My interest was triggered because I’m building a RepRap and they have one finished and building a new one. People can use the Timelab infrastructure to print their own 3D models or use the other gear they have. Not only can you use it, they can teach you how to build those things yourself.

To do that, they organise a range of workshops from open labdays to an introductory course to Arduino programming. That is exactly what I was looking for. If you are interested in taking this course on April 20, check out the details here! It is free but places are limited so hurry.

I really wish the guys at Timelab the best of luck, this is a great project!
You can find all the info you need on http://www.timelab.org.

Update: I just received a mail from Timelab to let me know they are organizing a second Arduino workshop on April 27 due to the success. – More details on http://www.timelab.org/Arduino

First, lets see what a document-oriented database is.
You know about scheme-oriented databases like MySQL, right? Before you start you’re project, you start thinking what data you want to save. Once you know that, you have to start breaking that up in databases, tables, strongly typed fields and hope you don’t have to leave that path too often during the project…

With document-oriented databases this is not the case. You just create a database and start developing. Every time you need to save some data, you just create a document, add the fields you need (for a shopping card you’d probably save a user_id, date, price, all the items, …) and save it to the database.

From Wikipedia:

As opposed to relational databases, document-based databases do not store data in tables with uniform sized fields for each record. Instead, each record is stored as a document that has certain characteristics. Any number of fields of any length can be added to a document. Fields can also contain multiple pieces of data.

Lets get physical!
I assume you are running on osx 10.6 or higher and have some notion of php

Got 10 minutes?
I’ve chosen for MongoDb after some (quick) looking at benchmarks and comparison charts and it seems Mongo DB is slightly faster at execution. But there are others out there;

• Apache Jackrabbit (Apache License)
• Apache CouchDB (Beta software), (Apache License)
• FleetDB (MIT License)
• Redis (BSD License)
• Riak (Apache License)
• StrokeDB (Alpha software, MIT License)

So, lets install MongoDB. I’ve chosen for the painless route and installed it using Homebrew. (If you don’t have Homebrew installed, check out the github page)

brew install mongodb

Next, we need to have the mongodb php extension. You could compile the .so file youreself, but again, but again, I chose for the easy solution. Grab the right .so file and place it in your php extension dir. Then add this line to your php.ini file;

extension=mongo.so

Restart apache and you’re ready to go!

Create a folder where you want your databases to reside and fire up mongodb;

mkdir -p ~/data/mongodb
mongod --dbpath ~/data/mongodb/

Go ahead and create a plain php file to play with.

First, we need to establish a connection with our MongoDB server;

$conn = new Mongo();

This will connect to the server on your localhost running on port 27017. You can add a parameter to specify the server location (eg: new Mongo(“mymongoserver:65432″);).

Then select a database like this;

$db = $conn->dbname;

and select a collection;

$albums = $db->albums;

That’s it! Now you can start manipulation the database.

Let’s create a document;

$album = array(
   "title" => "The Fame Monster",
   "artist" => "Lady Gaga"
);

Now we need to add some tracks. In scheme-oriented database system you would create another table with tracks, and link them to the album with an album_id. Not so document-oriented database systems;

$album["tracks"] = array(
    1 => "Just Dance",
    2 => "LoveGame"
);

Done! The tracks are saved in the album document itself, not separate documents.
Now we can insert it into the database;

$albums->insert($album);

You can read out the documents with the find function;

foreach($albums->find() as $album) {
    foreach($album as $k => $v) {
        echo $k . ": " . $v . "<br />";
    }
    echo "<br />";
}

And there we have a list of all ablums on the screen.

I just wanted to show you how easy it was, if you want to find out more, here are some links;

• http://www.mongodb.org
• http://php.net/manual/en/mongo.tutorial.php

If you start playing with is, please do let me know what your think of it.

Because we’re not used to working with electronics, the BOM (Bill of Materials) of the RepRap (as found on the RepRap wiki) looks pretty frightening at first. After a second, third and fourth look things became a bit clearer.

We looked up every part in different online shops that are best for us (Belgium / Europe) and have assembled ready-made ordering lists for most parts. We chose to buy some parts pre-assembled, while the original BOM mentions them separately (to make our life a bit easier).

The original BOM can be found on the RepRap Wiki here. This is our BOM in PDF format.

Some remarks:

• Bars: All necessary bars for X/Y/Z axises are 1 item, since they’re 3 times the same
• Belts: X and Y belt are 1 belt of 10mm width, split into 2 belts of 5mm width.
• m5x20-mudguard-washer: If you can find an M4 instead of M5 that’s better, but the shop we bought it in didn’t provide it.
• extruder: We found someone on the forum who sold the barel and nozzle combined. Makerbot sells these parts separately.
• electronics: We decided to buy Fully Assembled kits, because we’re no soldering heroes. The only thing not available fully assembled at Makerbot was the endstop, so we bought an extra kit to have a backup when we screwed up (They’re not expensive)

Some other things you’ll need:

• Thin sheet: This is metal that can be gotten from anything (for example soda cans)
• Thick sheet: Sturdy plates meant as printing base. We’ll use MDF for this (Get this at your local do-it-yourself store)
• Soldering set
• Magnifying glass (to put together PCBs)
• Electronic wiring
• Jumpers
• Soldering tin

At the moment we have ordered everything int he BOM except for the Makerbot items (Some items were out of stock, they should be up again in a few days / weeks). We’re also still looking for someone to print the reprap-printable parts for us, we’re looking on IRC / Forums for those.

Time and money spent on the project so far:
Time: About 8 hours trying to make a complete list of everything we need and grasp the big picture of the RepRap
Money: € 401.44 in parts and € 35.00 in food

We’ll keep you posted on our progress!
Wish us luck.

We are keeping all posts on this topic in this post.

RepRap is an open source replicating rapid prototyper, available under the GPL license. You can assemble it with (most) parts available in your local hardware shop. More then fifty percent of a new RepRap can be printed out by other RepRap’s.

We decided to take on this challenge. Without any knowledge on electronics we’ll figure out how to build one ourselves and will document this process step by step as we go along. We hope others can benefit from this and hope to find a helping hand when we screw up.

The model we are going to build is the Mendel. This is already the second generation that the geniuses at RepRap created.

Underneath, you’ll find a list of posts, which will expand in the future. Each one referring to a night of fun we had while figuring this thing out and building it.

• Step 0: BOM

Bernard, Marlies, Joren and myself formed a team and created everybody.lovesbeer.com. A site to find Belgian beers you’ll probably like based on the profile you assemble by liking & disliking beers.

Because the contest is growing each year, this year not every entry is available in the voting. A team of judges put together a shortlist of 20 entries (out of – give or take – 200). Since our beer-application lacks some functionality and isn’t completely finished, we didn’t make it to the shortlist. But there is no timing weeping over that because…

Our friends who put together tablesurfing are in the shortlist. Gorillaminds (the name of the team) is Jan (Openminds), Jeroen, Jelly (Gorilla webdesign) & Benny (Gorilla webdesign). Because they are the only Belgian team to make it to the shortlist, it’s their job to defend hour honor. But you can help!
We need everybody to vote, now! Voting is only open for 2 days…
How to vote?

1. Point your browser to http://r09.railsrumble.com/entries
2. Click “I want to vote”
3. Log in or create an account (really painless)
4. Check your account page and open the tablesurfing entry
5. Give stars accordingly to what you think they deserve
6. You’re done, but now that you’re there you can vote for the other entries also if you like.

The whole team will be great-full and I’ll keep you posted on the results later on!

dConstruct is the affordable one day conference for people designing and building the latest generation of social web applications.

Steven Johnson kicked it off with a talk on the long history of the geoweb and maybe even the first one. Back in the 18th century, when Cholera was ruling the streets in London, the need emerged to map all the death in order to find a potential source of the decease.
This leaded to the geoweb and how it is influencing the social web. The Urban web is what is happening.

Next up stage whas Aleks Krotoski with one of the best sessions of the day for me: Playing the web.
She talked about how the game- and web industry can work together more often to make the web a better place in terms of the experience.

In the afternoon Tantek Çelik gave a promo talk on microformats with his talk: Social network portability.
This encouraged me to pick this ‘technology’ up and start to implement it. I recommend his book: Microformats: Empowering your markup for web 2.0.

As a absolute highlight of the day, Jeremy Keith gave the closing session: The system of the world. I really can’t spoil it for you guys because a description would not even begin to describe his session. I will give you a link as soon as the podcast for this one is online!
You can find his slides and a full write-out of his talk on his site!

I really enjoyed this inspiring day and make sure to register for the next editions!

For most sessions, podcasts are available via the dConstruct site!

Let me know what you think about it!

Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo (33 yrs) started hitch-hiking in Milan heading for Jeruzalem. She wanted to promote world peace with this project and did it dressed as a bride.

I just love how people can do extraordinary stuff for the wellbeing of others.
Funny no-one (including me) in my environment ever heard about it before april 11.

April 11 is the date she was found in bushes in the city of Gezbe, northwest Turkey, murdered and naked.

A dangerous gangster has just escaped from prison in The target. He is terrorising the city because a client will give him money for every crime he commits.

Three policemen are sent to catch the man before he has managed to collect € 1,000,000 and he leaves the city.

I teamed up with Claudia, Ellen & Roel as a policeman and started chaising the bad guys in Kortrijk and had good fun.

Be sure to take your chance when you got the opportunity to play it!