Monday, March 25, 2013

Creo-Elements tutorial -Making gears

So I thought it might be time for another kind of lets teach something blog post.


Making gears with Creo Elements

So I'm going to design an actual part (that I will be using in the creation of my own variant of 3d printer, (I have an idea in my head for this at the moment).

The pulley that I'm going to print now will need to accept T2.5 belt, (5mm thick) and will need to fit over a standard skate bearing (608Z)

So lets have a look at what that actually means.
First we'll have a look at the skate bearing.

These have an outer diameter of 22mm

This means that my pulley wheel must have a hole in it that is 11mm radius.

Next we look at the specification of t2.5 belt.

Basically, any point in the belt to the same point on it's adjacent tooth is 2.5mm.
Each peak is 1mm, each trough is 1mm, there is a slope to the teeth that accounts for the remaining 0.5mm, (a 0.25mm slope)

However, on the pulley I won't put the slope in, I'll leave a sharp angle to allow the belt to bend.

To we're looking at a 1mm crown, and a 1.5mm grove on the t2.5 pulley.
Now we need to figure out the outside diameter of the pulley.

Start by deciding at least how big it must be.

The hole in the middle is 11mm.
We want at least 1mm over the width of this bearing. so we say that the pulley must have a radius of at least a few mm more than this.

Now lets work out the circumference.

14*2 = 32 * pi =88.116
so the outside circumference would be 88.116mm.

I'll round that up to 90mm circumference.
that give me

90/2.5 teeth = 36
each tooth has an angle of 360/36 = 10 degrees

If my circumference is 90, then my radius must be
90/pi / 2 = 14.29mm

I'm going to create a 14.3mm Radius T2.5 pulley wheel, with an 11mm hole in the centre.

So start by drawing a single line that's 14.3mm long on zero degrees.
then a second line 14.3mm long on ten degrees.

Now draw a line 1mm coming into the part, toward the other line.
Then a line that goes towards the centre of the part at a perpendicular angle, that's 0.7mm long (the height of a T2.5 tooth.

finally draw a line directly to the opposite line.

This won't be exactly 1.5mm in length as it's shortened by being closer to the centre of the pulley

now delete the line on zero and redraw to the correct size.

Now you have one thirty sixth of your pulley wheel.

Use the pull tool to make the gear segment 5.5mm tall, (the intended belt width is 5mm, so this adds some space for fit.

You now have a slice of gear.

Next you need to select the structure tab,
pull down the copy part options and select radial copy.

You'll need to copy, 36 times, (there are 36 teeth)
with the axis set at the centre of the pulley
and the angle of each segment is 10 degrees

Press ok and a new gear is produced.

Now delete the work plane.
Now select the circle tool and click on the gear to create a new work plane,

Drag the circle from the centre of the gear to a 15mm radius.

Use the pull tool to make the top of the gear 0.75mm high

repeat on the other side.

Now use the chamfer tool set to 0.5mm to add a slight grove to the pulley wheel edges, this will held reseat the belt if the alignment is slightly out.

now use the circle tool to create a circle with an 11mm radius, and use the pull tool to pull to a depth of -7mm to remove the centre of the pulley wheel.

Now we have a pulley wheel.
It fits over a standard skate bearing.
It has 36 teeth at a T2.5 pitch.

(this will be an idler pulley in the drive system)

This can of course be used to create spur gears as well as pulley wheels, sprockets for use with chain drives, all you need to do is work out the appropriate angle and make your tooth profile fit the job then replicate it.

You can also use this method for making other repeating shapes, for example, spoked wheels, clutch plates, fan assemblies. etc

Monday, March 18, 2013

Breakout board for the Raspberry Pi






After removing the solder I've added 8 new pins to P5



I started with a 44pin IDE cable.

This wastes 2 pins in the connector, but don't worry.


This is halfway through,










Now solder in the header pins to the perf board.




Finally the raspberry pi can be connected to my breadboard.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Setting up your Pi

So you've got a raspberry pi, and it's all on line and everything.

The next thing to do is customise the board a little more.

The first think that you might decide is I don't want to call my machine Raspberry Pi, perhaps you have two, and they can't both be called RaspberryPi.

Well you'll need to change the host name then...

first to find out your host name type:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ hostname

now to edit this you need to edit the host name file, so type
sudo nano /etc/hostname

Delete RaspberryPi and enter the host name you wish to use and then save the file.

next you'll need to edit the hosts file:

type sudo nano /etc/hosts
find anywhere that says Raspberry pi in this file and replace it with the host name of your choice.

Now reboot your device for the changes to take effect.

DHCP vs. Static
Next you'll find that it's all very well to have your Raspberry pi having an IP address just provided by your router. and you've assigned your NAT rule to point to that address, but ,what if the router breaks, or the router restarts, or your Raspberry Pi is off for a while and another machine gets given that IP address?

What you really want to do is assign a static IP address.

To do this you need to enter your network configuration details into a configuration file.

for this example I'm going to suggest that the whole network range is - (The subnet for this range is /24)
and that the router has the address
and that it serves DHCP addresses from -

So first we need to edit the file that controls the network configuration for the network interface.

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

by default this file will appear like this:

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface default inet dhcp

you need to tell the machine to be statically assigned not DHCP, so change the line

iface default inet dhcp to iface default inet static

Then you need to say what address to use
so add the line

(this address is outside of the DHCP range served by the router, so there should never be an IP address conflict)

then you need to say what the subnet is by adding the line


and finally you need to put the gateway address, (which is your routers address


then save and exit this file. then restart your machine

(remember to restart use sudo reboot)

If you've changed the IP address of your Raspberry pi, don't forget to update your NAT rule on your router so that you can have external access!

Monday, March 04, 2013

Adding software to the pi.

Last time I looked at adding the no-ip client to the Raspberry pi through downloading source files and compiling software with the make command.

There are a few other ways of getting software onto your device, clearly you can program something yourself, and compile it.

Or you could use the Raspberry pi app store.

Or you could use a package manager called apt-get

The Rasbian distribution of Linux is built on top of a different Linux distribution called Debian.
Debian is cool not only because the distributions, (woody, buzz wheezy etc) are named after toy story characters, but because it's incredibly stable, all software that is released to the apt-get "store" is thoroughly tested.

This means that if you use apt-get to install anything you can practically guarantee that it will work.

This doesn't mean that you can guarantee it will be exploit free however, that guaranteed work comes at a price. that price is a longer delay (whilst testing is happening) until software reaches you.

In the future I plan to build software on my Raspberry pi. so lets make sure that I have gcc installed.

to install gcc I type
sudo apt-get install gcc

and I get the following:
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get install gcc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap php5-cli ssl-cert
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
Suggested packages:
  cpp-doc gcc-multilib autoconf automake1.9 libtool flex bison gcc-doc
The following packages will be upgraded:
  cpp gcc
2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 186 not upgraded.
Need to get 21.6 kB of archives.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Obviously I already have gcc installed, but there is an upgrade available.
So I chose to install it by pressing Y

I can choose to install things by using apt-get followed the the word install then the name of the package
I can remove by typing apt-get remove

if you want to remove all traces you can use
sudo apt-get --purge remove

or, (say you've installed apache2 there are a few configuration tools that seem to want to hang around) you can type

sudo apt-get remove apache2*
That removes everything with apache2 in the name

Updating the list of packages
when you've got a lot of software installed on windows knowing if it's all up to date can be a bit of a nightmare, I suppose for the operating system there is windows update.
but what about the copy of apache running, how do I know if my, Oracle server is up to date

On the rasbian OS it's easy, you just type

 sudo apt-get update
and it tell you

If you want to have just one thing upgraded then type
sudo apt-get upgrade gcc

To upgrade everything don't specify a package, just type
sudo apt-get upgrade

and wait whilst the package manager upgrades all the software on your system.

Another way that you can install software is to use dpkg

Packages in the Debian based operating system are all zipped neatly together in .deb files.
If you have downloaded a .deb file you can install it with the following command

sudo dpkg -i /my/path/to/my/file.deb

You can remove software with the same command, but using -r instead of -i

sudo dpkg -r /my/path/to/my/file.deb

What's installed
You may be wondering, what's installed, I mean how do I know to remove something if I don't even know that I have it.

For that we'll use the dpkg utility again.

dpkg -l

This lists loads of installed packages, and they all wizz past too fast to read.
Try typing this instead

dpkg -l | more

Then hit enter to move down 1 line at a time, or space as a page down. (hit q to exit half way through)

one problem that I have found whilst running apt get is that the following errors have been thrown up

    pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get update
    Err wheezy InRelease
    Err wheezy InRelease
    Err wheezy Release.gpg
      Temporary failure resolving ''
    Err wheezy Release.gpg
      Temporary failure resolving ''
    Reading package lists... Done        
    W: Failed to fetch

    W: Failed to fetch

    W: Failed to fetch  Temporary failure resolving ''

    W: Failed to fetch  Temporary failure resolving ''


This means that the apt-get utility can't find the package sources,

either the package source is offline, (pretty unlikely)
or you can't find them for another reason.

I found that I couldn't resolve them because the DNS resolution of my home router was a little flakey,

To combat this you need to add a more robust DNS server to your list of DNS servers to try.

so type
sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

the add the lines

Then exit and save.
(those belong to google, and they have opened them up for public access) -of course you could use your ISPs name servers IP addresses in place of, (or as well as) those google owner server addresses above.

Of course it might be that the server hosting the packages is offline.

 the place where apt-get looks for packages is defined in a text file called sources.list, you can look at this file

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb wheezy main contrib non-free rpi

you can browse to to find out if it's still online using a regular internet browser, (such as internet explorer, or firefox.

Obviously if you can't get to this repository at all, then there is a good chance that your apt-get is failing because the place it's looking for updates just doesn't exist any more.
in which case you should edit the /etc/apt/source.list file to replace the broken repository with one that does work.