Professor Phunk's Tri-Dimensional Printarium

2012-01-23T09:52:00.000-08:00

I am still waiting on new Stepsticks (the first ones that I ordered couldn't handle 1/16th stepping) so I thought that I would do a short report on one of the nicest machines that I have seen for a while. There have been a number of new printers that have appeared over the last few months but this one uses a unique open-source linear bearing system and is a truly elegant design.

It is called the Quantum ORD Bot and was created by Barton Dring who also created and sells the Makerslide linear bearings. First, here's some info the bearing system:

Makerslide Rail

The system is basically a 20mm x 40mm aluminum extrusion along with a set of parts designed to work with it. Any parts that fit standard 20mm extrusions can be used and, in addition, Dring sells V-notched wheels that run along a pair of V rails integrated into the extrusion. The wheels are designed to accept standard 5mmx16mmx5mm bearings as hubs which are simply press fit to install, and various spacers are available to mount them to flat stock.

Makerslide standard carriage with wheels mounted

V-wheels with standard 16mm skate bearings

The Makerslide store sells a set of standardized parts like the carriage that can be integrated into your designs or you can buy the wheels and mount them to your own carriage. The parts can be ordered at the Makerslide Store and he will even cut it to your order prior to shipping.

The whole purpose behind this is........ well, I'll let Barton explain it himself:

"The biggest design, cost and fabrication hurdles in a new CNC design are the linear bearings. There are a lot of commercial and DIY solutions out there, but none support an easy, low cost and rapid fabrication philosophy. I want to create a solution to this. The idea is to use a method that seamlessly integrates into standard aluminum extrusion systems.

The basic bearing concept is not new. I have used it for years in my own designs and many high end commercial systems use it. It is the V wheel running on V rail. The problem with the commercial systems is that they are expensive, require a lot of accurate fabrication to integrate and don't seamlessly integrate into standard extrusion systems.

MakerSlide is a V rail integrated into a standard extrusion profile. Since it is based on a standard profile from several sources."

He financed the project through Kickstarter. The parts are inexpensive and the cost of the rail is currently set at 1 cent/mm (or about $3.00/foot). That is an incredible bargain in the world of precise linear control. Makers with a supply of Makerslide rails and parts on hand could prototype their designs extremely quickly

Of course the next thing the world needed was a 3d printer designed around the Makerslide components and Mr. Dring took care of that as well. Behold, the Quantum ORD Bot!

Quantum ORD Bot

It's a nice little 3d printer that uses the Makerslide as both structure and linear bearing system in all three dimensions. The usual rat's nest of wires is run inside the extrusions so it has a very clean look to it. Information on this machine can be found on Thingiverse or on his Buildlog blog posting. The prototype has a small build area but it has already undergone a redesign to address that issue.

The best thing about this is that the parts can all be purchased for a very reasonable cost. The worst thing about it is that there is increasing demand for the Makerslide extrusion as word spreads so it sells out very quickly every time a batch arrives at the store. Still, this is a clean, elegant machine with a very stiff chassis. It might be worthwhile taking a look at it if you haven't settled on a design yet for your next project.

Some Progress, Still Waiting

2012-01-04T09:11:00.000-08:00

I am still waiting for my new pololu boards to arrive but I have managed to make some progress in the meantime.

It was immediately apparent that my axis were not moving as they should. The steps/mm were obviously incorrect but it took me a while to figure out what they should be. I could see that the X and Y were moving in tiny increments and finally realized that I had to multiply by 16 to allow for the microstepping (Duh!). That worked but then their movement seemed to swing too far in the other direction. Luckily I found Josef Prusa's online RepRap Calculator (Calculator). Once I had carefully entered the correct data (gear tooth counts, microstepping settings belt pitch angle, step angles and leadscrew pitch) it spit out settings that seem to be correct for my machine.

I think that the extruder setting is still off. It seems to be pushing out more than 5mm of extrusion when I hit the jog button but I will wait until I have all three axis working to mess with it further.

I am working on the heated bed while I wait. I got the PID out and wired it up yesterday. since it runs on 120v AC I don't want to use it without an enclosure but I will give it a quick power up to confirm that it is working. I have attached the heater pad to my build plate but I didn't get the thermistor wired up last night. I should be able to finish it up tonight and give it a try. Assuming that it works I will finish the enclosure and get everything tidied up.

I expect that the new stepper drivers should be here within the week. I have ordered some ABS to complement the PLA that I already have on hand so I will be able to experiment with the different materials.

The Never Ending Story

2011-12-22T07:01:00.000-08:00

Well, not quite never ending but it sometimes feels that way.

I adjusted the pots on the stepper controllers last night. It fixed all my problems with the steppers except for the Y-axis which just sat still and jerked a bit no matter what I tried. I eventually moved the motor over to one of the other controllers and found that it worked fine so I guess I have one bad controller. I actually thought about ordering a couple of spare Stepsticks when I ordered the Sanguinololu but decided against it so now I have to wait again for a delivery. The genetic predisposition to being a cheap bastard which I inherited from my Scottish ancestors has undone me again.

The good news is that everything else seems to be working finally. Extruder, steppers and hot end are functioning as they should so I am able to do a few things while I wait. The opto-endstops are not working yet but that is because I have not yet soldered the bridge for the 5v power to them. I also need to clean up all of my wiring but I was waiting to do that until I got everything working. After I do that I am going to switch the controller for the Z-axis to the Y and then I can do a couple of tests while I wait:

Lay down a line in a single layer so I can confirm that it is extruding the correct length of filament.
Lay down a square in a single layer to confirm that everything is square. Should get right angles at the corners and sides of the same length in both the X and Y directions.
Lay down some complex curves in a single layer just to confirm that ethe X and Y axis are moving as they should and are coordinated properly with the extruder.

Since the Stepsticks are coming from the Netherlands I expect it to be a couple of weeks yet before I will be able to build anything but success is definitely in sight at last.

By George, I think I've Got It!

2011-12-21T06:48:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update.

Based on some online posts that I found, I believe that I have identified the problem with my steppers. I think I just have to adjust the current potentiometers on the Pololu driver cards. I haven't had time to try it yet, hopefully tonight. If this works I will have solved my last problem with the machine itself. Very exciting.

Hot Damn! Melted Plastic at last!

2011-12-19T07:15:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend I finished re-assembling the Mendel and tried it out. The Sanguionololu works great and so does the Sprinter firmware although I still expect to have a lot of tweaking for my specific machine. Here's a quick pic of my first mess of plastic:

I think I will keep this blob on my desk as a post modernist sculpture

At first I could not get the filament to feed into the extruder. I was trying to get it in by hand-turning the gear on the wade's extruder but it just didn't seem to be able to pick it up. It was late and I was just going to give it up for the night when I realized that I was turning the gear the wrong way! As soon as I turned it the other way the filament loaded into the hot end easily. One more boneheaded move among many.

With the ATX power supply and the single board electronics my wiring is much cleaner. I still seem to have a problem with my steppers though. The X axis moves very slowly and the Y and Z axis don't move at all. They just hum and jerk a bit. I think that I may have them wired wrong but it was getting too late to get into troubleshooting last night so I will check it out tonight.

But, in general, it looks like I am finally ready to build some things. Life is good.

Finally, Some Good News!

2011-12-05T07:23:00.000-08:00

I wired up the Sanguinololu board last night and things went very well. I jumpered the power enable pins on my new ATX power supply and then clipped the connector off of the 4 wire power connector and twisted the two power and two grounds wires together. These were inserted in the screw terminals on the Sanquinololu board and then I plugged in the USB cable. I got a steady green light so it looked like everything was ready to test.

I loaded up the Sprinter firmware that I had modified for my Mendel with no problems. Then I confirmed that Pronterface can connect to the board. I probably still have to do a lot of tweaking of the firmware but that can wait until I have a test print to use as a baseline.

My extruder is still disassembled from fixing the broken thermistor wire but I was able to wire it up on the bench to test it. I had been holding off on reassembling it and mounting it back on the machine until I could confirm that it was working correctly since it is a major pain in the ass to remove. I removed the 4 pin connector that came with my Botmill extruder and replaced it with two 2 pin connectors. The heater and thermistor connectors on the Sanguinololu are on opposite ends of the board so their arrangement just wouldn't work. After connecting with Pronterface the temp reported as 25C, which is about correct for my basement workshop so I went ahead and sent a command to heat up to 185C (PLA melting temp). The heater worked and the thermistor immediately began reporting the correct temps as it rose I confirmed that it heated up to the correct temperature and that it then started the regular on-off switching cycle in order to keep the temp stable. Being fairly certain that I could melt plastic safely I then moved on to the steppers.

The Sanguinololu board expects 4 pin connectors and my old boards had screw terminals so I can't hook up the steppers until I get the correct connectors. I had bought some locally only to find that I had the wrong ones. I have a set coming in the mail but they have not arrived yet. Luckily I have one stepper that arrived with the correct connector already attached so I used that one for testing. I attached it to the extruder controller and sent a command to extrude 5 mm. The stepper kicked in and ran for what seemed to be the correct time period. Hot Damn!

I then moved the motor to each of the X, Y, and Z controllers in sequence and tested them with the jog commands. All seemed to be working correctly. The only thing that I did not test was the opto-endstops. I have to solder a joint between two pads on the board in order to set the voltage for them. In my case this is 5v but I forgot to do it before I hooked everything up so it will have to wait until I take everything apart again prior to the final assembly..

So it looks like I am finally ready to print. As soon as my connectors arrive I can do the final hookups of the steppers and move on the the really interesting part of this whole thing, the printing!

New Electronics

2011-11-29T09:37:00.000-08:00

Sorry I've been gone for a while. I finally threw up my hands and gave up on the Techzone electronics. It seemed that, no matter what I did, I could not get any firmware to work correctly on it. When I looked online I found that very few people were working with or supporting it so there wasn't the community that I needed to help me through it. Given that sad situation I ordered a Sanguinololu and I have been waiting for it to arrive.

The new board arrived last night so I am back on track. I will be using the Sprinter firmware since it seems to be fairly mature and has a good support community. I hope to have time tonight to get things hooked up and tested.

More Progress, Same Problem

2011-11-08T06:18:00.000-08:00

Last night I modified the heated bed and got it installed. I attached the silicon heater element to the bottom (it's a simple peel and stick) so I just need to install a thermistor and wire it up to my control box and that will be ready to go.

Of course, a heated bed does me no good unless I can get this thing to extrude. I switched out the thermistor again and got the same result. Temp reads as 875 degrees at room temperature so the heater does not kick in. I know that the thermistor is fine (I guess the previous one was OK as well) so I have another problem. It wasn't until this morning on the way to work that I realized that I probably have the wrong temperature table in my firmware. I will check that next.

Replacing the Thermistor

2011-11-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

I finally got some free time to work on the Mendel yesterday. I removed the extruder and replaced the thermistor with a spare one that I had laying around. It involved carefully cutting away the Kapton tape and removing the thermistor leads from the crimped fitting that Botmill uses to connect it. Not an extremely complicated procedure and it only took me about 20 minutes to replace it and re-crimp the connectors and tape the new thermistor in place.

I thought that I would do some testing prior to bolting the x-carriage back on the Mendel and it's a good thing that I did. The temp showed as 875C so the heater never cut in. When I checked the resistance of the thermistor I found it to be about 115K Ohms rather than the 80K that it should be. Should have checked it before I installed it. Either it is a bad thermistor or I picked up one with the wrong values at some point. Luckily I have another one and it tests at the correct 80K so I will switch it out again.

Since I was dismantling things anyway I decided to switch out the build surface for the aluminum one that I bought to prepare for adding heating to it. I removed the old one and then found that the aluminum plate blocked two of the holes in the plywood frame piece. I will drill them out tonight.

I also made a cable with two female connectors so I could add a ground cable between the main and extruder boards. I don't know if my problems with the extruder motor are due to grounding issues but this certainly can't hurt.

A Quick Update

2011-10-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

Just a short post here.

I have discovered the source of at least one of my problems. One of the leads on my thermistor is broken. I think it may have burned through when I had the thermistor and the heater wired backwards. In any rate, the thermistor reads as an open circuit and is definitely dead. I will have to remove the extruder and dismantle the hot end to replace it.

I have also made up a ground wire to run between the main and extruder boards. hopefully that will help to clean up the signals between the two boards and get the instructions to the extruder cleanly.

More progress - still no extrusion.

2011-10-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

I didn't get as much time this weekend as I expected. The furniture moving, along with the cooking and the Turkey Torpor, kept me out of the lab for most of it.

I did, however, get time to re-do the wiring for 12v power to the stepper controllers and the extruder board. I had decided that poor wiring was causing some of my problems. The issues with the steppers corelated with their distance from the power source. X and Y moved OK, Z was intermittent and the extruder didn't work at all. This was due to my crappy job of wiring that caused more grounding problems as the power was passed down the line. I rewired the whole thing and the problems disappeared. I now have all 3 axis moving just fine with no squealing steppers and no pauses.

The extruder is still a problem though. The motor doesn't do anything at all, which is odd since, last week, it was not moving but was squealing, indicating that it was getting some power when I sent a command. Probably still a wiring issue. Also, I noticed that the heater did not seem to shut off when I set the temperature to 0. It seems to be getting power all the time so I guess I still have an issue with it. I will get my IR thermometer from the garage so I can tell for sure what it is doing.

I will be logging in to the RepRap IRC chat tonight to see if someone can give me a fix for these items. Progress is slow but at least it is progress.

Progress - in less than 10 minutes!

2011-10-07T08:07:00.000-07:00

I only had about 10 minutes last night to work on the Mendel but I came away happy. I had figured out that my firmware was probably not correct for my boards so I downloaded a new version specifically for the techzone hardware. I loaded it up on both the main board and the extruder and got some great results.

All 3 axis are now working, although the Z axis seems to be intermittent. Sometimes it doesn't move when I jog it and the stepper makes a squealing sound as if it is jammed or something. A couple of times it moved just fine though so I think that this is probably a hardware issue (something stuck in the gears etc.). I will take a look at it tonight. The correct commands are definitely getting to the steppers now though.

Also, the hot end of the extruder is heating up just fine and the thermistor is passing good data back to the board. I was using Pronterface last night and could easily track the temp as it went up.

I didn't have any filament in the machine but I hit "extrude 5 mm" a couple of times to see if the extruder stepper would rotate. It didn't move so that is my biggest concern at the moment. I set the desired temp to 0 and it still wouldn't move so I guess it is not something in the firmware as I had suspected. I may have the stepper wired incorrectly but I didn't have time to check last night.

This will be a long weekend here in Canada for Thanksgiving and it is supposed to rain all weekend. That means that I should have lots of time to work the bugs out and get something extruded. I also have to move our entire home office down to the basement so my wife can have the spare room to set up an office for her new accounting business but what the heck, I have three whole days!

I'm an Idiot!

2011-10-04T10:28:00.000-07:00

I got my old Linux tablet working again and connected to the Reprap. Guess what I discovered? The damn thing can't connect. This indicated that the problem had nothing to do with my Windows workstation at all and was probably hardware related. I pulled out the 6 conductor cable between the main board and the USB/TTY adapter and, sure enough, one of the leads was dead between the two connectors. I made up a new cable and "voila" both Pronterface and Repsnapper can now connect with no problems.

I have the X and Y axis moving fine but my Z axis won't move anymore. Probably more of my sloppy wiring. The hot end is heating up but I don't seem to be getting any temp readings back from the thermistor. Again, probably a hardware problem.

I tried to sending a command to the extruder but the motor didn't do anything. I only thought afterward that the software may prevent it from running until the hot end reaches operating temperature to prevent damage from trying to push un-melted filament through the tip. I will check the code for this.

So it looks like I am finally able to proceed with final debugging and getting Mendel working. There's a lesson to be learned here - don't assume anything. Just because things were working on the Linux tablet didn't automatically rule out hardware problems being the culprit. It was really my tunnel vision on the ports that kept me from examining other possible issues earlier.

Oh well, Onward to Victory!!

A Possible Solution

2011-09-27T08:23:00.000-07:00

I have been looking through the FDTI site and I may have identified my problem. There are two types of drivers for the chip on the Techzone board - VCP drivers and D2XX drivers. The VCP drivers set up a virtual COM port and those are the ones that I installed. The D2XX drivers allow the software to access the USB connection directly using a DLL.

It seems possible that I should have been using the D2XX drivers instead of the VCP ones that I installed on my workstation. It is certainly worth a try anyway. I will install the other set of drivers tonight and see what happens.

The Continuing Story....

2011-09-27T07:11:00.000-07:00

I now have Repsnapper installed and working. Unfortunately it has made no difference in my ability to connect to the Mendel. Although Pronterface was telling me that the port was unavailable, Repsnapper tells me that it is timing out while trying to connect but has no further information. This happens whether I attempt to connect using the original COM! port on the machine or the virtual COM3 port created by the USB/TTY interface

I am wondering if the whole problem lies with the drivers that I installed for the FTDI USB/TTY chip that is used on the Techzone board. I am going to see if there are older versions available.

This worked so easily under Linux. It is very frustrating to be this close to a working machine and be stopped once again.

Connect Problem

2011-09-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

I have tried several times to get Pronterface to talk to the Mendel but I get a message stating that it "cannot open port COM3, access is denied". I believe that this is due to a problem in the pronterface code. The Reprap Host Software on my Linux machine had no problem connecting. I think that it is something to do with the communications between the PC and the USB/TTY adapter that leads Pronterface to believe that the COM port has already been opened by another application. I have not been able to find any resolution for this in the various forums.

I am going to install Repsnapper tonight and see if it is able to connect. Good thing that there are a number of options out there for host software.

Back Again!

2011-09-20T07:14:00.000-07:00

Well, after another extensive period of procrastination I am finally back to work on the RepRap. I have been at it for a couple of nights and have managed to finish all the wiring so I am back to fighting with the software.

I installed the reprap host on my new/old desktop but I can't seem to get it to run. It is probably due to version conflicts with Java but, after messing with it for a while, I decided to switch over to using Pronterface and Sfact as my toolchain. They both installed easily and run fine under windows.

I initially had some problems loading the firmware from the Windows machine until I realized that I had to load a set of drivers for the Techzone USB/Serial board. I guess they were already available on the Linux OS that I was using on my tablet because I am sure that I didn't have to manually install them there. (I am sticking to WinXP on the desktop, not because I like it but because I don't have Linux drivers for the wireless card I have on it). Once the desktop was able to talk to the Arduino I had no problem installing the firmware on the main board and the extruder.

That was where I left off last night. I was not able to get the steppers running but I think that was due to my ignorance of Pronterface. I will go through some documentation today and give it another try when I know what I am doing.

I expect that there may still be some adjustments to the firmware but I will have to get things running in order to know for sure.

Perhaps I will finally extrude.

A Little Progress on a Couple of Fronts

2011-05-31T14:34:00.000-07:00

Well, I am still not printing. That is more due to my crazy life than any real issues with the Mendel. I have managed to change jobs, attend a funeral/family reunion, get my daughter off to New York on her class trip, make a couple of road trips for my work, arrange for repairs on the house, fix both cars and see my wife through a bad stretch with her (former) employers. I'm pooped! What I have not managed to do is finish assembling my extruder.

However, a couple of weeks ago I anticipated this situation and ordered a fully assembled extruder from Botmill. After I placed the order I happened on a lengthy exchange on the Reprap forum where a number of folks complained of poor customer service from Botmill so I was not sure what to expect. It all turned out well though. I received an acknowledgement of the purchase within 10 minutes and the unit was shipped within 48 hrs. They sent me another notice when it shipped along with a tracking number. It arrived within a week of the order and it is exactly as advertised. A very nice little unit based on Wade's extruder. It even came attached to an upper x-carriage so now I have 2.

I realized when I started to install it that I had neglected to install the captive nuts for the extruder bolts in my upper x-carriage part so I will have to dismantle the x-carriage. Bummer! However, it was going to be necessary anyway. As it turns out, one of the angled bolts holding the 45 degree bearings on the lower carriage is too long and interferes with the extruder so I will have to cut it down. I could cut it in place but I don't want to be spraying metal filings all over the Mendel and into my steppers.

I also have my new (used) computer installed now. I bought a cheap monitor for $100 and an even cheaper wireless card for $30.00 and installed a dual boot OS with WinXP and Ubuntu 11.04. Unfortunately I can only get the wireless drivers to work in Windows. I will run the Mendel using the Reprap Host Software on WinXP until I get that situation resolved because I hate running disks back and forth from my office upstairs to the Lab (that's what my wife calls it, complete with the capital L)

On another front I seem to have finally found someone to cut the parts I need for the chassis of the DIYLILCNC router. A guy in Alberta is offering to laser cut them from 1/4" MDF for a very reasonable price. I will post his contact information on the builders forum once I have received the parts and can evaluate their quality. I have a number of additional parts to source before I can start the build but the cut sheet parts are the hardest to get hold of. Very similar to the Reprap situation last year except that it isn't the scarcity but the cost of laser cutting that is the difficulty. The parts comprise most of a 4*8 sheet of mdf so there is a lot of cutting and all my local laser cutters wanted over $1000 to do it.

Hopefully I will actually get some work done this week and will have something to take pictures of shortly.

Still Waiting!

2011-05-03T09:18:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update. I am still waiting for my last stepper motor to arrive so I can complete the extruder. I have been puttering on the control box while I wait. It will contain the bed heater, power supply and emergency cuttoff switch.

It Works!

2011-04-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

Last night I checked the extruder settings and, sure enough, the target temp was set to 2 but the extruder temp showed as 1 even without any thermistor attached. I changed the setting for target temp to 0 and the whole machine started working just fine. It was very exciting to watch it go through the motions of printing a frame vertex. I took some video but I have not been able to get it to upload to Blogger. I am trying to reduce the size and convert it to other formats but no luck so far. I may try uploading it to YouTube first.

One More Baby Step Forward (and a really cool resin printer)

2011-04-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

I managed to change my firmware settings last night so I now have all three axis moving correctly. I hit "home" and watched all three move at the same time. Very inspiring.

Then I decided that I would load up a Gcode file and get things moving, even though my extruder is still on the workbench. It was a good exercise since I hadn't even looked at the user manual for the host software. I managed to get the Gcode generated and loaded up but when I hit "print" it just sat there with the "estimated time to print" moving upward into the hundreds and then thousands of hours. I had to think about it for a while but I realized today that it was probably waiting for the extruder to reach operating temperature. I am going to try again this evening but first I will set the working temperature for the hot end to 0.

Here is a site that everyone should see. This guy has built his own 3d printer but it does not use the fused deposition technique of the Repraps. It harks back to the original 3d printers in that it uses a polymer resin that is hardened layer by layer using UV light. I don't know the details of his hardware but the resolution is really remarkable. The flute in these pictures is playable. He is trying to get plans or kits together (not too sure exactly where he is going yet) so this is definitely a site to put on your watch list.

Alien Skull designed by Avinash Hegde at http://aysculpture.deviantart.com/

Playable flute

And Now for Something Completely Different

2011-04-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

One of the things that delayed my work on the Mendel over the last week or so was that my trusty HP TC1100 tablet computer was out of action. This was caused by my preparations to get another project underway after the Reprap is finished.

This is a small CNC router called the DIYLILCNC. It is open source and the plans are freely available on their website. It has a cutting area of 12"x14"x2". I am going to build one to complement the Reprap since it will be great for cutting small parts out of flat stock. The DIYLILCNC is constructed mostly out of stressed hardboard, called Masonite in some places. A full 4x8 sheet is required but it is very inexpensive and the parts are simply bolted together, much like a Mendel. All in all it is a very elegant little design and has the advantage of being complete, tested, and well documented. The parts are designed to be laser cut but, like Repraps, the user community has already begun their own redesigns. Someone has posted a set of cut patterns optimised for a CNC router. Since my daughter's school has a large CNC router setup I plan on doing some horse trading for the cutting service. Perhaps I can do a presentation on the Mendel for the shop students.

Instead of designing their own electronics hardware the lilcnc team simply used one of the commercial 3 axis kits that are now available from a number of sources. They also use an easily acquired Dremel tool as the cutter. I ordered my motors, electronics and power supply as a kit from China. I have no idea what the quality will be like but the price was worth taking a chance on (about $200 including shipping). The three NEMA 23 motors are slightly less powerful than the ones called for in the DIYLILCNC plans but they should do the job.

As far as my tablet being out of action - I tried to load an application called EMC2. It is an open source CNC control application and is the one most commonly used if you can't afford the (very expensive) commercial alternatives. Unfortunately, when I loaded it up it somehow corrupted my Nvidea drivers and I was unable to even boot the machine. It took the better part of a week to get things going again. Since I use that machine to run the Mendel it really slowed down the work on the current project. Perhaps I should stick to one project at a time. In any case, I discovered while troubleshooting the problem that the folks at the EMC2 website do not recommend running it on tablets or laptops since it is a realtime control program and the older laptop technology usually can't keep up with the cutter and will start dropping instructions. Oh well, Live and Learn.

More Progress

2011-04-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

I did a lot of work on small things this weekend. I finally greased the rails, adjusted the endstop tabs so they meet the endstops correctly, reloaded the firmware, and rewired the 12v system (it was very sloppy and would have caused problems eventually).

I now have all 3 axis moving smoothly. My only problem is that the X and Y axis move in reverse. They worked fine when I was jogging them but as soon as I tried to home them they shot to the wrong end of the rails. I don't have my control box wired up yet so I had no emergency stop button but I had my hand on the plug for the power brick so I was able to pull it and shut things down without any damage. I tried to reverse the direction of those two axis in the firmware but it had no effect. I suppose I have to dig deeper into the code. Either that or change the wiring of the motors themselves. Strangely, the Z axis moves correctly and I can home it without any problems.

I also worked quite a bit on my extruder. The hot end is assembled as well as most of the rest of the parts. I just need to epoxy the peek insulator into the main body of the extruder. My main problem now is that I still can't get the gears off of my used stepper motor. I am going to order a new one today and I will just have to wait for it to arrive.

I will start to assemble my control box this week. It will clean up my workbench a bit and I won't have to pull the plug anymore to shut the steppers off. It will only contain the power brick, a lighted on/off switch, for the 12v system, the emergency cuttoff, and the PID for my heated bed but keeping those things neat will be worth the effort.

Some Progress But .....

2011-04-04T09:34:00.000-07:00

Well, I just had a whole week off work but I am still not printing. Why, you ask? Because I am a lazy so-and-so. Also because there always seem to be a hundred things that need to be done before I can get to the Reprap work.

I have made some progress though. I have assembled both of my MakerGear Heatcores. They seem to be working perfectly. A small problem with them is that they did not come with the Molex connector that should be attached. I think that the later kits include it (it is shown in the assembly instructions on their website) but mine did not. Remember that I bought my kits last spring so they are from the early lots, things have been improved since then.

I also began assembling the geared extruder. I don't have bolts long enough for some of the assembly steps so I have been cutting lengths of threaded rod and placing a nylok nut on one end. It seems to work fine and it allows me to customize the lengths to whatever I need.

I also discovered another oversight on my part. When I ditched my plan to use a set of used stepper motors for the Mendel I purchased some new ones. Unfortunately they came in a set of three so I don't have one for the extruder. I will have to use one of the second hand motors for this but that means that I have to solve my problem with the gear that is stuck on the shaft. If I can't find a way to remove it without damaging the shaft or the motor I will have to buy another new one and wait for it to arrive. I guess that would not be too serious a problem since I am taking so long with these final steps but I will try to get the old gear off first.

More pictures and some video of the axis moving when I post next time.

It's Alive! Alive!

2011-03-26T20:17:00.000-07:00

Great progress. The Reprap software is running properly on my laptop, it is talking to the main board which is talking to the stepper controllers. All 3 axis are now moving although I have a problem with the Z axis. It only moves up, not down. I think that the belt is too tight so I will do some troubleshooting tomorrow. I have started to assemble the extruder and, since I have a week off now, I should be extruding plastic within a few days.

Excellent!

Great Joy in Mudville!

2011-03-17T19:49:00.000-07:00

Good news. My new main board arrived from Techzone yesterday and I immediately sequestered myself in the fortress of Solitude (formerly the daughter's playroom) to check it out.

I plugged the USB/ITE cable in and, with breathless antici..........pation, compiled and attempted to download the firmware. It was apparent from the start that something new was going on since the red LED began blinking along with the steady green one that I have been seeing all along. The board behaved exactly as described in all the online resources and the firmware loaded successfully. The red LED then settled down into a steady 1 Hz blink just as it should.

So, long story short, I had a bad board. I don't believe that the board was bad when I received it. There were a set of check marks on the back indicating that it had passed all the testing prior to shipping. I think I may have sent some current through it incorrectly when I was figuring out how to wire everything up. Techzone was not the culprit here, just my own clumsiness (again).

I have a long weekend now so I hope to work out all the remaining small things and have the beast up and running by Sunday. As long as family responsibilities don't get in the way. Amazingly, my wife has been very understanding, and tonight she actually referred to the Mendel as my "Happiness Machine" when I was coming down here to work on it!

Big News! AdderFab!

2011-03-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

The University of Washington has become a major source of innovation in the use of powder bed printers with new and inexpensive materials. Professor Mark Ganter and his students have been experimenting for several years and have produced some amazing results. Today they tease us with the announcement of something really fantastic - the AdderFab 3d printer. It is a powder bed printer using an off the shelf HP print cartridge and assembled using fabbed parts which are very similar to Mendel parts.

From their video it is apparent that AdderFab prints quite slowly at the moment but Mark says that they will be working over the next few months to speed it up before releasing the design as an open source project. Most of the home built printers of this type have used the whole X-carriage from a commercial inkjet printer which has both advantages and disadvantages. On the upside the X axis movement can be handled by the existing printer carriage hardware but it also means that every printer has a unique design if it uses a different printer as its' parts source. The design of a standard X carriage, once the bugs are worked out, will make this design much more reproduceable.

This is exactly what I was planning on doing as my next project after I got the Mendel working. Of course, with my limited engineering skills, I would not have produced anything as nice as what I see from the Open3DP group so I will be happy to build their design and avoid having to figure things out on my own.

Having both machines raises the possibility of creating items that are assembled of parts printed in multiple materials - plastic parts from the mendel and ceramic or glass parts produced by the AdderFab.

Some Progress But ...

2011-03-07T06:07:00.000-08:00

I have managed to make a bit of progress but I still don't have the electronics working properly.

I lost a couple of weeks on other projects. I upgraded all of the PC's in our house to windows 7 (except for my trusty HP tablet which will stay on Ubuntyu Linux) and fought my way through the various issues that cropped up. Then I moved my entire shop from the large family room in the basement to our spare bedroom. The room was used as a playroom by our daughter but, since she is now 16, it is available for other purposes. It took a couple of days to get everything moved and organized but I am finally ready to proceed.

I sat down last night and worked on the firmware again. I had been using version 22 of the Arduino IDE but the various forums recommended going back to version 18 to solve my problems. As soon as I started using the earlier version I had some success. Both the G-code Interpreter and the Extruder firmware compiled immediately.

I was able to load the extruder firmware onto the board and it was really satisfying to see the green LED's start flashing as it was running. This proves that my USB board and the 6 wire cable that I made up are both working correctly and that the IDE is able to communicate with the board using that path. Unfortunately none of this made any difference when it came to loading firmware on the Sanguino board. All I get is a steady power light when I plug in the USB cable. When I attempt to upload the firmware I get a messages from the IDE that indicate that everything works fine but there is no indication that anything is getting to the board. The power light stays green but there is no flashing or blinking to indicate that anything is loading or running. No amount of playing with the reset switch has any effect at all.

I was interrupted last night and didn't get time to do much experimenting so I will try again tonight and see what happens. In any case, I am getting closer to having a functional machine.

Also, I ordered a couple of additional motor controller boards (I fried one) and some additional opto-endstops. If I don't fry any of my endstops I can use the new ones on my next project.

Quick update

2011-02-18T07:02:00.000-08:00

I have still not managed to get the firmware loaded on the main board. Despite changing the baud rate and messing about with timing of the restart it continues to do nothing. What is strange is that the Arduino IDE reports a successful upload with no error messages. The fact that the LED does not flash when I push the restart button leads me to believe that there is something wrong with the board itself.

I managed to contact Lambert from Techzone Communications and he was very helpful in giving me a few suggestions. None of them has produced results unfortunately. One thing that he suggested is that I use Repsnapper as my host software instead of Reprap Host. I haven't gotten Repsnapper working on my tablet yet but it is not yet a priority since I am pretty positive that nothing is being loaded on the Sanguino by the IDE. Unlike Reprap Host, which is written in Java, Repsnapper is a C program and Lambert feels that it is more stable. Time will tell.

I am going to move on from the main board and try to load the firmware on the extruder board this weekend. Even if it doesn't work perhaps it will give me some more information to work with.

On a more positive note, I received my silicon heater pad and the PID controller for same. I will be ready to proceed with my heated build platform whenever I get the Mendel running. I also received my new Soldering station with both a soldering iron and a heat gun included. See Below:

Pretty Cool Eh? It also comes with these extras:

I have been using a fixed temp pencil iron up until now and I just can't wait to melt some solder with this thing.

A major task this weekend, which is a three day weekend for us Saskatchewanians, is to clean up the spare room downstairs. After we make some room in there I am going to move in all of my workbenches and gear. It will give me the room to set things up properly and get organized.

Into the Valley of Troubleshooting Hell I Ride!

2011-02-09T17:01:00.000-08:00

After much messing around I have managed to get the GCode Interpreter to compile on my old Linux Tablet PC. I am running Ubuntu Linux but I had neglected to download all of the various AVR modules that I needed so I wasted a couple of days digging through the code for the compile error and searching the online forums for help that I didn't really need. At least I feel a bit like a programmer again. It has been a good 10 or 15 years since I looked through any code. I am going to have to get used to it

I was amazed, when I got into it, at the amount of settings and tables that exist in the Interpreter code. I will have to go through it again before I run the machine to ensure that I have things like the thermistor or thermocouple tables set correctly. I will double-check the accuracy of their readings with my handy dandy infrared thermometer the first time I power up the extruder. No Reprapper should be without one.

The next step is to get the software loaded onto the Sanquino main board. Unfortunately I have been unable to get this to work. The Arduino software tells me that it is uploading and that the upload is complete but there is no indication from the board that anything is happening. The LED stays a steady green. I have tried the various combinations of clicking on the upload icon and pressing the restart button on the Sanguino that are suggested on the Reprap Wiki with no results. There is always the possibility that I have a hardware problem with the cable I made for connecting to the board so I will check it with my multimeter. I will also do some searching online for other folks suggestions. Oh, before you ask, the restart pins are permanently jumpered on the Techzone board.

I have been off work this week with another bout of illness so this is all I have been able to do. I am hoping for better now that I am on my feet again.

Green Lights!

2011-02-07T06:12:00.001-08:00

Well, i finished wiring the Mendel this weekend. I only hooked up one of the stepper drivers and disconnected the extruder board just in case. Then I plugged in the USB cable and ..... Green Light! The main board LED lit up just fine. Since I was feeling foolishly overconfident I also plugged in the 12v source for the stepper and got a green light on that board as well. Unfortunately that is as far as I got.

The green light on the stepper board faded out over about 5 to 10 seconds. When I disconnect and reconnect the power I get the same reaction - first a bright LED which fades quickly to nothing. I have no idea what is happening there.

The Main board, on the other hand, is a different problem. There didn't seem to be any communication between it and my laptop so I went back and re-read a lot of the Techzone information. It turns out that the firmware loaded prior to shipping is for the Makerbot so i will have to load up the Reprap firmware before I can go any farther. Given my limited tech savvy that is harder than it sounds but I am working on it. I have the Arduino IDE and Sanguino extensions downloaded and tonight I will try to figure out how to get the firmware loaded.

Some Thoughts on the future

2011-02-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

Since my project is nearing completion I have begun to consider where I will take it from here. I quickly came up with the following list of projects that I would like to work on. They are not in order of priority and some may get dropped completely later but they are the ones that are spinning around in my head currently

Tentative list of Projects using the Reprap – Things that would utilize parts printed on the Mendel.

Build a powder style printer. A modified version of the Mendel Y-axis hardware could be used to move a re purposed inkjet printer carriage. The X-axis hardware from the printer would be used as-is. Utilizing the existing steel bar/skate bearings/printed parts design would save time and make it easier for others to replicate it. The bins for the Z-axis would have to be designed from scratch but the electronics could be as straightforward as an Arduino and a set of Pololu drivers.

Print spare parts for the Reprap. This is a no-brainer and should be the first set of parts printed by any reprap owner.

Print a Prusa Mendel for Dissidence. He has been an inspiration and a good sounding board for ideas. He deserves a Mendel and will also provide a good backup for me in case I break a part and don’t have a replacement on hand.

Build a Prusa Mendel to donate to my daughter’s school. I would like to help raise awareness of the amateur rapid prototyping movement. They have great mechanical and woodworking shops at the high school and I’m sure they could make great use of one of these machines. They already have a large CNC router table so the instructors are relatively familiar with the basic principles involved. Actually, depending on performance, I might keep the Prusa and donate my original Mendel.

Make a set of adapters for the relays in my Jaguar. I am replacing the belt driven fan in my Jaguar XJS with a set of electrical fans. This requires me to add two new relays to the wiring. Unfortunately the relays that come with the kit do not match the mounting brackets in the car. I would like to print a set of adapters that clip onto the mounting bracket in the car with one side and onto the relays with the other. These will probably have to be made in ABS since the Jaguar V12 engine produces a great deal of heat.

Build something large. I’m not exactly sure what this would be but I would like to produce something to really demonstrate the capabilities of the Reprap and that would mean pushing the boundaries of what it can do. I was speculating on creating something out of parts that would each be almost the maximum size of the build area. When assembled it would be very big. This might require an enclosure around the Reprap in order to prevent warping and definitely needs a heated bed before I would even consider it.

Model car. I would like to produce something to show my friends at Jagnuts, the car club that I belong to. I was thinking of creating a scale model e-type Jag. There are a number of 3d models of them available that I could use as a starting point. I would print it as several parts that could be painted and then assembled.

HO scale buildings for my model railroad. I think that creating one-off plastic items for hobbies is one of the best uses for these machines. I can create flat wall and roof sections, doors, windows, chimneys, steps and a host of other parts that can be assembled later into buildings that are unique to my layout or even copy buildings in my city. It will depend on how much post-printing cleanup and sanding is required to produce a good looking final product.

Organette or busker organ. This would be a big project and would require some significant design work prior to building anything. I have long been a fan of mechanical music machines, the ones that play a punched paper roll. They disappeared in the early part of the last century when the gramophone rendered them obsolete but they are fascinating machines and there are hundreds of different types. I have plans for a number of machines ranging from a small “monkey organ” to a large Wurlitzer band organ that I could use as a starting point. It would be nice to create something that actually plays music and then turn the plans loose on Thingiverse.

Related projects - These do not necessarily require the Mendel to build, but they provide additional capabilities to the workshop

Enclosure – A simple enclosed box for the Mendel allows for containment of toxic fumes (they would be vented outdoors) as well as maintaining a heated environment to prevent warping of larger pieces. This is one of the simplest additions to build and might be one of the first projects that I undertake, just for the sake of my health.

Heated build platform – This is also a high priority project. Heated platforms help to prevent warping of parts. They greatly increase build quality and reduce waste due to scrapped parts. I have already ordered the heater pad, thermistor and PID controller for this project. I will use a flat aluminium plate for the bed which I will source locally.

3D Scanner. An excellent, self contained, laser scanner using laser pointers was described in Make Magazine. Everyone with a Reprap should have some kind of 3d scanner to allow them to create 3d models of existing items without having to manually model them from scratch.

Powder printer - Mentioned above. I think that this machine will provide an excellent complement to the capabilities of the Mendel. It can be used to create parts in clay, ceramic, glass, plaster and some other materials. My reading indicates that the DIY versions lack the precision of the Mendel but the powder bed provides support for overhangs which allows production of parts that are currently impossible on the Reprap. With an 8.5” X 14” build area and at least 12” to 14" depth in the build bin it can also create parts that are much larger than the current Mendel build area.

Kiln – A lot of the materials used by the powder printer require firing before they can be used. This applies especially to the Clay and Glass materials. There are a number of sets of open source plans out there in Internet Land so it would be a case of picking one and building it.

These are only a few ideas off the top of my head. The more I think the more stuff comes to mind. It is going to be a very interesting year.

Close to The Finish Line!

2011-02-02T08:12:00.000-08:00

I have been making progress but not as fast as I would like. It seems that I can only squeeze a half hour at a time to work on the Mendel so everything just creeps along. At least it is still moving forward and no new problems have arisen.

I have managed to fabricate an electronics mount out of fibreboard and mounted it to the machine. Sorry for the fuzzy picture. All of the boards are installed and I have made up all three cables for the stepper driver boards. One advantage of this side mount design is that the cables are much shorter. I hope to get the rest of the wiring done tonight so I can see at least one of the axis move under it's own power. Very exiting.

I made a small mount for the 12v power socket out of a small bit of U shaped aluminum extrusion. It works fine and is very solid. I plan on mounting the USB board on top of it with a piece of double sided foam tape so that problem is also solved.

I have fabricated new opto flags out of heavier aluminum from my scrap box and my new Z-axis belt arrived. It fit perfectly and is now installed so I have all three axis moving OK by hand. I also installed the bed so the mechanical build is complete. As a side note, my friend Mike from Method to his Madness suggested simply doubling up the layers of pop can aluminum to get the needed stiffness for the flags. I never seem to think of these simple solutions to my problems so it is always good to have another set of eyes looking at things.

Mike and I have been discussing getting a set of Mendel parts printed for him when I get this thing operational. I have a roll of PLA so I could even print the bushings for a Prussa. We'll have to see how long it takes to get the calibration right but it would definitely be in my interest to have another working printer in the neighborhood in case of problems.

I am already compiling a list of things that I want to try once I get it running. I will write up a post on various projects I am considering so I can get some feedback.

A Little Progress

2011-01-27T16:24:00.001-08:00

I have spent most of this week working on costuming for my daughter's musical theatre project so I haven't managed to get much done on the Mendel. However, I did manage to make a flowing black robe and a Greek helmet with a silk flame built into the top so she could play Hades in a musical number from Hercules so the week wasn't a total loss. Whenever I am faced with something like this I immediately turn to the Instructables website. I was able to find instructions for a cardboard version of a Roman helmet that worked great. This is one of the best sites on the Net for information on creative projects.

I did manage to find time to add a washer to all of my idler bearings for the belts. This provides just enough extra space so the belts move smoothly. The X and Y carriages both move smoothly now.

I have also roughed out the mounting board for my electronics. I will cut it and drill the holes tomorrow. I am planning on using the printed mountings for the original laser cut mounting boards to mount it so it should be a nice clean job.

A couple of other small jobs that I will get done in the next day or so:

make a new set of opto flags. The pop can aluminum I used for the original ones is just too light. They flex in a strong breeze.
make a mounting bracket for the 12v power connector. just need to bend and drill a piece of aluminum
make some sort of mount for the USB board. No mounting holes in it so I'm not sure what I will do there.

After I wire up the electronics I will finish off the extruder. I started to assemble it a while back but never finished. I stopped at the point where I was going to make the heater coil. When I read the instructions I realized that they wanted me to turn on the heater in order to cure the paste that holds the wire in place so I had to wait until I had the electronics ready.

My new Z-axis belt has been shipped and should be here within the week. Things are looking good!

Some Progress and Some Planning

2011-01-24T08:36:00.000-08:00

Well, I pretty much completed the mechanical construction this weekend. I installed the Y-axis bars and the chassis. I had to remove and rebuild all the bearings on the chassis in order to get them to slide smoothly on the bars but I managed it eventually. Only the installation of the bed remains and I may wait until the heater arrives and make an aluminum bed instead of the laser cut acrylic that I have now.

I discovered one more problem with the mechanicals that I will have to fix. The idler bearings for the belts don't have quite enough room for my 1/4" belts. The belts stay on but they rub against the fender washers and the friction will be a problem during operation. I will have to remove all of them and add another washer or two to make a bit more room for the belt. Not difficult, just one more small tuning type task.

I also ordered a new z-axis belt from SDP-SI. I was able to order the same belt that I had before but with an extra two inches of length (39" vs 37").

Next up - the Electronics!

The next step is the installation of the electronics. I have the Gen-3 remix from Techzone and the boards are considerably smaller than the original boards for which the laser cut mounting boards were designed. I discovered a great alternate design on the Techzone Gen-3 Installation Wiki page that mounts on the side of the Mendel and supports all the boards on a single panel:

Single board electronics mount.

Side mounting of the board with zip ties.

This one is made out of a used nylon cutting board but I think that I can find a scrap of something around the garage to use.

Note - there are actually two Wiki pages for installing the Techzone electronics. The one with this nice mount is largely incomplete. I think that they abandoned it and started over. The one that contains the most current and complete information on installation can be found here.

On the Wiki they also discuss the possibility of using an additional stepper driver board for the extruder rather than using the extruder board to drive it. Apparently it results in a more reliable and quiet extruder. I will have to look into this. Perhaps I can find some information on the forums from someone who has tried it.

I admit to being intimidated by the prospect of installing the boards and wiring everything up. When doing the mechanical build I was able to disassemble and fix anything that I messed up. With circuits I may not know until I turn on the power that I have an issue and it may be too late at that point to avoid the smoke and sparks. I will just have to proceed carefully and do any testing with only the minimum number of boards connected in order to limit any damage that might occur. In a worst case I can always buy replacement boards from Techzone but I would like to avoid spending too much more on the machine.

Problem Solved! .......... And a new problem arises

2011-01-19T13:10:00.001-08:00

I added the stick-on rubber feet to the Mendel and they raised it just high enough for the Z-screws to clear the bench. I also found that using lock washers on each side of the Z-axis bearings solved my problem with the washers contacting the mounting screws. This means that I am good to go for the rest of the build.

Or it would if I hadn't encouontered another problem as soon as I moved on. The Z-axis belt proved to be too short, even with the tensioner in the loosest position (as these pictures show. I obviously messed up my parts order somehow so I will take a look at the bill of sale to see where I went wrong.

This doesn't mean that I am stalled again. I should be able to proceed with everything else while waiting for the new belt to arrive. I now have all the motors installed and I have the x-axis moving smoothly (by hand). I think that the next step is to install the electronics and the build table.

X-Carriage Rebuild

2011-01-12T17:12:00.000-08:00

A correction of my last post. The part that I broke was not part of the extruder. It was actually the lower X-carriage. See Below:

When the upper and lower parts of the carriage were assembled the 2 sets of 180 bearings did not close on the steel rod. When I tightened the bolts on that side the two parts of the carriage were drawn together and the lower one snapped. You can see the stress marks where it broke.

When I took it apart tonight I found that it had also broken at the belt clamp mount.

I carefully measured everything that I could think of to compare the original parts that I got from Nophead against the new ones but they seem to be identical. I can only assume that I did something incorrectly during the assembly that threw off the fit but I had completely disassembled it by the time I realized this so I will probably never know. At least I can confirm that Nophead's parts were not the cause of the problem. That comes as no surprise since they have been excellent in fit and quality throughout the build while my own skills have proved to be .............. slightly less than excellent, shall we say?

It only took a half hour to take it all apart and reassemble it. It now fits fine, moves smoothly and I can proceed to fixing my problems with the Z-axis.

I picked up some rubber feet for the bottom of the machine today. They should lift it up enough to resolve my problem with the Z screws contacting the bench and also will help with vibrations. I still have to figure out how to assemble it so that the screws move smoothly. currently the bearings are being contacted by something and won't rotate.

I'm not Dead!

2011-01-06T08:09:00.000-08:00

I'm back!

I never expected when I paused for my vacation back in July that I would still be paused at the end of December. Some health problems combined with an extremely busy fall/winter have kept me away from the workshop for far too long. I notice that I am not the only one as the frequency of posts from all the blogs that I follow has fallen off considerably over the last 6 months.

I went downstairs yesterday and tidied up the workbench so I can start working on the Mendel again. Just to recap - I have finished the basic mechanical structure and I am working on the z axis mechanism. I had to get a new set of extruder parts since I clumsily broke the ones that Nophead made for me by overtightening the bolts. The new parts arrived long ago and need to be assembled. This will be the third time since I had to toss the first set of cast parts that I bought due to their poor quality.

My current problem is that the washers that sandwich the bearings for the Z-axis rods are not the right size. They are too large and interfere with the operation of the bearings. I haven't been able to find the correct washers anywhere here so I have used my bench grinder to modify the ones that I have. Hopefully that will take care of things and I can get moving again.

Also, the z-axis rods extend too far below the chassis. I think this is due to the 1/4" nuts being too large. I will have to put some rubber feet on the Mendel to prevent the rods from contacting the bench.

Hopefully, I will have more progress to report later this week.

I'm Back!

2010-07-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

Just back from 3 weeks vacation in Canada's northern forests. This has got to be the greatest place in the world to live, a six hour drive gets me to the limit of civilization. Nothing but bush and lakes over most of the northern part of our province. Lots of bears this year but they didn't bother us, wish I could say the same for the bugs.

Unfortunately I won't be leaping right back into the work on the Mendel. I have an old Jaguar that has been up on axle stands for the better part of a year for some engine work. The work isn't that complicated but I have been very lazy. The other guys in my car club are starting to wonder why I always show up to our get-togethers in a Toyota! I am going to focus on getting the car back on the road for the next week or so and hopefully I can then get back to the Reprap.

Some Miscellania

2010-06-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

My PLA arrived last night. A beautiful 5 lb. roll of green filament. As a welcome surprise the folks at Ultimachine sent me two small sample rolls as well, one clear and one grey. I will use those for setting up the extruder and calibrating the machine.

I spent some time over the last couple of days on my next project, the powder printer. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think that the laser cut bin setup created by Peter Jansen will make an excellent foundation to build on, although I will have to scale it up. I also reviewed all the blog entries that Alvaro Fogasa made on his work (good thing that I made a full copy since he has since lost everything in a computer crash).

I downloaded the latest version of sketchup which I will use to create models of all the parts. I plan on using modified versions of the Mendel parts wherever possible. That way I can create them on the Mendel and others will be able to pick up on the design. Luckily someone has already posted a sketchup file of all the Mendel RP parts so I have a great starting point.

The Mendel Y-axis carriage should work fine as the basis for the X-carriage for the printer. The repurposed printer carriage from a Lexmark Z12 printer will be mounted on it to privide the Y-axis movement with the printhead. I will redesign the mendel Y-carriage bearing mounts and use 5/16 barstock for the rails, just as the Mendel does.

I plan on mounting the whole shebang in a stock kitchen cabinet from Home Despot with locking wheels on the bottom so I can move it around. he storage space this will provide can be used for powder, bottles of binder, brushes, dust masks and all the other paraphenalia of printing.

Finally, an update with pictures!

2010-06-29T07:09:00.000-07:00

I finally have a few shots of my progress. I have completed the frame and installed the x-axis. My only problem is that the z-screws seem to project too far below the machine and raise it up off the feet. I haven't checked yet to see if I measured something wrong or if this is due to using nuts that are thicker than intended. I expect the fix to be fairly straightforward though.

Sam, my assistant, guards my creation from evildoers

Here's a bit clearer shot of the whole machine.

My new motors arrived and I had no problems with installing the gears on these. Unfortunately I only have three of them so I will have to use one of my existing motors for the extruder.

Closeup of the z-axis 360 bearing and the x-axis motor.

The y-axis chassis is ready to go although I still have to do final adjustments on the bearings.

And, finally, a quick shot of the y-axis 360 bearings.

So, next steps are:

Resolve the issue with the z-screws.
Install the y-chassis and the bed.
Install the belts.
Move on to the electronics

I'm feeling pretty good at this point. the mechanical construction is almost complete. Since I bought pre-built electronics I am cautiously optimistic that they will work out of the box. That means that I could have a working Mendel within a week or so.

that is, if I can continue to work on it. Vacation is coming up and I need to put some serious time into getting my old '76 motorhome into shape for the trip. With a vehicle this old, that is only used once a year, there is always something to fix before we can head out so the Mendel may have to wait until we get back for the final touches.

I have ordered 5 lbs. of green PLA which should be here this week so I will be ready to build as soon as the machine is done. Then the real fun begins!

One Giant Leap for Powder Printer Hobbyists

2010-06-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

Peter Jansen over at the reprap Builders Blog just posted a great article. He has been experimenting with a powder printer using selective laser sintering and has just published his design for a very inexpensive powder printer chassis. At this point it only has the two bins and the z-axis control hardware but it is a great start. His design could well become the de-facto standard for an open source powder printer. you would only have to figure out how the x and y hardware works and, if you are using a salvaged printer mechanism, only one of those.

The open source powder printer chassis

There is no scale in his article but I believe that the build area is quite small. He is, after all, experimenting so he doesn't want to build a large machine to prove his approach. Scaling up the design, though, should be fairly easy. I would like to see something with a build area that takes advantage of the capabilities of a salvaged printer mechanism. That is, either 8.5 x 11 or 8.5 x 14 inches.

Peter's geared drive mechanism for the bins

He uses a sqeegee rather than a roller to spread the layers of powder. I am not enough of an engineer to know whether this will work with all materials or not but is seems to me that it will have higher drag and might decrease the life of the motor.

His design has been posted at Thingiverse so we can all start right in on replicating and modifying it.

By the time I get Mendel working and start looking at powder printer construction I expect that this design will have have most of the bugs worked out. Since laser cutting is getting fairly cheap and very available I think that it should come together quickly except for the software.

Great Progress

2010-06-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

I made considerable progress this weekend. Since the new parts go together so smoothly I was able to complete the x-axis and assemble all the parts for the z-axis and the y-axis. the y-axis parts are all installed on the squashed frog but I have not completed the alignment of the bearings yet.

I am now installing the electronics on the two electronics boards and then it will be time to begin the final frame construction. Since the boards that I bought from Techzone are smaller than the original design I am trying to figure out exactly where they mount and how. I should have that straightened out today.

The main problem that I still have to face is that I have have not yet managed to get the gears off of my stepper motors. I tried to drive the motor shaft out with a punch but it seems to be very firmly attached to the shaft. Even a couple of shots with a 2 pound steel mallet didn't budge it. I have resorted to attempting to cut one of them off with the Dremel. I wasn't able to finish the job last night so I will be back at it tonight or tomorrow. if I can't get the gears off, or if I damage the shaft in the process, I will just have to order new motors. At least they are not one of the more costly parts.

BTW - Nophead, who made my plastic parts, posted an excellent article on his blog today regarding an enclosure for the entire Mendel. It basically acts like a heated chamber and can also be used to contain and control fumes. It looks like a good idea to me but I would probably mount the electronics outside the box. I worry that the heat inside might shorten their life.

Construction begins.........Again!

2010-06-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

I received the set of printed parts from Nophead last night.

It took me two weeks of spare time and hours of drilling, grinding and sanding to get all the subassemblies for the x-axis built using the cast parts. Even then, they didn't align properly when it came to installing them on the rails. With the properly printed parts I was able to build all of the same subassemblies in 2 hours and all of the holes for the rails align so they should go together just fine. I hope to have the whole x-axis together tonight if I get some free time. Since it has been raining here for days that seems likely.

A New Start

2010-06-03T09:19:00.000-07:00

Well, I won the auction so I now have a new set of parts coming. They were pretty expensive but at least they will allow me to actually assemble a working Mendel. Here's the Ebay Pic:

So, I will have to wait a week or so for them to arrive and then the build should proceed in a fairly straightforward manner.

In the meantime I will try to get the old gears off my motors and install the new ones. I can also finish the extruder build, except for the HeatCore piece.

A Long Overdue Update

2010-06-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

Things have stalled at the moment. I have been unable to get the various components for the x-axis to align properly on the rails. the holes are just not in the right place (or rather, are differently spaced on different components so the rails are never parallel). I have just about given up on the molded parts and I have actually bid on another set of properly repraped parts on Ebay. That auction closes tomorrow and I would then have to wait for delivery before starting my assembly again. If I win it I will also get another set of geared extruder parts so I can build a backup extruder. Since this set is manufactured by Nophead, definitely a respected name on the forums, I can be sure that they have been made properly and will fit together as they should.

I received the "Adrian's Extruder" parts and I have started assembling them. I first gathered all my parts together and discovered that I had not purchased a thermosensor so I sent a quick order to Makergear for a couple, as well as some insulating fabric. I need a couple of 55mm bolts but the longest ones I have are 45mm and won't fit. I am going to cut a couple of pieces of the 4mm threaded rod that I bought and put nuts on both ends. I had to buy 3 feet of the stuff so I have lots to play with. The geared brass insert was the toughest thing to find. I finally located a hobbyshop in England that had them and was also willing to ship overseas so I bought 10 of them and they arrived last night. They are not threaded on the inside but they have a grub screw that will dig into the threads on the shaft and hold them in place.

I also started to assemble the removable HeatCore heater from Makergear that I bought but ran into a problem. After applying the ceramic paste over the nichrome wire they recommend hooking the unit up to the Mendel electronics to cure the paste at high temp. I don't have my electronics hooked up yet so this will have to wait. I thought about trying to cure it in the oven but I don't want to experiment at this point and I have lots of time before I will need a functioning extruder anyway.

Last week I was able to meet Mike (Dissidence) in person. He has a lot more electronic knowledge than I do and is creating his own design from scratch. It's great to have another raprapper within driving distance. We are setting up a forum for Saskatchewan on the Reprap site so we can start to gather other, like-minded, builders together. I look at this in a completely selfish light... the more local people who are interested and working on these machines, the more likely that I can find someone to help me with my inevitable problems.

So come one, come all!

Assembly Update #2

2010-04-26T12:30:00.001-07:00

Just a quick update without pictures. This weekend I managed to complete all the parts for the x axis. I cut out all three opto flags, drilled out the x bar spacers and then completed the assembly of the vertical-bearing-360 as well as the motor mount. I was thrilled that the 360 bearing fit perfectly on a steel bar at the first trial fitting. Much better than the x-carriage which still needs adjustment to clamp the bar correctly.

I then started working on the assembly of the x axis and immediately had trouble. The biggest problem is that the holes for the bars do not line up correctly. from measuring the x axis carriage I can see that the bars need to be about 5cm apart. The spacing of the holes on the various parts varies from 4cm to 5.5cm. This means that I have to go back to my trusty Xacto knife and Dremel to adjust them. I hope to have the full x-axis assembly assembled tonight or tomorrow.

When attempting to install the first stepper motor I found that there was some kind of mount already installed on the motor with a pair of screws. These have proved to be extremely difficult to remove and I am afraid that they have permanent threadlock on them. I have tried a couple of things that have not worked and my next step may be to heat them up with my soldering iron in an attempt to defeat the threadlock. Hopefully I don't also defeat the motor itself!

There were several ebay auctions for full parts sets for a "Wade" style geared extruder. Given that the geared extruders have a better reputation for reliability, I decided to go to one of those right away. The extruder parts from the cast set are a bit rough anyway. I managed to win the auction and the parts should be here within a week or so since they are actually coming from Toronto, right here in Canada.

I should also comment on a post that I made a while back. I was going to order some of the trickier parts from Provantage to avoid having to adjust the cast ones. Although they were very helpful and prompt in their communications it turns out that Provantage does not ship to Canada (or anywhere internationally) unless you are buying the full set of Mendel parts ($1500!!!)

I guess I will continue with my "Hack it with sharp objects until it fits" method for the time being.

Powder Printer Recipes

2010-04-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

Powder printers, which lay down a thin layer of powder and then use a binder fluid to bond the object together, are now being built by the home hobbyist community. One of the factors limiting their usefulness is the powder being used as raw material.

Most commercial printers use proprietary materials in their print beds and they tend to be very expensive. Now that people are building their own machines there is a lot of interest in developing cheaper materials that can be created at home. There are a number of recipes for different powders out there for use in diy powder type printers. A lot of them, and the best of them, come from Open3dP (Open 3d Printing) at the university of Washington, though there are also a few others that I have seen on various forums.

I have collected as many of them as I have encountered in a single document which I am making available to anyone who might be interested. There is nothing revolutionary about this document. I will just save you the time of looking back through all the blog articles if you are trying to remember a formula. As time goes on I expect many people to be experimenting with different materials and I will update this document as I discover new information.

None of these recipes are my own. They are all the result of hard work done by other, smarter people so I can't answer any questions about them. Until I get a powder printer built I am not even able to try them myself. There is a lot of additional information available on the open3d site. That site is maintained by Professor Mark Gantor who has been very helpful in creating this document. Thanks to him especially for advising on how copyrights and proper credit should be handled. The Open3dP site should be the first stop for anyone experimenting with materials for powder printing.

For what it's worth, I offer this up to the powder printing community. The information is all in the public domain but the pictures are copyrighted by Professor Gantor. If you want to use the text in other documents please give proper credit to the original creators. The recipe book is in MS Word format and can be found here.

Assembly update #1

2010-04-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

Made some excellent progress on the x-axis this weekend. I only get about an hour at a time to work on the Mendel, due to the ongoing demands of my actual life, so it is going slowly. Especially since there are a lot of adjustments with an exacto knife and dremel required to make the parts fit properly.

X-Carriage with bearings aligned properly

I managed to fix the alignment problem that I had with one of the bearings on the x-carriage and then proceeded to construct the idler bracket and the vertical bearing 180. There are still some adjustments required because I can't align the bars as it stands at the moment. I will need to adjust the holes in the vertical bearing so they line up better.

Two shots of the Idler Bracket

Vertical bearing 180 (very rough parts, will need major adjustment with sharp things)

It was obvious that the cast gears that came with my RP parts are completely unusable so I posted a request on the Reprap Mechanics forum and discovered that Markus Amsler offers free Mendel gears for just the cost of shipping. A quick email and my gears are now on the way for the unbeatable price of $3.80. Markus is in Europe and he didn't specify the currency so I sent it in Euros, still only about $5.00 Canadian and well worth the price. Thanks Markus!!

I will post a picture of the crap gears along with the new ones when they arrive.

When assembling the idler bracket I discovered that the 4mm fender washers that I bought are exactly the same diameter as the bearings so they will not work to constrain the x-axis belt. I went to Canadian Tire (my favorite store) and picked up a handful of 6mm fender washers which worked just fine. I also finally bought a set of metric hex wrenches to make assembly easier.

4mm washer on the right. Too small. Larger 6mm washer on the left. Just Right!

The opto flags need to be installed as you assemble the x-axis carriage and the vertical bearing so I will have to cut them out before proceeding further. I tried to print out the template last night but couldn't get the scale right. I will try again today and will probably use HeeksCad, which was conveniently blogged about by Niel Underwood over at RepRap Log Phase. It looks like it would be able to match the dimensions on the dxf file to the printer to get the scale right. We'll See. I did get a start on this task by buying a six pack of coke and drinking several, so can report that I have made progress.

I have been having some trouble with the camera so I haven't posted any pictures for a while. I finally asked my daughter. Since she is a teenager she is, by definition, much smarter than me. She pointed out that the old camera that I was trying to use was crap, I have started borrowing her, most excellent, camera for these shots.

Sam the Science Dog

By the way, here is a picture of my assistant. Sam recognizes that I require constant supervision to keep from severing an artery with an exacto knife so he sleeps beside my workbench. Also, when I start throwing parts that don't fit, he brings them back.

Assembly Begins!

2010-04-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

It has taken a while but I have finally started construction of the Mendel. Definitely a very exciting day.

On Saturday, I went out to the garage and cut all the smooth and threaded bar stock for the machine. It took about an hour and a half. I bought stainless for the smooth bars and I went through two hacksaw blades cutting it. I smoothed out the ends of those on the grinder and I was ready to go. I actually still have to go out and cut the three jigs because I forgot about them at the time but, I will cut them as I need them.

My Molded Parts

The molded set of RP parts I bought from Ireland are extremely rough. The holes are all undersized, probably due to shrinkage in the mold material, and have to be drilled out. If the shrinkage in the rubber caused undersized holes it also probably caused the entire part to be slightly oversized. Many of the holes were filled with a rubbery substance and others were completely filled in with the casting material. I finally realized that parts of the rubber mold had broken off in the bolt holes when the parts were removed from the mold. The missing holes are where the bits broke off in the previous casting and were not present during the molding of my parts. This would indicate that the quality of these cast parts drops significantly from the first casting onwards. There is also some warping but not enough to cause problems

Anyone buying these cast parts should inquire whether they came from the first or second casting from a particular set of molds. Anything after that is suspect. Whoever bought the set that was cast after mine probably had most of the holes completely filled. I would not recommend these cast parts unless you can acquire them for considerably less than a set of printed ones. They require much more manual cleanup to be usable.

Construction

I started by cleaning up and drilling out the parts for the carriage assembly. The x-carriage upper and lower parts have a lot of trapped nuts and some of them needed to be enlarged or cleaned up with a Dremmel in order to get the nuts into them. The majority of them were OK, however, and a bit of pressure with a set of pliers allowed me to force fit the nuts into their cavities.

Strangely enough, my most serious problem was that I don't have any metric hex wrenches. None of my SAE ones would fit well enough for even rough work. I had to grip the cap of the screw with a set of pliers since they require more torque than I was able to apply with fingers alone. I will pick up a set of metric hexes this week.

My most serious problem was that one of the holes for the bearings on the lower carriage was missing and I drilled it at the wrong angle. You can see from the pictures that the bearing outlined in red will not sit correctly on the steel bar. I am going to have to remove this one and redrill the hole.

In the end, however, I was able to assemble the very first parts of my Mendel. I can see that the assembly will take quite a bit longer using these cast parts but they should all prove to be usable. I will certainly make printing a proper set of replacement parts a high priority as soon as the machine is operational though.

A Quick Update

2010-03-31T15:02:00.001-07:00

All of my parts have arrived. I will post some pics of the cast RP parts as soon as possible. They are quite rough but are usable. I may just order some of the trickier bits from Provantage. They produce all the printed parts on their commercial Stratasys® Dimension™ 3D printers in high-strength ABS Plus® plastic. They are pretty expensive compared to any other sources but they do this as a business, not a hobby. I know from experience that many factors conspire to drive prices up once you start considering commercial operations.

I attempted to order the drive gears and the x-carriage-lower_1off but their google widget told me that they didn't ship to Canada. An email to their contact address resulted in a very quick response from Nick Pace telling me that he would have it fixed in a day or so. I love good customer service!

This will probably drive the price of my Mendel up into "WTF territory" but I am past caring. I am having too much fun.

The Parts Collection

2010-03-26T10:40:00.001-07:00

Here are some pictures of what I have accumulated so far. The only thing that I am waiting for is my RP parts and they have been shipped so I expect them within the next 3 or 4 weeks.

All my metric fasteners. Not too exciting in the boxes but you can't build a Mendel without em.

The X belt and 8 ft of additional belt for the Y and X axis.

4 NEMA17 stepper motors. I will have to remove the gears currently on the shafts since they do not fit my belts.

50 624 bearings and 2 608 bearings.

Various Printhead parts from Makergear, including their heater kit for the extruder. It allows me to make a heater that I can remove from the extruder if necessary to place on another one. Handy if the extruder fails, which seems to be quite common with us beginners.

The lasercut chassis, build plate and circuit board mounts. all ready to go.

Mendel vertices from James Villenieuve. I won't need these now since I will get another set along with my RP parts but I will keep them as spares and perhaps to kickstart the build of a second Mendel.

The power supply that came with my boards is a small 12v adapter. Probably fine for running the Reprap itself but I also want to run a heated build platform, cooling fans for pos-print cooldown and maybe some lighting. I found a 500W ATX power supply on Ebay for only $20 (plus another 20 for shipping of course) so I ordered it as well. Once I have it here I can decide how big a project box I need to contain everything.

At Last!

2010-03-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

I have managed to acquire a set of printed parts. Actually they are a set of the cast polyethylene copies of the printed parts available from Ireland. They were pricey but I am unwilling to wait and what good is working for 30 years if you can't outbid the poor young engineers for things you want?

Also, my electronics arrived today from TechZone Communications. Unfortunately I have to take care of some real priorities before I can get back to my hobbies. We have been waiting for almost a year to get my daughter in to see an orthopedic specialist about a knee injury and we finally have an appointment tomorrow morning. That means that we have to hit the highway to Saskatoon this afternoon. No time to look over the boards.

Last night I took pictures of all the parts that have arrived so far. When I get back I will post them and hopefully start setting up the electronics and motors on the workbench to try everything out. It will probably take 4 to 6 weeks for the printed parts to get here from the UK so I should have time to get bugs worked out of the electronics.

The Steampunk Aesthetic and Rapid Prototyping, a Perfect Marriage?

2010-03-19T10:01:00.000-07:00

As you might notice from the title of this blog and some of the graphics that I have used, I am a fan of the steampunk movement. For me it probably started back in the early 70’s when I first saw Disney’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” and the movie version of H. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”. The look and feel of all that Victorian technological equipment fascinated me more than the stories and I have loved it ever since. During the intervening 30+ years I always thought that I was just an eccentric oddball (which, of course, I am) but apparently there were any number of people out there who felt the same. Over the last decade it has grown into a movement with it’s own websites, stores, books, newsletters, games and all the associated detritus of a modern social phenomenon. The specs above were created by Y43GR at Deviant Art.

These days I am more given to analysing things than I was back in my teens so I have been thinking about what it is about steampunk that attracts people. I suppose that there are as many answers as there are different people but, in my case, it is the fact that it represents the rise of the individual inventor and craftsman. During the late 1800’s the industrial revolution brought high quality equipment and parts within the reach of many people who previously were not able to manufacture anything themselves. They could take that hardware and use it to build their dream gadgets. It is the fact that these machines were one-of-a-kind pieces, built to high standards of both function and beauty, which makes them so attractive. The Victorian craftsmen lived and worked in an era when ornate decoration was as important as the actual operation of the device. Since every piece was a one-off, it was worth investing the time.

Jake Von Slatt's steampunk computer

This combination of mass produced industrial hardware and individual craftsmanship only lasted for a short time. Rising labour costs and the creation of the assembly line brought us to our modern world, where everything is affordable but nothing is unique.

So how does this relate to Rapid Prototyping? Well, we are now entering another era when individuals will be able to manufacture, in their own workshops, whatever they desire. These items will be as individual as their creators and, even if we all pass around the .STL files to make multiple copies, there is always an impulse to personalize “your” version of someone else’s design. A quick look at repstraps out there shows an amazing variety of designs, all reflecting their creator’s individual goals and design choices. They even have unique names, as was common for Victorian devices.

I have been wondering what a steampunk Mendel would look like. The rod used throughout would have to be brass, of course, as would all the connectors. The various plastic parts could probably be made out of wood but that really goes against the whole reprap philosophy. Perhaps black ABS with scrollwork grooves that could be later picked out with gold paint. Add a build surface of polished wood with a brass plate for the heater and you have a RepRap for Captain Nemo. Handy when you are on the bottom of the ocean without your full shipyard available and you need a replacement trigger for your electric rifle.

Nemo: "Drat, my electro-rifle is damaged. To the Mendel M. Aronnax!"

Perhaps the actual steampunk fad has just about run its’ course. Now that it seems to be everywhere on the internet, maybe folks will become bored with it. I hope not, I love the whole brass and wood look with the elegence that they imply. I am not enough of a sociologist to know for sure how long steampunk will last but I believe that the underlying philosophy that drives the design and creation of such unique hardware will continue to be apparent in the RepRap community for years to come

Curses, foiled again!

2010-03-18T13:59:00.000-07:00

This lot of Mendel parts appeared on Ebay. The seller was in Ireland and they are cast in polyurethane rather than printed or machined.

Here's a closeup. the quality looks pretty good. Of course looks can be deceiving but I thought it was worth the risk so I threw in a bid just shy of $400.

They finally sold for $465 which is still a bit too rich for me. I am hoping the fact that they were cast rather than printed or machined means that the seller will be making more sets. This could finally start bringing the price down.

Hopefully whoever bought these will post something to let all of us potential buyers know what the quality is like.

Ruminations on a Heated Build Platform

2010-03-16T11:54:00.001-07:00

In the early days of homebuilt rapid prototyping machines (that would be a year ago) there were constant problems with the parts warping due to cooling of the different layers of the object. Commercial machines have the whole build area heated in order to prevent this but that wasn't really possible given the RepRap's open grid design. Then someone had the brilliant idea of simply heating the build platform and a new era of predictably unwarped building was begun. Now anyone who is able to heat their platform can, with a bit of experimentation, produce good quality parts without throwing 50% of them in the trash.

It is fairly obvious that I will need to add a heated platform fairly soon after I complete the Mendel if I want it to actually be usable. I have investigated any number of designs on various blogs. Most of them look fairly simple but, being mechanicaly challenged, I want to take the absolute easiest path possible. I think that I have found that in Tim's design over at Bothacker.com. It is a bit more expensive than others I have seen but tons easier to implement. This guy is my hero, his repstrap design, using aluminum channel, is also extremely clean and elegant.

The following links and pictures have been shamelessy stolen from Tim's website.

The setup consists of the following:

4×4 flexible silicone rubber heater, 115VAC, with pressure sensitive adhesive on one side, ~$30
Commercial PID temperature controller, $42
Type-K thermocouple, ~$6

I find this approach attractive because it is basically a buy it and install it solution. The pads even come with their own adhesive already applied. He has also posted a couple of pics of his control box which is exactly what I was planning on setting up. It seems logical to have everything neatly enclosed in a project box and, in addition to the heater, there will probably be a number of additional systems to build and control as things progress. The workbench could become a mess of loose switches, wiring, etc. without some advance planning and organizing. Below are a couple of pics of Bothacker's control box which includes the bed heater controls, power supply, fans, control board, stepper drivers and an emergency cutoff switch. Very slick, and he still has lots of room on the front panel to add things.

These project boxes are not expensive. I have been looking as a couple on this site but I will wait until I have gathered all my electronics before ordering one to ensure that I get the right size.

As a final note - A new set of Mendel RP parts has shown up on Ebay so I threw a bid in on it. Given that the set sold by Adrian Bowyer went for $647 Canadian, I don't hold out much hope but you never know.

Holy Crap! This stuff adds up.

2010-03-15T14:38:00.001-07:00

Here are the actual costs for all of the parts that I have purchased so far. The laser cutting for the thick sheet is the one that I overpaid the most for. I subsequently found the same parts on Ebay for $33.00 US so I guess I got hosed. Happens to me regularly. All costs are in Canadian Dollars and these numbers also include shipping, which was overly high in some cases (in my opinion). The cost of shipping is always a significant cost out here on the Canadadian prairies. We are a long ways from everywhere.

I bought the bearings kit from VXB Ball Bearings for $62.00

Belts from SDP/SI (part numbers A6R3-C025 and A6R3-185025) for $32.00

I bought my extruder parts (nozzle, insulator, Heatcore) from MakerGear.com for a total of $37.00

All my metric Fasteners from Pointe Products for $81.00

I found 4 NEMA17 stepper Motors on Ebay for $65.00 including the shipping

Electronics are from Tech Zone Communications for $258.00 (includes the power supply and cables)

I got all my thick sheet cut locally at Laser Cut Mfg. in Saskatoon for $176.00

Total spent to date - $751.00

McMaster Carr does not ship to Canada so I had to find different vendors for my fasteners, belts, bearings, etc. My best find was Pointe Products, who were able to provide all of my fasteners and could probably have been a single source for everything if I had found them sooner.

You will notice that, for $750, I could have purchased a Cupcake from MakerBot and been printing by now (if they weren't out of stock). Oh well, the construction itself is a journey and I am looking forward to it.

Note - I have not yet received the electronics from Kimberly Andrus at Tech Zone Communications but she has been quick to reply to emails and very professional. I will post a review of the boards when they arrive. Her price of $215 US for all of the boards, including the extruder board as well as a power supply and all the cabling was just too good to pass up.

First Post

2010-03-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

Like many others at the moment I am beginning to build a Mendel 3d printer. I have decided to document my journey in the hopes that the information will be useful to other builders. I have built a few mechanical items in my life and I have a couple of older British cars that I manage to keep running so I am not too worried on that front. It is the electronics that I expect to be a challenge if anything goes wrong. I am trying to avoid that by buying them as completed items rather than kits of parts. I work in the software industry and, even though my technical days are somewhat behind me (about 20 yrs behind me), I'm sure that I can either manage the programming myself or talk one of my staff into helping me.

I have ordered all of the necessary parts except for the printed ones. Most of them have arrived and I expect to have the rest within the next week or so. I will post a cost breakdown of what I have purchased so far, where I obtained it and how much I paid. I have already found that I grossly overpaid for a few things that I could have found on Ebay or through the Reprap forums. Perhaps I can help someone else from making the same mistakes.

Of course, it is the replicated parts that are hardest to come by. I expect that the scarcity will resolve itself within the next 6 months or so since it creates a significant business opportunity for entrepreneur types. Anyone who is able to produce full sets of parts can essentially name their price at the moment. The set that Adrian Bowyer put up on Ebay about a week ago is currently listed at $427 (CAN) and hasn't yet arrived at the frantic bidding that always pushes things up a bit more in the last hour or so.

I have reached out to several of the user groups (without success so far) and I am also watching several sites that advertise the RP parts but are currently out of stock. I am still hopeful that I can find a set within the next few weeks.

If not I have plan B. Alvaro Fogassa documented the build of his 3d powder printer on his blog http://homemade3dprinter.blogspot.com/ and it looks like an excellent complement to the extrusion technology of the Repraps. I managed to find a printer identical to the one that he used on Ebay for $15 plus another $15 for shipping. I would prefer to build the Mendel first since it is better documented and I will have to do some design work on the powder printer but, if I become impatient, perhaps I will proceed with this project first.