Electronics, software, interaction - where do I start?

sorry if this is the wrong forum, but i have a quick question.

i have absolutely no understanding of the electronics or software involved with reprap or 3d axis robots at all.

If someone could give me a link to where i can learn about the various electronic pieces and what they do, as well as a link to learn about some of the software, and how it interacts with the hardware (for example how it knows how much to move the motors to get the extruder where it needs to be) that would be great!

I enjoy learning, and i learn by searching for things, the thing here is... i dont even know what questions to ask, so a basic tutorial on these things would get me started

[I've split this to a new thread. (It's a good question.) - Sebastien]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2010 09:47PM by SebastienBailard.

those are settings you must put into the headers before making your firmware: see [reprap.org] discusses telling the firmware about your machine.

the basics of the 4-axis machine are a motor driver for each motor (X, Y, Z, and extruder), and a central controller to keep the motors' movements coordinated and located. you also need end-stops so it can reset the machine to a known state at power-on or after an error. the reprap also needs something to control the heater temperature.

The FiveD gcode adds movement speed into the list of things to coordinate, so we can do acceleration and still extrude the right amount of filament.

The current mendel design splits extruder control to a separate smaller controller so a machine can easily have multiple extruders without tying up lots of I/O lines on the main controller. A machine can have as many or as few controllers (and axes!) as you want, as long as the movements remain coordinated enough to do what you want.

thankyou

so, technically its possible to use this with any machine that i build?

I think so..

if you want to do subtractive stuff, replace extruder with rotating spindle and tell skeinforge or w/e that you're using a cutter rather than an extruder. skeinforge seems to have options for lasercutters and wire winding too