Standard size RP parts and adapted software for Ft. lbs. Americans!

Has anybody thought of using feet and inches in the RP parts? The software would have to be adapted, but these parts are easier to find than metric, especially in Dayton, Ohio, home of Mendelson's!!!

Talk to Forrest Higgs, whose overall approach in Tommelise seems to include something approaching "I'm an American, so I'm not metric" :-) See: [www.3dreplicators.com] for the deviations from the Reprap philosophy that underly his approach.

BTW, I think his comment about "Tommelise has been created for people who aren't particularly clever ..." may be overly humble -- anyone who can construct anything even vaguely resembling a working repstrap, no matter how deviant(!), at this stage of the project, is in reality a pretty clever and multi-skilled individual!

Jonathan

"BTW, I think his comment about "Tommelise has been created for people who aren't particularly clever ..." may be overly humble -- anyone who can construct anything even vaguely resembling a working repstrap, no matter how deviant(!), at this stage of the project, is in reality a pretty clever and multi-skilled individual! "

It's all relative. Darwin is using some pretty hefty steppers and will draw quite a few amps. The chips that let you do this, like the L298N, are good but not something that recommends themselves to a bright 14 year-old. Get the connections wrong and you can have some spectacular results. I was the first RepRapper to use the L298N successfully, so I speak from personal experience gained painfully on the way to that success.

"Talk to Forrest Higgs, whose overall approach in Tommelise seems to include something approaching "I'm an American, so I'm not metric""

The problem with going metric in the US is that you have to special order most of your parts. That puts Americans wanting to build RepRaps at a distinct disadvantage.

I have these brand new steppers I gtot for $3.00 a pop! Lin Engineering 5618S-54 with a step gear on the end! I live close to Mendelson's where they have any kind of fastener or threaded rod you can think off all for a $1.00 a lbs! I can get nuts. bolts, cap head bolts, cotter keys, you name it, CHEAP! Mendelsons buys GM surplus from the many auto plants down here. The third floor is electronics, mainly diodes, transistors, (like tip 110 darlingtons), connectors and 7400 and 4000 series IC. I can't use the RP software because my laptop is still using windows ME, time to upgrade! If you need any STANDARD HARDWARE I can get it cheap. Why couldn't I use the Darwin boards on a Tommelise machine? Do you have mechanical plans? Mendelsons also has a wide assortment of timing belts too and since they are moving, they are having a 20 % off of everything. The counter people on the third floor are friends of mine, so they give me special deals, (I've been coming in for 16 years!)
I think I could build a Tommelise and use it to make standard parts for a new Darwin.
I would appreciate any help you can give me. I think I'm going to check if you made a blog for the Tommelise construction.

you could definitely use the reprap boards on a Tommelise style repstrap. you may have to end up hacking some software or firmware, but they are designed to run a 3axis machine + 2 print heads. no problem there.

Yup. Mind, depending on how the firmware is written you might have to adjust a few parameters to deal with the different thread pitches on the non-metric studding rods that are used to drive the axes. I'm not sure whether that is done in the PC-based programme or in the firmware.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/04/2007 03:43PM by Forrest Higgs.

Is anyone planning on making standard size RP parts? I can't use the C compiler because it is for Windows XP and I have Windows ME. I would like to see the C code for all of the axis, if someone wouldn't mind emailing it to me englewood1@hotmail.com
Thanks
i




i

C code? Reprap uses C code for the microcontroller firmware but not in the controller programme. The microcontroller code is generated with the SDCC compiler. If Me will run Java it should run SDCC. Mind, Me is arguably the worst implimentation of Windows that happened till we got Vista.

I downloaded this but I get no executable file in the C:\programs\SDCC\
directory. No compiler. I have a C compiler, so if I hd the C code, I could, at least look at it

I have the HEX code, but not the C source code. It has to be there somewhere, right?

"I have a C compiler, so if I hd the C code, I could, at least look at it"

You should be able to look at the code with something like Notepad or Wordpad. It's nothing special.

The C source code for the Reprap firmware is exactly where it should be -- in the publically accessible Subversion repository. There should therefore be no need for "please email it to me" requests.

Interested parties can either check it out (there are open source zero cost SVN clients for Windows, including TortoiseSVN [tortoisesvn.net] ), if you want a local copy of the C sources. Or, you can just browse the entire repository online from any reasonably working web browser - even a simple text mode browser such as Lynx works (I've checked, and I did it from a machine running FreeBSD 4.x, just for fun)! Start at [reprap.svn.sourceforge.net] for the C sources to the XAxis stepper controller, for example.

If you are just reading the C sources, your Windows OS is not too much of a handicap at all, and you definitely do not need a compiler to read them :-)

BTW, you *might* be able to compile the version of SDCC that we are currently using under Cygwin [www.cygwin.com] , and so develop Reprap firmware that way, though this is as yet untested. So, if you want to take part in a research project, have a working knowledge of C, and the Reprap firmware is of interest to you but you are feeling hobbled by your choice of OS, you could "research" getting "our" version of SDCC to work under Cygwin, and tell us how far you get. That could be a nice contribution.

Getting the whole Reprap software development toolchain portable to Windows and Mac OS X is definitely going to be a useful thing to do, even though those OSes are not themselves "replicable" in the way Linux is, and so they are not the OS platform of choice for exponentially growing Repraps with. Personally, I'd like to see Solaris as a further OS choice if it isn't too hard to do, but I'm probably one of very few people who might care about that :-)

Jonathan

cygwin isn't exactly untested, I and Simon, who showed me the link about it have both compiled and used hex files generated from it to make pics talk and blink lights. Now this is dependant on the version of SDCC you use. I found problems trying to move to the latest code. I don't think anyone has publicly gotten past that bump. I think the makefile that downloads the particular version uses 2500 svn or 20051210 cvs or something like that

Cool! Any chance you could document the state of Cygwin support as a Reprap firmware development platform, on the Wiki somewhere appropriate? Please? :-)

cvs -D 20051210 is what the firmware/Makefile grabs under Linux, too, BTW.

Thanks,

Jonathan

I didn't have to do anything special, I started at
[www.reprap.org]

and then I got the current sources from svn and built noting that I matched the structure that Simon used in the zip.

The instructions for setting up Cygwin for SDCC is pretty good on the SDCC site.

[sdcc.sourceforge.net]

More useful Wiki pages that are not linked on the path I would have expected! Thanks for the pointers.

We should probably link to CygwinBuild from somewhere in the HowToBuildReprap tree? Maybe from RepRapWindowsSoftware, or from its developer-oriented equivalent if that page is now becoming user-oriented??

Jonathan