It took a couple weeks to gather the parts and tools to assemble the Extruder Controller V2.2. The Extruder kit was ordered from makerbot.com. The Fisher Scientific isotemp hotplate was found on eBay and it has temperature graduation that seems accurate with an infrared thermometer. Reflow solder seems daunting at first, and I had a tendency to lay on too much soldering paste. I used the 22 gage 0.017" applicator tip and it still seems too big for the tine AVR ATMega168 TQFP chip. I worried about bridging with too much soldering past and ended up smearing the tiny pad with a q-tip in an attempt to clean up the soldering pad areas I also worried about the applying too much soldering paste for the two slight larger surface mount IC, however reflow soldering seems quite forgiving. There were a couple pins that bridged during the reflow process, but I was able to remove them using copper wicks. Visually, the result looks okay. Next are the through hole soldering. Images can be found in the image gallery.

Change of hosting service from HostingRails to bluehost with minor changes to the website update structure. HostingRails was easy to setup but just too slow.
Speed Test according to website speed test:

	Size	Load Time	Avg Speed/KB
HostingRails	1.63KB	5.18s	3.17s
bluehost	4.6KB	1.45s	0.32s

The boring details on the rails setup and the ActionMailer configuration is here.

Finding the parts for the laser cut acrylic RepStrap is proving to be quite challenging so the current plan is to build whatever component is available starting with the extruder while the rest of the components are located. It will be good exercise in SMT Soldering.

Details can be found in its project page.

Originally the goal was to build a RepRap but after failing to find the plastic structural parts for RepRap the short term goal was shifted to building a RepStrap first, then a RepRap.

Addition of a Haas SR-100 CNC router and a Haas TL-2 CNC tool room.

PMT 58 - Industrial Design for Plastic
covers the basic design and manufacturing methods for plastic products. Kind of like rapid prototyping with your hands. Methods covered includes polyurethane soft mold, plaster molding for vacuum forming, foam board prototyping an d more to come.
PMT 59 - Injection Molding
\r\ncovers the injection molding process that details the principles of injection molding, the mold parts, and operation. The first half of the class is most lectures that covers the fundamentals from raw material to the molding process. The second part is mostly lab build on Paulson multi-media training modules
WMT 185 - CNC Woodworking from the class syllabus "introduces students to AlphaCAM software. . .Topics includes software operations, preparing G-Code. . and use of CNC router."