Hello all of you,
Firstly, Adrian Bowyer, I'd like to say that your idea of a replicator and your speech about it really gave me a tingling sensation down my neck. It's one of those ideas that is not just pretty neat, but really something I want to be part of and help out with. I've actually had trouble sleeping because I had so many improvement ideas (which I'm all writing down).
I'm Erik de Bruijn, 25 years old. I found out about RepRap while looking for a H-Bridge setup to automate my drapes. Google pointed me to a page about an H-brigde on the RepRap wiki. When I found out what this project was I dropped the drape project and started reading. I forced myself not to start buying on impulse immediately and wait if the enthusiasm would wane... it didn't. I had actually started constructing a CNC machine 4 years ago, but dropped that because I wanted to make it so big that it wouldn't fit in my (small) room back then (student). Desktop size is a good choice I think. Also, it failed because I had to create anything myself. The open source EMC2 software seemed more complicated than writing things myself.
I'm already into PIC programming (wrote some RGB HW PWM led controllers on 18F4550 and similar) and made several PCB designs with a colleague. I hope to help this community with the extrusion of conductive material and also with simplyfing the PCBs by using a stronger PIC microcontroller with USB built in an able to
control all axes at once...
I've finished all the electronics. Together with setting up the software I needed only 2 (full) days, which is a great accomplishment for the RepRap team! I wonder how much time the mechanical parts take, because I have less experience in that field. I do think that someone with little or no electronics experience could do all the electronics, though it might be daunting...
Waiting for the BitsFromBytes shipment, I'm back to automating the drapes again.
There are some snippets about successfully extruding metal paste already,
could this be shared (preferably with .stl files and some more pictures) so people can work on this?
I'll hope to start blogging about my build progress (and issues of course) soon. I'll also post ideas as they take further shape.
I can make no promises of what I'll actually achieve, but I hope it's a lot.
I'd like to be able to edit/improve wikipages but registration is
restricted. Would it be a problem to make editing possible for anyone
that registers? Wikipedia doesn't even seem to require registration, so
that doesn't seem to be a problem? Or is it spam related? In that case
an idea would be to add a captcha an/or require verification from the team...
Maybe I'll work on a 3D scanner system that can be mounted on the XY carriage. I'd like to use the Wiki to document stuff...
Oh, I'm a founder of [
www.BudgetDedicated.com] . If the RepRap needs a fast European based private server (for hosting stuff, to backup to, host a mirror or for software regression testing or anything else really...). I could provide this free of charge. The current Australian based server is not really close to the majority of the RepRap users, although it's close to Vic IIRC, a prominent contributor
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Best regards, keep up this great work,
Erik de Bruijn
3rd years student of the University of Tilburg, the Netherlands
My studies: Information Management