Another Salt Lake area builder

Hi guys, I thought I would chime in here. My name is Dennis, and I live in Farmington. I've been building a Prusa for several weeks now. I'm just about ready to do a first print in the next couple of days, so I'll be fighting the learning curve of calibration myself. I just picked up some glass for my heated printbed today.

I bought most of my parts from Ultimachine and I've been pretty happy with their stuff. They're in the USA, so shipping is cheaper than those overseas sites. They even throw in a sample of PLA filament with each order, so I've got three different colors to play with now.

I'm an electrical engineer by day, so if any of you have problems with electronics, I'd be happy to help. I'm actually thinking of designing my own version of the Gen6 board and adding a heated bed temperature controller. I might even sell them online if it works out well.

-Dennis

Hey Dennis, I'm an EE guy too. well not quite, I'm still in school. But I took certification classes and have experience as a technician before deciding to go back to school for my EE.
Well working on my printer, I have had some ideas about what would make it better. If you decide to design a new board, let me know and I'll help you with it between my classes. I'll be starting my "junior" year in the fall. I've been keeping an eye out for a good "Senior" project and have been thinking of this project as well as some other open source projects.
One of the things I was thinking about doing with a new board design was replacing the processor with an FPGA and softcore processor. There are some obstacles to overcome with that idea, but a good design is do-able, and a softcore processor that's compatible with the existing firmwares has already been written. I also wrote my own processor in VHDL just so I could get more familiar with the inner-workings of processors. So I could modify it to fit our use if need be.

A well designed board with all the desirable fetchers in it could still be affordable too. It might even become the most common board used.

Anyway, If you decide to do anything let me know. I'm in Ogden so I'm not that far from you.

PS. I'm also looking for an internship somewhere if your company does that.
PPS. please ignore any type-o (if any) and spelling errors etc., it's the end of the semester and I'm running low on sleep.

I forgot to mention, I'm in Ogden. And I would be willing to help you with your printer if you have any trouble. I have a working printer if you want to see it we could get together some time.

Dustin (see this thread) is planing to come look at it some time in May when he gets out of school. He is also an EE guy. We should all get together and start really developing a community.

I don't know if you guys are still doing this but I am in SLC and would love to get into 3D printing. I'm actually just going into engineering, but I can't decide between Comp or EE, although there seems to be a Comp & EE program at the U. Anyways, post back here if you've got your printers going because I would be incredibly interested to check them out. Thanks.