Building Mendel

Hello Everyone, been following this project for about a year and a half now and it has been very interesting watching this project evolve. I was always very fascinated with it and recently decided to jump in, got printed parts from ebay, hardware from McMastercar, .35 and .5 hybrid extruder from Brian, heated bed from reprap source, bearings-bars-rod from mendel parts (except he didnt give me stainless threaded rod like I ordered, just BZP and haven't heard back from him about that yet.)

Recently while building I ran into a hiccup, I'm missing 2 pieces of the the (x-vert-drive-side-plate-180-end_2off.par look HERE) I'm thinking I might be able to make something out of MDF, just to hold it together long enough to be able to print my own but if someone can print this for me, I will gladly pay you for your assistance.

As for electronics, I saw that TechZone had an all in one board with heated bed support (Monolithic All-in-one Electronics Kit), has anyone used or heard about this board? Also has anyone bought electronics from them, are the any good?

I have photos and progress I can post later.
My goals to add to this project are to make the RepRap have more accurate prints, and design a multiple extruder carriage with remote drive motors.

I think that's new, or at least I haven't seen it mentioned before.

I believe that techzone have recently sorted out their customer service side, and the quality issues which plagued their gen3 remix should not be an issue on a new board since the cause was fired long ago. On the downside, I can't find any documentation on it beyond the description on the techzone site, so if it goes wrong nobody except techzone themselves and other buyers of these electronics can help you. The other options which currently look good are RAMPS (Ultimachine are the only people producing it that I can find) and Gen6, which cannot control a heated bed but is otherwise a plug and play solution.

As for your missing parts, you should only have 2 of those, but your wording suggests that you have some and think you should have 2 more? If you really are short, then post in the wanted forum mentioning where you are, and someone will be able to print you some. Or contact the guy you bought parts from, if he sold you a complete set he is obligated to make up any shortages.

No mention on the techzone site if it's a micro-step driver.
It's not really any different from Gen3 or Gen6

RAMPS will give you a very good solution for minimal cost and it's easy to build yourself

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[richrap.blogspot.com]

Andrew, Right, only need 2 of them, and I don't have any.
As for electronics, yes, I kind of thought when I saw it, that no one uses it as I never heard about it or seen it anywhere.

I would also recommend the RAMPS shield. If you use an all-in-one solution and you burn up a stepper driver, for example, you have to replace all three of them. With the ramps shield, you just pluck out the bad one and replace it. It'll cost you $15 instead of $50-100. I like the compact size and easy pin access too. If you buy from Ultimachine, you won't have to worry about customer service either.

Just keep in mind that you would be using one controller to do the job of two. I'm noticing on mine that temperature control and motor control compete for processing time. I had to fiddle with the loop timings a bit to get responsive temperature control. I have yet to see if my adjustments will cause motor control problems. I might try to wire up my gen3 extruder controller simply for monitoring the extruder and bed temperature if it becomes a problem.

I would like to try Triffid's firmware with it, but there were some bugs that keep it from compiling in arduino last time I checked.

Techzone electronics have been known to have some issues but I think that they are serious about correcting any problems and they sent me out a replacement extruder board to me without a hassle. They are priced pretty good and they are modular, which can have both positive and negative impacts. If one board goes bad it's easier to replace, however wiring it all together can create reliability problems of it's own. The small boards are versatile and you can mount them more creatively and there are tons of blinking lights all spread around which creates a cool high tech look. I like my techzone boards now that everything works.