Show all posts by user

Re: Let's reconsider... - 11 years ago

Some people just don't know how to interact with others. Probably some trauma there causing mistrust and snap decisions based on minor details. A lot of the time, part of it is feeling entitled to lots of attention, regardless of whether it's good or bad. I'd advise simply deleting this thread and any others that ohioplastic takes in unnecessary, self-centered directions. It's not like he really

by macegr - General

Re: Midwest 3d Printer Fest - 11 years ago

Within 20 miles of a major airport would help a lot.

by macegr - General

Re: Let's reconsider... - 11 years ago

bigot: (Noun) One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.

by macegr - General

Re: Guerilla Marketing for RepRap? - 11 years ago

What does "A RepRap" mean? I don't think there's enough agreement on that topic to set up an us-vs-them campaign. Leave the marketing to the people who take RepRap concepts and make viable consumer products with them. That doesn't just include Makerbot. They might be great at marketing, but the RepRap community is great at coming up with cool technology. Play to your strengths. All the time, I

by macegr - General

Re: New to 3D Printing Please Help - 11 years ago

Ah, the Johnny Cash method of building a RepRap: The message of that song is still pretty relevant. Things change so quickly, you'd be far happier putting that money in savings and then buying all the parts at the same time. It'll be what, a year before you can build it? There's a real risk that no one would be making parts a year from now that fit today's printers.

by macegr - General

Re: De-icer to clean glass print bed - 11 years ago

It's all voodoo. Follow a specific pattern and it works, but you don't actually know which part of it is really working.

by macegr - General

Re: Show Your Best Recent Prints (Pics Inside) - 11 years ago

I've been chasing the quality dragon lately, and fully understand and respect that 40mm box. More so than the Yoda or rook.

by macegr - General

Re: TMI. RepRap circles. - 11 years ago

Exactly. RepRap is intensely DIY and multi-disciplinary, and everyone IS in a room talking at the same time. We all have different ideas. I'd be stunned to find two functioning RepRaps identical in every detail. If you buy a J-Head you get some parts in a bag, no one tells you exactly how to bend the wires around, insulate the leads, where to wrap the tape, etc. You're expected to have an excelle

by macegr - General

Re: Screw drive for X and Y axis - 12 years ago

Screw drives are unlikely to gain you higher resolution at the same speed. You'll need to significantly reduce speed in order to see a positioning accuracy improvement. It's physics. Consider that many users tune their RepRaps to operate fairly close to the maximum speed their machines can operate without losing steps. Losing steps occurs when the force required to accelerate the print head exce

by macegr - General

Re: Is the Marlin firmware ignoring the geometry in machine.xml? - 12 years ago

By what mechanism do you believe Marlin is reaching out through the serial port to the filesystem on your computer, and reading that machine.xml file?

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 12 years ago

QuoteTraumflug Absolute E commands? Teacup stops working when this reaches 4300mm or something. Relative E commands work better. Most of the slicers have absolute extruder as the default now, they zero the E axis frequently. I find this actually works better during complex prints. If you have a lot of extremely tiny relative E moves, they can fall behind pretty quickly due to decimal rounding in

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Sprinter narrow pulse width - 12 years ago

Would be interesting if it did the opposite...activate all pulses moving in a given stepframe at the same time. Then you'd automatically have diagonal steps when needed.

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Sprinter narrow pulse width - 12 years ago

I have not. I did test Teacup, the pulse width varies a bit with feedrate but the shortest pulses are about 12uS instead of 2uS. The pulse width seems to vary when more axes are used, similar to how Sprinter works with my change.

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Sprinter narrow pulse width - 12 years ago

My machine has been out of commission for a few months, after a major rework attempt. Finally got some wiring repaired and have been testing all the newer firmware. Had very high hopes for Sprinter, but it somehow didn't run well at all. No smooth acceleration like I saw in videos...just rough, noisy, stuttering motion. Decided to tear it all down and look at the pulsetrain coming out of Sprinte

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

I hunted through all the code to find the places where E is reset, and added code to allow zeroing E, but for some reason Teacup kept stalling out. I wanted to use absolute mode, where E is reset on every layer.

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

aka47: I'm pretty sure that you have soft endstops enabled in config.h for Teacup. I absolutely hate them for X and Y, but on the Z axis it's extremely valuable. I'm not the first person who's ever sent a file to a printer that starts a few mm below zero. With the Z soft endstop enabled, by zeroing the machine at the bed surface every time before a print, you can practically eliminate Z crashes a

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Teacup Firmware replicatorG & Skeinforge - 13 years ago

I believe most of the remaining problems with ReplicatorG and Teacup involve flow control. I think there's no concept of timeouts or retries, so it just keeps crashing if it either doesn't see something it expects, or gets something it doesn't expect. I noticed that the frequency of freezups increases with CPU load. The reprap5D driver may just be incorrect. I still haven't found very much from u

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

One more bug to track down: I've noticed that when I turn Jitter on in Skeinforge 40, it produces Gcode that somehow manages to crash Teacup. I should make some Gcode to demonstrate the problem, haven't gotten that far yet. The crash happens some random point within the build. I don't think I've ever managed to complete a build that had Jitter enabled. Disabling Jitter resolves the problem in eve

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Big Printer - 13 years ago

Threaded rods will be too slow, especially for a large printer, unless you invest in multi-start ballscrews etc. Very expensive. There is a very good reason that belts are used on the X and Y of the Mendel.

by macegr - Reprappers

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

I wasn't on the endstop branch. My problem was something to do with the Arduno Uno, remember? The exact same firmware loaded on a normal Arduino works fine.

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

I also have a question about the acceleration method. It seems almost backwards. When the tool is moving a long enough distance to notice, it appears to start moving at the maximum speed, and slowly wind down to a stop at the end of the move, and then start on the next move with max speed. "BREEEEeeeeeooooo......." Is that just RepRap style acceleration? If so...yuck. No wonder people lose steps

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

Here's a Teacup print. I've actually been trying to get something to print for a couple days (maybe 2 hours total work) and got only strange smears and blobs. One time I got a raft down and was pretty excited, until everything stalled for some reason. This print was the second one I tried using Skeinforge 40. I highly recommend using it for all reprap5d variants, because the stepper extrusion com

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

Repsnapper did run Teacup pretty reliably. However, the STL>Gcode converter doesn't really work. Also, try to rotate a part...and laugh as it goes tumbling off the screen. Try to create a raft and then see your part's toolpath hovering 50mm above the build surface. I want Repsnappers ability to talk to Teacup, combined with ReplicatorG's actual usable interface.

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

If someone can identify what was changed in RepSnapper that made it work with Teacup, please let me know...I have a working development setup of ReplicatorG.

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

Totally in agreement with you, aka47. I love the more polished interface of ReplicatorG and seeing it work was what finally made me take the plunge into building one of these things. The RepRap Host software is a prime example of traditional OSS reliability and user interface design Repsnapper's Windows port is abandoned. I plan to jump in over on the RepG topic and try to get this working reli

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

I did just get Teacup ~working with ReplicatorG after putting a new 328p on the Seeeduino. Got some filament extruding finally. I'm using the stepper drivers that came with my robot. It's not working all that well, since the ReplicatorG control panel will keep locking up for 5 to infinite seconds at random times. I think it's waiting for an OK that it didn't get. It wouldn't work at all until I d

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

Yep, the Uno 328p still doesn't work with Teacup when placed in a Diecimila board (requires manual reset to program too). So, there's something about the Uno firmware that is incompatible; either the bootloader, or something the IDE does when downloading to the Uno.

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

Triffid_Hunter: I'm using the IDE to upload. I think using the ZIP file is also OK, it appears to have the latest commit on the master branch. At least, the ZIP checksum changes every time you do a commit. The problem was definitely some difference between the Uno and the Diecimila/Duemilenova. And for most people, using the ZIP download and the Arduino IDE is a nice and simple way to try it out,

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

All right so this is why I wanted to know what exact hardware was used...I noticed that with all the stuff I had disabled, the hex size was small enough to fit on a Diecimila. So I tried that and it works. Changed board type to Uno, uploaded, doesn't work. Hope this helps anyone else unfortunate enough to have the same problem. Now we need to figure out why.

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Project: Teacup Firmware - 13 years ago

I set up and used Git instead of downloading the zip file, and it did not make a difference. The Arduino works fine otherwise. Triffid_Hunter: you said you used a 328p, but didn't mention the actual type of Arduino?

by macegr - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future