Wow! Awesome robotic arm!  Please share your background with 3d printing and design software. What advice would you give a Newby to 3d printing and software?  Where did you print the arm?  How did you make the joints in 3d design software? Great work.  

- Susanne C

Hey Susanne -- thanks! I've been messing around with 3D printing for a few years, and have tried out a few design programs (and other related software). My current favourite is Autodesk Fusion 360. It's free for those that make less than $100k USD per year ("hobbyists and students"), and could be used professionally. It also has a 6-axis CAM package, some simulation capabilities, and a few more tricks. For those new to 3D printing, I'd say jump right into Fusion 360 tutorials, and, if you have your own printer, spend $149 USD on Simplify3D for the best overall experience with slicers, and check out their 3D printing tips and tutorials here: https://www.simplify3d.com/support/.

I will see you there Jon - looking forward to this conference for the 3rd time, and absolutely great for eLearning.

Nathaniel

I love this conference, but will be in New York, attending another conference. 

I look forward to hearing all about it.

Thanks Jon, I will be attending the conference and present a paper. Oscar

It's comes down to how much money they want to make vs how needed their product is. Some projects operate based on donations, while others start offering additional services or training. I've never used Reddit much, it just never appealed to me. On the other hand I will continue supporting the GPG and Enigmail project, for example. There are plenty of open source projects that continue to thrive 20 years later. In some ways open source is just like art.

Indeed - a nice metaphor. Open source needs patrons! All software is pretty much like art (or at least craft) and, like art, there are some pretty draconian laws in place about what you are allowed to do with it. 

Though I do like Reddit and use it for serendipitous discovery quite a bit, I don't resent Reddit's decision. It probably makes good business sense and, anyway, there aren't that many people that actually want to run a clone of a pretty rough-and-ready system (Reddit's value is its communities, not its software), especially when there are vastly superior open source tools performing a similar job like Discourse available. It's just a bit sad that something vibrant has been taken out of the system and that the world has become a bit more closed as a result. The Reddit algorithms are (currently) not particularly great but it is really important to know what they do and how they do it, and useful for those seeking to build better variants. That information may be hidden in future, and that's not a good thing in what is, by some measures, the most popular open discussion site on the Internet. 

I made a few measurements here:

• https://landing.athabascau.ca/blog/view/2699531/dc-motor-locked-rotor-torque-measurements
• https://landing.athabascau.ca/blog/view/2701982/dc-motor-speed-measurements

Can you clarify something for me? The second last paragraph about concurrency doesnt make sense to me because I thought Javascript was single-threaded based on what I've read about it.

Can you clarify something for me? The second last paragraph about concurrency doesnt make sense to me because I thought Javascript was single-threaded based on what I've read about it.

JavaScript is indeed single-threaded. When it talks about concurrency it is (I think - haven't checked the article again but this is normally the case) most likely referring to aynchronous execution, where a function can be busy doing something while other code is executing, for example when using a setTimeout function. This is really just task switching rather than using multiple threads, but it performs much the same role. Technically, it is also true that, when you have two or more tabs open, the JS engine will usually run the code in multiple threads, but there can be no communication between them so there's not much use to be made of it. Finally, JS can do a kind of almost-multithreading using Worker functions, that copy a script into a separate thread that can be used to exchange messages with the main thread without blocking its execution. If you use such things, it would be great evidence of advanced JavaScript skills!

Jon