User:Ganly

Steve Ganly @ganly

Background

• Self taught 6502 assembler on a vic20 aged 12 in 1980 (yep - one of those...), had a few games released in the 1980's micro boom on the Commodore 64
• BSc degree in Computer Science graduating in 1990
• Founded an IT consultancy and grew it to 44 people servicing merchant banks setting up and maintaining large networks of Unix systems
• Long time Perl Hacker, been working with Ruby on Rails since about 2007

Skills

• Learned basic wood and metalworking as a child, did O'Levels in Technical Drawing and something called Modular Technology
• Last 5 years re-examining things from the ground up - doing some fine woodworking and accurate metalwork on lathes and mills
• Big time automation fan - CNC using Mach3

Goals

• Get a deeper understanding of electronics - I'm still not happy with my mental model of semiconductors at the molecular level and that bothers me
• Improve the CNC facilities of the Hackspace

Project plans and speculative ideas

• Build a bunch of CNC machines for the Hackspace

 * Practise bot - to learn about gcode, movement, how to crash, how to fix
 * medium accuracy A4 size mill - for pretty accurate wood and plastic
 * mini mill CNC converstion - for metals. As accurate as the base mill
 * super accurate mill - for isolation routing of fine PCB, for making moulds for fine pitch resin cast gears and similar parts. Fairly small - less than A4 size
 * medium size plasma cutter - for Steel plate and various stock up to 20mm (depends on the plasma torch). Bed about 1m square
 * large full size sheet mill - able to cut 1400 x 2400 sheet goods. 1/2" router based plus dedicated dust collection
 * various 4th axis devices - rotary tables, etc.

• Build a decent aquaponics system
• Solar powered lawn munching swarm of robots
• Scratch built radio controlled hovercraft
• Make some ferrofluid for the space and do some films of it's properties
• Make a 1D sliding saw tool
• Make a 2D sliding router tool (guides like CNC but manually set)
• Experiments with router height adjustment mechanisms
• Maybe make a wooden bandsaw like Mathias Wandel's
• Test making different gear types in the space, do some how-to videos for the available tool chains
• Learn about welding and brazing
• Try out some metal casting - Aluminium and maybe brass
• Build a chalk drawing robot
• Do some experiments with quadcopters and tricopters
• Wind powered compost assist