power it all up before it was ready, which is why the motor itself is the last piece from this stage to arrive.  Continue reading 3D Printer Part 3: Y-axis motor and testing

3D Printer Part 2: Y-axis assembly

Today I finally started unwrapping the pieces of my 3D printer.  After the issues with getting the magazines into their binding, I have been putting this off until I had the time and space to work through it properly.  I have 15 pieces to work through and this includes several circuit boards and a plug.  This entry covers the first 6 issues of 3D Create and Print by Eaglemoss Publications where we create the y-axis assembly up to the point of being ready for the motor and power.

Parts 1 and 2 and the tool kit
Issues 1 and 2 and the tool kit

The last set of pieces also came with a handy tool kit with everything I need to build and maintain the printer – another reason that I hadn’t done this earlier – no matter how many screwdrivers or allen keys I’ve bought over the years, I can never find any when I need them.  The one thing the tool kit is missing is a sharp pair of scissors to break open the plastic packaging of the printer pieces, but you can’t have everything! Continue reading 3D Printer Part 2: Y-axis assembly

How Old Robot – Well played

How Old example
Example of How Old Robot doing its thing

So, a few days ago, the internet had a new toy: How Old Robot – a very simple website where you can upload a photograph and it will guess your age and gender.  For many people the guess was about right, but there were some howlers, with very similar images being uploaded and giving age results differing by (several) decades!

The site doesn’t hide the fact that it’s a learning tool based on Microsoft’s facial recognition technology and is built on the Azure platform as an example of how quickly it is to build and deploy sites using Azure.  What started off as a quick demo from the Build conference soon became viral, with people all over the world loading their photos into the app and sharing the results on social media.  This is exactly what Microsoft wanted and they’ve been oh so clever with this and here’s why.

Continue reading How Old Robot – Well played

Proof by Induction

In my last post I talked a little about logic as it applies to generic statements.  Now it’s time to think about more mathematics proofs and different techniques.  As part of MS221 there are two proof types that we need to consider: proof by exhaustion and proof by induction.  This all lays the foundations for building more and more complex mathematical statements so it’s important to get the basics right.

Dominoes
Wikipedia: Domino effect

Firstly, proof by exhaustion.  This simply means that we try every possible valid input and check that the result is true.  A single false result would disprove our proposition.  So let’s consider an example:  Continue reading Proof by Induction