Error 404: | Reports from the USA

Week Two: June 15, 2015 (late, oops!)

Mikaela Juzswik

No one said it was going to be easy.

I jest, of course. We just finished week two of what is undoubtedly one of the coolest jobs in the world, wherein I get to hang with awesome people and play with incredibly expensive toys in the name of engineering design, and it’s been overall so great that I’m running out of positively-themed words to use to describe my time thus far. That being said, I’ve discovered what everyone says about the engineering design process: it’s a process. As in, you try, test, modify, fail, try, test, modify, fail, try, test, modify, fail. I’m sure there’s an actual series of actions that are supposed to happen, but this cycle pretty much sums up my week. Which, honestly, I think is pretty cool. I’m probably also a masochist.

The Intubation Box fully came together this week, meaning it’s grown from several sheets of acrylic into an actual rectangular prism, with copious help from Joe and Grant. On the whole, Harrison and I (with copious help from Joe and Grant) were able to get the assembly down pretty smoothly. We started encountering problems with the doors, however—the acrylic starts to sag if unsupported for more than about six inches, causing the doors to reach further out than they’re supposed to and collide with each other. Following our trend of throwing stuff at it until it works, Harrison and I filed down the edges a bit and then opted for ordering longer hinges. Unfortunately, the collars we ordered last week were the wrong size, so we ended up ordering more of those as well. Our current state of the box looks something like this:

In short, Error 404: the hinges and collars you requested cannot be found (but will be, soon).

In the name of minimizing our thumb-twiddling antics, Harrison and I began working again on the Incubaby Box. This time, we also began considering some design aspects, such as modifying the box to improve its ventilation. Being well-versed experts in fluid mechanics, we were able to quickly model the airflow in the box and—no, actually, we just started moving things around and thinking about what would probably work out okay. After a couple of setbacks involving the laser cutter smelling like burning death, we ended up creating a working prototype for a new organizational system in the need of a lot more testing.

So, really, for the time being, Error 404: the optimal organizational output that you requested cannot be found (but will be, soon).

With that done temporarily, we were again reassigned to work with the rest of the crew (hurray!) on building and calibrating new 3D printers. Using kits from PrintrBot, a company which seems to have some deep-rooted distaste for the letter ‘e’ (and, in rflction of this distast for th lttr ‘’, I brifly dcidd to withhold from th us of th lttr ‘’ bfor ralizing th omission of th most common lttr in th nglish languag is a trrbl ida. But mor powr to you, PrintrBot!).

The ten of us worked to assemble five different 3D printers. Erm, printrs. I worked with Leah this time, and we made an awesome 3D printr that, for the most part, went entirely according to plan. We did, however, face a slight issue when the assembly instructions called for four vinyl washers that, as it turns out, don’t exist in the kit.

(I got 99 screws but a washer ain’t one).

(Which, of course, leads to Error 404: the vinyl washers you requested cannot be found.)

Luckily, vinyl washers are easily located in the OEDK, and assembly for our printr continued uninhibited, and the finished product actually worked out pretty nicely. We experimented a lot with screw placement and wire organization after assembling the circuitboard, but the most exciting moment by far was when we printd our first object, a three mm test square for calibration purposes. And another. And another. After printing ten different test squares on Thursday, some in better stages of calibration than others, we called it quits and went home for the night, ready to spend Friday doing advanced calibration with more complex and interesting shapes.

Upon arriving the next morning, though, we discovered that something was wrong with our printr. We still don’t know exactly what equipment malfunctioned, but our z-axis sensor appeared to be faulty, preventing the printr head from stopping before hitting the printr bed. We were forced to emergency abort the print job before the printr arm ground itself into the bed, after which we tightened the set screws holding the arm in place and prepared to try again. This attempt was immediately thwarted when our printr failed to connect to our computer, for reasons unknown. We attempted to solve this through a variety of options, including uninstalling and reinstalling all software, restarting computers, restarting the printr, trying different computers, trying different printrs, and so forth. Finally, we decided to call PrintrBot’s technical support line, only to find:

Error 404: the technical support phone line that you requested cannot be found.

As it turns out, PrintrBot has no phone-based technical support, using an online email and user-based help forum to solve most of their difficulties. After perusing the forum, we found that a lot of people actually had the same problem as we did, but:

Error 404: the solution to your technical issue that you requested cannot be found.

We also decided to post a question of our own on the forum; as of the time of this blog post, four days later, we’re still solidly at:

Error 404: the answer to your forum post that you requested cannot be found.

In fact, all of our attempts to fix this problem resulted in a failure to connect the printr to the computer, meaning printing and calibration was absolutely impossible. The computer simply could not find the printr. Renaming the USB port?