help a newbie clarifiy things please

Hello guys,

i been lurking here for a few weeks now, and i spend countless hours on the massive wiki trying to get an idea what i get myself into.
I been thinking about building me a printer for a while now however there are a few things that would be great to get some advice for.

Mostly i am not sure what reprap design to go for. For a fair while i was pretty much hooked and investigating towards buidling a delta ( kossel ),
however, due to the format of the extruded alu and the printed parts i looked into other designs like the MendelMax 2.0.
A year ago i build a portal style cnc, so i guess i could cut most of the parts for a MendelMax2.0 myself except for some smaller printed parts.

-What kinda reprap would you suggest for a "noob" to build ?

Also electronics. Many different boards are listed, however i had a hard time finding out what advantages they have over each other.
-Do i go for a "normal" ramps set or should i aim for a different board ?
-How much of an advantage is it for 3d printers to run the steppers at higher voltages?
-Would you prefer a Rumba over a Ramps?

Any advice from you guys would be greatly appreciated!
regards

I'm also interested in this topic. I'm thinking of getting my first RepRap, and I'm interested in opinions. I went to the 3D print world trade show in burbank last month, and I was pretty impressed with Rostock Printers. Thats the one i'm thinking about getting.

I'll second the voltage inquiry. With the brushless power systems I use in my RC planes, running a higher voltage setup usually is more efficient i.e. less amps for the same watts. So what are the drawbacks to higher voltage like 24 instead of 12. The only two things I can thing of is maybe higher cost for a power supply and maybe the steppers may not run as hot at higher voltage.

take a read here on voltage [www.geckodrive.com] click on STEPPER MOTOR BASICS then POWER SUPPLY BASICS. It appears motor inductance and voltage are interrelated. (corrections welcome)

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/05/2014 12:06AM by Bill Clark.

An advantage to using a 24 volt psu is to reduce heating time for the bed and hot end.

Quote
noonerly
Also electronics. Many different boards are listed, however i had a hard time finding out what advantages they have over each other.

If you didn't find it already, there's a comparison chart of major features here.

Quote
noonerly
-Do i go for a "normal" ramps set or should i aim for a different board ?
-Would you prefer a Rumba over a Ramps?

For a first build, there are some convienence and aesthetics issues between a RAMPS board and the RAMPS derivitives like RAMBo and RUMBA. The derivitives have additional capabilities that RAMPS don't have out of the box that would require some additional electronics or connectors in order to duplicate. However some of those capabilities may not be normally necessary, for instance additional extruders, heaters, and temp sensors, or 24v capability vs 12v.

I went with a RAMPS board for my first build. It's a proven design readily available from many sources (although some are of inferior quality). It's signifiantly cheaper than other all-in-one boards. It's modular so that if I screwed something up, I at least had a chance of not releasing the magic smoke from my entire investment. RAMPS features was good 'nuff for my first build. However now that I've worked more with it, I think I would have preferred something that had screw terminals instead of header pins. My connectors just don't feel tight and secure. Having connectors (either header pins or screw terminals) along the edge I think would clean up the appearance of electronics a lot more. The opposite of having everything modular, it's not as compact as other boards, with or without individual Pololus/StepStick driver boards. I also wished it had more build in control for fans, I need a fan for the cooling the electronics, one for my E3D hot end, and another for cooling the PLA. But out of the box it can only control one fan if you have a heated bed. The biggest thing for me though was just price. The Ramps was 1/2 the price.