Well it’s 2012 and the buckybot printed me out lots of Christmas presents. I hope my family isn’t totally sick of free objects.
I finally put in an arcol type hotend, aluminum block with resistor. It works great, at least after getting the nozzle and barrel tight enough to prevent leaking. My next step is to insulate the block and add a little fan. The fan currently setup cools it to much and after 10 minutes it gets too cold to extrude.
I decided to order up a ramps kit from ultimachine to finally get my mendel working. The only thing that i’ve had a bit of an issue with is the firmware. I managed to get tesla’s version of tonokip’s firmware working, I had to edit the pins to reflect the correct assignment for the 1.2 version of ultimachine’s ramps. I also managed to get the reprap 5D firmware working too. I find the quality with 5D better which I think is do to the acceleration being enabled.
So I have some videos of various things, mostly stuff related to this whole 3d printer thing. Enjoy
Must print more dome bracket’s. Well I love the newest rendition of the dome brackets with the ball and socket joint thanks to both effalo and yazzo for there work and everyone else who it wouldn’t be possible without. I’ve been making enough to do 1 dome and hopefully get 2 done sometime but sadly I’m waiting on some replacement pully’s for the Mendel. Thanks Kliment And mattymatt. I finally got a really nice pulley printed and wouldn’t ya know it’s the wrong one, well not completely wrong, it just won’t work with a stock sells x carriage. It was the pulleymod off a prusa repo and it’s slightly larger so it grips great just not for the tight radius on the stock sells x carriage. Luckily when I was on irc Kliment offered me some and the timing couldn’t be better since he was shortly receiving another shipment of as card adapters. Oh how I’d love for the Mendel to not need a computer, one day, one day. So until replacement parts arrive i decided to fire up the makerbot and put it to work. Sadly it’s like driving a bug after you’ve had a Porsche for a few months, it keeps working but it ain’t pretty, well perhaps debatable but nonetheless like the beauty of 16x microstepping and a stepped extruder. Oooo la la.
The Buckybot aka. A sells Mendel is working great, other than my bad pulleys. I have to print up a batch and bring them to work and setup the drill press proper, or cut the laser cut version on the cnc at work, I just don’t like using the 1/16mm drill bit or rather haven’t used it yet. I managed to get half a prusa printed. I love the absolute reduction in parts. I decided printing spare parts for a prusa would be quicker. I made the mistake when assembling the Mendel of not drilling out the holes. I basically threaded everything into the PLA pieces, thus making replacement of individual parts time consuming. The prusa on the other hand looks to be much simplified in this regard. Meaning one can easily snap parts out if need be. I might have to reprint the z motor brackets since I printed them oriented in the other direction. The turned out well enough I am just not sure if they’ll be as strong.
I have enough spare pololu’s and gen3 electronics I should be able to get a prusa Mendel running but after dealing with the simplicity of the RAMPS setup I’m not sure If I want to go back. Although with the post online of using hydrogen peroxide and vinegar with salt as the developer solution for circuit boards the RAMPS setup becomes even more appealing.
Well after fixing my idler wheel several times I thought I had it licked. After the epoxy not holding enough, the hot glue seemed great but wouldn’t get through 2 prints. So superglue I go. I let it sit for a couple days, then after a couple quick warmup prints I told it to do the printruder II block, after about 15 minutes the idler wheel stopped moving. It was still feeding the plastic and there appeared to be a crack in the acrylic idler wheel. So it looks like the third one is down. Amazingly it held out the print and I have a nice looking printruder block. This was the last piece I needed but figured I’d try to get a couple more prints in, or at least try. A couple prints later, or was it the new firmware that appeared and I couldn’t resist burning, no matter. The printruder was ready to be installed.
As Sumer in Calgary is coming to an end I’m starting to do more activities inside. I have two heatcores built they were working ok but the noodles were curling after a some time. On one of the reprap blogs someone had noticed a similar thing after lots of usage and drilled out the nozzle thinking it was becoming an oval instead of a a circle. Mine seems to curl but not initially which has started me to wonder if it’s not related to pid settings or something Else related to the new makerbot firmware 2.3 I think.
It all starts with an idea. I was brainstorming with a friend about some personal spheres and I got the idea to use old tent poles, the fiberglass ones with the shock-cord down the middle. So a few days of research and some openscad finagling I came up with a script to generate them. I printed one and posted it on thingiverse. A few weeks late user Effalo did up a full dome and posted a howto on his blog. He then uploaded some visual improvements for aligning the struts.
Finally the idea in my mind progressed into making spheres with LEDs on each node to use for some visuals so I started off on printing the 32 nodes. Well I got to 26, enough for the dome, but realized 42 was a more realistic number. I think it stems from my data from desert domes which was more about building domes, not spheres.
So here it is, the dome that is.
I finally got around to making a couple heater cores from makergear. Amazingly its not because my old one failed. One of these will be used for the new Mendel thats mostly complete. The mechanical part is all together so now I only have to work on the hot end. I printed up a wade extruder, the one modified for the makerbot but unfortunately one of the holes was off and I didnt use enough solidity ratio so I kinda already broke it. So until I get the energy to print up a new one I figured Id get the hot end ready.