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Am I done? I can’t believe it. Working though the night into the wee hours of the morning, I can now say that Cupcake is now complete!
Well, almost… I have no endstop triggers at the moment, but from what I’ve been reading, they are not essential.
Initial tests seem promising. The extruder works, the build platform works, and the Z-stage works in reverse. Fixing the Z-stage was thankfully easy, just a simple checkbox in the machine preferences and voilà, it’s fixed!
If you have read my last post on the Cupcake CNC, you would have heard of my firmware woes.
Basically, what has happened was that I fried the boards (both the motherboard and extruder controller) during hotplate reflow soldering. It seems that the AUD$10 hotplate was simply too crap and the temperature spiked high enough to damage something (I never got round to desoldering the microcontrollers and testing each one).
25 April 2010
Due to being dicked around by my .es domain registrar, and a few shady registrars (one of which is the parent company of my original registrar) trying to convince me to transfer my domain, I’ve decided to let go of the .es domain and move over to my .com domain. And I don’t see much of a benefit to having that domain besides the slight cool factor. Everything will be business as usual.
I’m in HKIA again, waiting for my connecting flight to Cebu (which is about 6 hours from now).
I’m never good at goodbyes. Especially when I’m the one leaving.
This has been an exceptional month, despite the obstacles I faced during my early days here. I’m not going to say that it has been a bed or roses. There were ups and downs, but thankfully there were many more ups then there were downs.
There was initially an epic night planned for my going away. It started out as a few people going to a KTV, which then suddenly became my going away party, to which I didn’t have any say in.
Yesterday, we set off to go bungee jumping, but it seems that out penchant for unexpected adventures has led us astray yet again! And this time we have more victims.
First, none of us knew of the plans at all. We pretty set off at half past 10 in the morning. Everything was pretty much going according to plan. We were going to Qinglong Gorge, doing our jumps and coming back by the end of the day.
My fourth week has passed, the adventure is almost over. I now have only a few days left at the school.
This week has brought forth yet more new arrivals. One of which was a fellow contact staffer! It was great having someone to talk and share tricks with.
I have learnt so much, and gotten much stronger during this time. The training wasn’t as hard as I expected, but it’s still taxing.
Last night we decided to check out Beijing Jugglers. A social practice session, not much unlike Juggle Jam back home. Oh how I miss Juggle Jam.
The information that I got was that Beijing Jugglers happens on Wednesday evening at Sanlitun, the “foreign quarters” of Beijing. What I didn’t get was that if the organisers don’t know if anyone is coming, the gathering doesn’t happen.
So our merry band of circus folk descended upon Sanlitun and found out that the gathering wasn’t on that night.
Yesterday a few of us decided (pretty much at the last minute) to head down to FUN Party, the opening ceremony for the 2009 Beijing Art Festival, at the 798 Art Zone.
We got there pretty late in the day and missed a few DJs and some of the new media works. Arriving there, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I was however disappointed at the general lack of video based works.
The end of my third week has come. This also signals the impending end of this little adventure that looms just over the horizon.
Training-wise it’s been good. Both during the week just past and my overall time spent here. I’m still not confident of the way things are run here, but on the bright side, I have great teachers.
I’m still trying to get used to being called by my Chinese name.
Every night from about 7:30pm onwards, the street vendors setup show outside the school. It’s a simple little setup, a trough with charcoal, a rickety wooden seat, small tiny tables, and cheap plastic chairs. You’d go there and order what you want and it’ll be cooked for you over the coals. Simple but extremely tasty.
The most popular item on the menu would definitely be the lamb skewers. Tasty morsels of meat & fat barbecued till succulent perfection, with a touch of chilli powder.
Feicha, roughly translated into “flying fork” or “flying trident”. At first glance, Feicha looks a lot like contact staff. In fact, when I first saw it, I thought that it was a restrictive and boring form of contact staff.
I am unable to find much information on the history of Feicha online. But I have been told that it was once a skill demonstration that the guards at the Forbidden City would perform every morning for the emperor.