Greetings and hello! There doesn't appear to exactly be an 'introduce yourself' forum, but this one seems fitting enough.
I've been following the progress of RepRap for quite some time but I've finally decided to dip a toe in the waters by building and then (hopefully!) improving a Mendel printer. I'm already well into the process of acquiring the various hardware to build my first Mendel; the major stumbling block is of course the printed parts. I'll solve this soon enough, either through the construction of a RepStrap or acquisition of a pre-printed parts set.
I have of course a never-ending stream of ideas of what to do with a RepRap, but I would say my long-term driving goal is thus: Lower the barrier to entry. Right now it's a bit difficult to get a RepRap, and then once you get it, what do you do with it?
Getting the bits is a difficult problem, but not one I look to directly work on. Instead, it seems improvements to the existing documentation on construction and operation could be improved, and such an improvement would provide immediate and ongoing benefit to the community. Not to diminish the excellent work that's been done of course! Most everything seems to documented in some shape or form -- somewhere. But I feel if you handed the average person on the street a complete set of RepRap parts and pointed them to the wiki, I'm not convinced they would be able to get it up and running. Certainly not with a minimum of frustration. The wiki is a valuable resource and certainly sufficient for the above average technical user. But I believe it could stand some improvement. There's *always* a need for better documentation, after all.
To remedy this, in the short term I hope to produce for the lack of a better term an "IKEA-style" instruction manual detailing the construction of a Mendel device in an easy to understand format. It will contain simple pictorial instructions for each step of assembly. "Take these parts that look like this, and use these screws to assemble, then connect the various sub-assemblies..." etc. Future versions will ideally be linked to the 3D object files, using some mythical yet-to-be-invented documentation program, so that when device revisions are made the documentation can be regenerated with relative ease to reflect the physical alterations.
Perhaps it's a pipe dream, but I played a lot of Mario Brothers as a child, so I'm not afraid of pipes.
I've created a blog which may be of interest -- though the content is currently rather sparse and is very much a work-in-process. You can find it at: [
www.incunabulator.com]
I'll try to post semi-regular updates though I think most of my work will be on the wiki, forums and various other community sites.
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whispers of a clanking replicator... [
www.incunabulator.com]
