documentation state of the art?

Hi there,

I'm working on some ideas to improve the packaging quality + general build ease of the RepRap (especially for newbies), and one area I've been looking at a lot is the documentation. I've seen the wonderful visual Prusa Mendel instructions, and I was wondering if these are the current state of the art? I expect so since they're pretty great, but just wondering.

Thanks,
Justin

RepRap changes at such a fast rate it would be a full time job to try and keep up with just one variation of machine.

And the beautiful Prusa manual is made using sketchup to export the pictures of the model by a dedicated individual.

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Hi there,

The Prusa Visual Instructions are reasonably up to date I think. I try to implement the suggestions and updates that appear in the comments section or (preferably) on the issues page so that it is in sync with the assembly instructions on the wiki. There are a few comments and additions that I have decided not to add because they are not so important - and I figure most people will at least look over the wiki at the same time. Because my Mendel is up and running I only look at the wiki page from time to time.

The biggest problem is that some changes can affect all subsequent images, for example, recently the bottom Z rod was moved from over the frame rods to under - but I certainly don't have the time to update every subsequent image (dedicated I may be (thanks Sublime), however the day job takes precedence )

Anyhow, if you find a big discrepancy with the instructions I would appreciate hearing about it.

Cheers.

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garyhodgson.com/reprap | reprap.development-tracker.info | thingtracker.net

Gary your instructions are fabulous, they were not identical to my setup which has lm8uu carriages (gregs) and felt x (prusajr) but we should at least be expected to use some common sense
Thanks for the hard work, some of the info was invaluable!

Riboflavin - have you checked out the assembly videos? I prefer the picture and text method by Gary but a lot of people like the videos as well. They're here:
[reprap.org] - I can't comment on how up to date they are but based by the drawings it seems as relevant as the visual guide

Prusa has been working on something called thingdoc that automatically generates documentation from the scad files.

We have talked about taking this further to generate visual documentation much like the stuff you are referring to, but doing it directly from the scad models so that you can easily build new documentation after making a design change.

The thing that is missing is being able to export a png from openscad from the command line. This would be a simple thing to implement, but it hasnt been done yet. Once that is available, and the effort is put in to make some scad "assemblies" showing the step by step assembly (much like the existing visual doco) it should be as simple as typing "make documentation" and it will regenerate the doco automatically.

That should be the ultimate goal.

That would be very cool - then each derivative or modification could have it's own, self-contained, up-to-date documentation too (so long as the developer updated the thingdoc files of course).

Do you know what the current state of play with Thingdoc is Greg? Is it actively being worked on? I'll happily help out if I can.

Cheers,
Gary

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garyhodgson.com/reprap | reprap.development-tracker.info | thingtracker.net

gary: if you want to help and are capable, update openscad to have a scad->png command line option.
it already can generate png's (part of the animation capability)
and it already does scad->stl from the command line, so it shouldnt be too difficult.