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  • How-to: DIYDTG

    For those unaware, the little acronym above stands for Do-It-Yourself-Direct-To-Garment printing. In layman’s terms, printing your own shirts and designs. Commercial DTGs can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 which for the hobbyist who only wants a few shirts is ridiculous. So you would think this field of technology would be hacked to no end, but we’ve actually only seen one other fully finished and working DIYDTG. So we took it upon ourselves to build a DIYDTG as cheaply and as successfully as possible.

    We would like to take this moment to thank [makemygraphix] for his original designs, as ours is heavily based off his. And Tshirt Forums, for their valuable input.

    For your own DIYDTG you’ll need a few parts, (we honestly just used what we had lying around)
    -3/4 inch particle board/plywood/MDF
    -1/2 inch particle board/plywood/MDF
    -1/4 inch plywood
    -1 and 1/2inch wood screws
    -24inch ball bearing drawer track
    -scrap aluminum (1/16″ thick)
    -Epson printer (more on this below)

    The printer you choose is the most absolutely crucial part of this hack. We took apart an HP DeskJet 3845, Canon iP1500, Brother MFC420CN, Epson Stylus Photo 820 and an Epson Stylus c40. Why so many? We literally purchased every printer the local thrift store had (at $6 a printer, it’s not that bad actually), that way the reader wouldn’t have to. Our findings were thus; the HP and the Canon both had rotary encoders on the paper feed shaft and ended up being a total peta to try to align and get working, both not recommended. The Brother was an all-in-one that would not function unless every part was connected, making it too large and bulky for our needs. Both Epsons used stepper motors, were very easy to take apart, and only had one easy to manage paper sensor. Go with Epson! (We ended up using the C40 because it had the 3 ink CYM system instead of the 5 CYMLCLM system the 820 did).

    As for the ink you will be using in your printer, we found DTGinks.com to be a good resource.

    For software for your Epson, we found the default drivers worked well enough. There is RIP software out there, but we couldn’t find any that supported the c40. We will recommend the SSC Utility program though. Allowing you to quickly and easily lie to the printer about how much, what kind, and replaced ink cartridges (for Epson only).

    For tools we recommend the following
    -measuring tape
    -square
    -pen/chalk line
    -table saw
    -circular saw
    -jigsaw
    -Dremel
    -drill press/drill (and an assortment of bits)
    -sand paper/file

    We started off by taking apart the printers. Every printer is different, so we can’t give you details but its relatively simple process. By the end you’ll only need the head and its carriage, the paper feed motor and its shaft, and the power supply.

    You’ll need to cut the wood as follows, (it should be noted, these are slightly different then what we actually used)
    For the 3/4 inch,
    1 x 26inch by 11 and 1/2 inches.
    1 x 26inch by 10 inches.

    For the 1/2 inch,
    2 x 26inch by 5inch,
    2 x 26 inch by 1 and 3/4 inches.

    First clamp the two 26″x5″ boards together. Now 6″ from the end and 2″ and 3/8″ from the bottom drill a 5/8″ hole through both boards at the same time. This is where your paper feed shaft will go.

    Here is a tricky part, the metal track. We mounted the outer part 3/4″ from the top on one of the 26″x5″(doesn’t matter which you choose) pieces and made the stop/back/end of the track flush with the end of the board (this isn’t very high priority) . And the inner part of the track goes 1″ and 1/8″ from the top on one of the 26″x1 and 3/4″ pieces.

    Normally we do recommend that you use metal “L” brackets to attach corners of wood, but as long as you pre-drill a hole slightly smaller than your screws, you’ll be fine (we also counter sunk most of our screws, but that’s optional). Attach the two 26″x1 and 3/4″ to the  26″x10″. Do the same with the two 26″x5″ and the 26″x11 and 1/2″ pieces.

    All that was a little tricky, so here is a picture to help out. For those wondering, the top tray rolls “towards” you in this image.

    And a shot without the top tray, as you can see our shaft wasn’t long enough, so a simple 2″x3″ piece was put in place. Make sure the shaft spins freely and without binding, with and without the top tray in.

    The next interesting part is mounting the drive motor. It needs to be snug against the gear of the shaft, yet not too tight to make it grind against the wood. It also needs to have a way of preventing the shaft from “popping out”. We solved both problems relatively simply.

    Take your assembly, remove the top shelf, and prop it on its side. Position your motor where it will be mounted on top/inside the 26″x5″ piece. Drop in the shaft, get everything aligned and draw a circle around the motors base. Using a straight edge and tangent lines you can approximate the center of your circle.

    Use a large hole saw cut it out (it doesn’t have to be perfect). Sand/file it so the motor easily fits in without bending any pins. We pop riveted a 1″x3″ piece of aluminum to the motor to make mounting a little easier.

    Drop in your shaft and make sure everything lines up. Finally, to prevent the shaft from slipping in, we used the washers and C clamp from the extra printer parts (you didn’t throw away, right?) on the other 26″x5″ piece. And to avoid the shaft from slipping out we took a 1″x10″ piece of aluminum, bent it in a “_n_” shape, drilled a hole for the shaft, and used a cut up spring from the extra printer parts. A picture is worth 1000 words,

    Bare with me, we’re almost done!

    You’ll need to modify the printer carriage now, simply cut off the slot that paper used to come through,

    You’ll want to mount it on-top of the two 26″x5″ pieces about 6″ back. We were lucky and found two of the previous mounting screw holes on the carriage fit perfectly, however other printers you might need to bend or make your own. (This picture taken before we made our nifty “_n_” bracket).

    Now we made our platen, this is the thing your shirt goes on. It’s really up to you how its made, and we’re not even totally happy with our design, so play around and find what works best. Ours is 24″x9 and 1/2″ piece of 1/4″ plywood mounted to the top of two 20″x2 and 7/8″ pieces of 1/2″ plywood. The height measurement completely depends on the height of your head. For those wondering, we never got an answer for how far the shirt should actually be from the head, but we’ve found about 1/8″ works well enough. (The “legs” you see on our platen were later taken off.)

    Mount your power supply and solder it, alongside your motor, to the driver board.

    Now there is one part we’ve neglected to mention until now. And that is the paper feed sensor (remember that one sensor we mentioned earlier?). Well it’s because we spent 3 days trying to get that sucker to work with our platen. We tried everything, different timings and positions of the platen, even programming an MCU to try to trick the printer into thinking the platen was paper. In the end, we just broke it off.

    By accident.

    And it worked (no really!) It takes a little timing on our part but by hand to trigger the sensor, but we’ve never had a misprint like we did with the platen. (Pictured below, one of our “tape” attempts at triggering the paper feed sensor, this one worked about 1 out of 50 times).

    Powered on,

    Send a print job, hand trigger the paper feed sensor, and we have a print!

    Here is just a short video if it in action, most notably you can see us hand triggering the paper feed sensor. The orange was a test print, as you can see if your platen isn’t 100% flat and level relative to the head, you’ll get some smudging and general print errors. The white shirt was a perfect (well, test) print that we did a little earlier.

    (Yes, we know the video was blocked earlier. We have re-uploaded it, thank you for your patience; it should work now.)

    *Disclaimer, using tools without proper ear and eye protection can result in a visit to the hospital. And HaD is in no way responsible for any damages. Be smart, be safe.*

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  • Murder the Internet

    HOME_header0110_01.jpg

    The New Yorker has a blog post up about how Jonathan Lethem paid someone to completely remove the internet from his laptop so that he could write without distraction.

    You should imagine my computer set-up guy’s consternation when I insisted he drag the Internet function out of the thing entirely. 'I can just hide it from you,' he said. 'No,' I told him, 'I don’t want to know it’s in there somewhere.'"

    If you're looking for a way to write fiction without distraction and you don't want to lobotomize your laptop, I suggest you take a look at an Alphasmart NEO. It's a simple, under-$200 battery-powered word processing device that's tough as a Tonka truck. It auto-saves, and it holds about 200 pages. The one problem with it is that the screen only displays about eight lines of text at a time, which makes editing nearly impossible: When you're ready to edit, you have to hook it up to your computer via USB, dump the whole thing into a text document, and work on it the, um, old-fashioned way, which means you are yet again at the mercy of the internet. Still: My NEO is one of the few tech devices that has actually made my life easier. You should consider it before you Lethemize your computer.

    [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

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  • The unreasonable effectiveness of self-experimentation
    Psychology professor and self-experimenter Seth Roberts (who seeks to discover his Optimal Daily Experience) has written a paper on why his self-experiments are so effective.

    Here's an abstract:

    Over 12 years, my self-experimentation found new and useful ways to improve sleep, mood, health, and weight. Why did it work so well? First, my position was unusual. I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, the freedom of an outsider, and the motivation of a person with the problem. I didn't need to publish regularly. I didn't want to display status via my research. Second, I used a powerful tool. Self-experimentation about the brain can test ideas much more easily (by a factor of about 500,000) than conventional research about other parts of the body. When you gather data, you sample from a power-law-like distribution of progress. Most data helps a little; a tiny fraction of data helps a lot. My subject-matter knowledge and methodological skills (e.g., in data analysis) improved the distribution from which I sampled (i.e., increased the average amount of progress per sample). Self-experimentation allowed me to sample from it much more often than conventional research. Another reason my self-experimentation was unusually effective is that, unlike professional science, it resembled the exploration of our ancestors, including foragers, hobbyists, and artisans.

    Here's a PDF of Roberts' paper, which was published in Medical Hypotheses.

    The Quantified Self: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Self-Experimentation


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  • Scientists Create First Self-Replicating Synthetic Life

    Figure 1

    Man-made DNA has booted up a cell for the first time.

    In a feat that is the culmination of two and a half years of tests and adjustments, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute inserted artificial genetic material — chemically printed, synthesized and assembled — into cells that were then able to grow naturally.

    “We all had a very good feeling that it was going to work this time,” said Venter Institute synthetic biologist Daniel Gibson, co-author of the study published May 20 in Science. “But we were cautiously optimistic because we had so many letdowns following the previous experiments.”

    On a Friday in March, scientists inserted over 1 million base pairs of synthetic DNA into Mycoplasma capricolum cells before leaving for the weekend. When they returned on Monday, their cells had bloomed into colonies.

    “When we look at life forms, we see fixed entities,” said J. Craig Venter, president of the Institute, in a recent podcast. “But this shows in fact how dynamic they are. They change from second to second. And that life is basically the result of an information process. Our genetic code is our software.”

    Coaxing the software to power a cell proved harder than expected.

    Figure 5 [Converted]After the Venter Institute announced in early 2008 that it had assembled a synthetic Mycoplasma genitalium genome, the assumption was that it would be running cells in no time. But this particular cell type, despite its minimal size, was not an ideal research partner. One problem was speed.

    “We had to deal with the fact that M. genitalium had an extremely slow growth rate,” Gibson said. “For every experiment that was done, it took more than a month to get results.”

    Moreover, transplanting the code into recipient cells was failing. So researchers cut their losses and called in a substitute, opting for the larger, speedier and less finicky Mycoplasma mycoides. The choice was a good one.

    “Over the last five years the field has seen a 100-fold increase in the length of genetic material wholly constructed from raw chemicals,” said synthetic biologist Drew Endy of Stanford University. “This is over six doublings in the max length of a genome that can be constructed.”

    Plunging costs of synthesis allowed a leap past the 1 million base-pair mark, from code to assembly. “Imagine doubling the diameter of a silicon wafer that can be manufactured that much, going from 1 cm to 1 meter [fabrications] in just five years,” Endy said. “That would have been an incredible achievement.”

    “They rebuilt a natural sequence and they put in some poetry,” said University of California at San Francisco synthetic biologist Chris Voigt. “They recreated some quotes in the genome sequence as watermarks.”

    It’s an impressive trick, no doubt, but replicating a natural genome with a little panache is also the limit of our present design capabilities.

    Researchers, for instance, figure yeast can handle the assembly of 2 million base pairs, but they’re not sure about more. And an energy-producing cyanobacteria that sequesters carbon, Gibson says, is still several years off.

    The ultimate goal, of course, is a brand-new genome from the ground up. Now, Voigt said, “what do you do with all that design capacity?”

    Images: 1) Schematic demonstrating the assembly of a synthetic M. mycoides genome in yeast./Science/AAAS. 2) Images of the phenotype of the JCVI-syn1.0 and WT strains./Science/AAAS.

    See Also:

    Follow us on Twitter @rachelswaby and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.


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  • N900 Gets Wine, Windows Users are Awed!

    Nokia-N900-Wine-WindowsSoon it may start raining Windows applications on the N900! Yeah, the dearth of good apps/games on the platform has convinced a certain Damion Yates to get the Wine running on his N900. Windows applications and Wine! What’s the connection? Well, for the uninitiated, Wine is a program which brings Windows libraries to Linux and is widely a part of many a Linux distros doing the rounds on the desktop platform. Coming the mobile platform, where our Maemo and N900 stretch their wings, unfortunately Wine is not compatible wit ARM processors, which is at the core of our N900 hardware. Thanks to Damion though, who figured out a way around this limitation by using QEMU emulator. The project is still in its stages of infacy and the full tutorial is not out yet. Till then, lust on this video showing Notepad running on Wine, via a stastically compiled ARM QEMU binary, which you can catch after the break.

    As can be seen in the above videos, Damion has managed to get the physical keyboard as well as the mouse pointer working on this project. While we wish Damion to get the nitty-gritty of the project figured out, enterprising hackers can get their hands dirty and get their doubts clarified by Damion himself at this MaemoTalk discussion.

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