> > - What progress has been made on the RepRap, and > how far is it from complete self-replication > (minus imported parts, of course)? I would guess I'm less than a month away from starting to test printing my own parts. I'm hopeful that the testing phase will be less than a month then I'll be printing my own parts with no issues (I've spend the 6 months getting to this point, worby reece.arnott - General
Digg had a link to an article about Reprap (and a link to Adrians poptech address) Nothing really in the Digg comments but there are a few more on-topic comments from the article linked to. If you don't like jumping through hoops: Digg summary and comments Article and comments Poptech streaming/downloadable video/audioby reece.arnott - General
Short answer is the live CD will *not* automate the installation of all those files , it *will* install the entire Operating System but this can be done without wiping out your existing system. It just makes another option in the boot loader. It is a full install of Ubuntu 7.04 along with all the Reprap stuff. If you elect to install it, it is a full operating system in its own right. If you dby reece.arnott - RepRap Host
If you want to quickly get some sort of 3D printer working quickly and less expensively then try the seedling. However this a more a sideline project as it was/is needed only until there are enough people with Darwin Reprap machines to supply the need for the custom-made plastic parts. It's called seedling as it is designed to be a quick project you can do to get something that will be able to prby reece.arnott - Reprappers
It would be great if .deb packaging was finished this month as I'm hoping to start making the next LiveCD next month :-) Thanks for the great work.by reece.arnott - RepRap Host
I was thinking it would be a good idea to make a 'miracle machine' that took CO2, CH4, and H2O (cabon dioxide, methane, and water) vapors out of the air and produced something (solid or liquid) useful. And it just so happens that these are some of the major greenhouse gases (CO2 everyone knows about but methane is about 20 times more efficent at trapping heat and water accounts for around 60% ofby reece.arnott - Let's design something! (I've got an idea ...)
I've just spent a rather frustrating couple of days going trying to get the right number and lengths of nuts, bolts, and washers. Most aren't too bad but I've had issues with the longer M3 bolts and the shorter M5s. The speciality store that I know has them is closed for a couple of weeks over Christmas, hence the issues, so I've been going around the generic hardware stores. This got me thinkinby reece.arnott - Let's design something! (I've got an idea ...)
I notice that you've deleted the part about the reversed pin outs for the X axis. Can I take it that whatever the issue was there has been resolved?by reece.arnott - Mechanics
Try the Reprap LiveCD before going that far. You just boot off the CD and it will run an Ubuntu environment with the basic reprap tools in RAM. If you can't get it working using that then its not a host software issue and you're looking in the wrong direction. You can download it via bittorrent (the .torrent seed is on the sourceforge site). First of course though, try the echo-back idea. Open uby reece.arnott - Controllers
A company called NanoSolar has shipped the first solar panels for $1 per watt. There technology is based on printing the solar panels. Currently the technology, whilst cheaper than normal, is also less efficient. I'd like to see us in a couple of years using similar technology to print our own solar panels which can then be used to power a Reprap (probably via charging a battery). Currently wby reece.arnott - Let's design something! (I've got an idea ...)
It has my vote (as someone who has no idea how feasible that would be). The only issue I'd have is that there is the possibility that someone may come up with a reason to run all 3 motors at once and move in a all 3 dimensions at once. I can't think of any reason for doing so in the current situation although it might affect those that were wanting to use extrude in something other than air. Eg.by reece.arnott - Mechanics
I did a quick test to make sure it wasn't the firmware by swapping the Y and Z PICs and the issue stayed with the board. It has now changed though to the motor only going counterclockwise and only when you drag the slider (in the software) to the left. Hopefully thats going to make it easier to figure out whats going on. Edit: Found the problem. Faulty wiring connections for one of the endstopsby reece.arnott - Controllers
I got my stepper motors wired up over the weekend and had a couple of questions: Firstly, the instructions have a different pin combination for the X motor that is the opposite of the pins for the Y and Z. Why? Whatever the issue is, wouldn't it be better solved in software which would let all the motors be inter-changeable? Secondly, once I got everything wired up, I tested the motors and founby reece.arnott - Controllers
A quick way to zip up the source folders is with the following for loop: for folder in $(ls -1); do zip -r $folder.zip $folder;done Note that this will break if the folder names have spaces in them but the ones for the downloaded source folders won't.by reece.arnott - RepRap Host
Oh dear, can you say scope creep :-) I don't mind though. The way I figure it, for a wee while to come the LiveCD will be a good vehicle to 'get the message out there'. At least until we have a Darwin in every city. As such I want it to make a good impression and be immediately useful in some way for everybody. I'm going to be flat out with work and family for the next month, so I won't be actiby reece.arnott - RepRap Host
Its for persons just like yourself that I created the LiveCD so you'll make a good crash-test dummy, congratulations! The whole point of a LiveCD is that its something you plug into your computer, boot off it and it just works. If you click the install icon it will put it all on your computer but otherwise when you take the cd out and reboot everything will be back to normal. I've just installeby reece.arnott - RepRap Host
bobt... It would be nice but does the emc2 LiveCD currently have the Java JDK (70M or Art Of Illusion (20M or its equivalents? The squashfs compression is around 2:1 and sometimes upwards of 3:1 but thats still quite a lot of additional stuff and very quickly you get to the point of making it a LiveDVD or taking out functionality. These are the big packages so far but there are a couple of moreby reece.arnott - RepRap Host
Attached is a quick and dirty script you run from a hard-drive whilst booted in the LiveCD. It will download all the sources for packages in the Ubuntu repositories but make sure you have quite a lot of space (and bandwidth) as it will download approximately 2GB worth of files which will then expand to fill another 6GB. Because of this, I've run through a significant portion of my bandwidth forby reece.arnott - RepRap Host
Thanks. I'll be uploading it to Ians bitsfrombytes site shortly. I've had my computer on and seeding pretty much non-stop (partly as I was copying and sorting out files from a couple of 120GB drives to a 500GB, all on external US and it looks like I've chewed through nearly half my monthly bandwidth so far so its good to know its worth it. Hopefully in the not too distant future I'll also have aby reece.arnott - RepRap Host
The site is looking good. From my point of view the best part is the RP/Moulded Parts Kit The price ofby reece.arnott - General
In case you missed the other thread about the LiveCD, I've put the torrent up on sourceforge and The Pirate Bay (where I miscategorised it as Games-Other instead of Applications-Other). So far 4 people have connected and downloaded it from me. How many of them thought a game called Reprap sounded cool I don't know :-)by reece.arnott - General
Finally! There are now a couple of new files on the sourceforge page under LiveCD: the sources for the packages not available from the Ubuntu source repositories plus a torrent for the LiveCD itself. Direct link: The tracker for the torrent is The Pirate Bay so if their servers get raided again there may be a small delay :-) A couple of pointers on the whole bit-torrent experience (from a neby reece.arnott - RepRap Host
OK, that time it got right to the end and something crazy happened at the sourceforge end to give me a zero length file :-( Plus I've just about reached my bandwidth cap for the month. I'll wait till next week when my bandwidth counter resets and I'll share it out as a torrent. Its always something isn't it?by reece.arnott - RepRap Host
Looks like the upload stopped half way through while I slept. I've restarted it and it is estimating another 14 hours to go :-(by reece.arnott - RepRap Host
I think I know where the corrupt file came from! I just tried to download the file referenced in the wiki instructions by right clicking on the link and it downloaded a file of the correct name. But, it was 6.7KB and when I went to look at it with a text editor I found it was a html file. So, I went back and actually clicked on the link and found that it gives you a list of the latest revisionsby reece.arnott - RepRap Host
I actually laughed out loud when I read that. Its a good thing the office happened to be empty at that moment. Anyway, I'm in the process of uploading the 0.4 version of the LiveCD to sourceforge... 9 and a half hours to go now... and if anyone wanted to design a cd label for it I'll put that up as well. Feel free to torrent the cd if you like. Personally I'd wait for a couple of weeks and seeby reece.arnott - General
I am currently in the process of uploading 0.4 of the LiveCD to sourceforge. It looks like it will take around another 14 hours. I hope it will be finished before I go to work tomorrow so I can click the last OK button on my way out the door but I'm not hopeful. So sometime in the next 12-24 hours it will be available on sourceforge. First a few negatives: Its based on the Ubuntu Feisty CD I hadby reece.arnott - RepRap Host
Fixed it. As I suspected it was a bent pin on one of the corners of the chip. I just took the chip out, carefully unbent it and carefully reseated the chip. I probably should have taking note of which pin it was but I didn't and now I can't tell. Oh, well.by reece.arnott - Controllers
I've been meaning to say something about this for a while now but something just jogged my memory at the right time... A number of months ago I brought a quantity of stuff from the Rerap store: mug, t-shirt, cap and a number of mousepads. Between them they've been a great tool to get the word out. Just last week I was wearing my Reprap t-shirt and a friend came up and asked me what it was aboutby reece.arnott - General
I have all my opto-endstops working... except for one! The max endstop on my z controller board (v1.2.1) is not working i.e. it never stops the motors. If the opto-endstop is replaced by a known good one it still doesn't work. Even when you just insert and take off the jumper it still doesn't work. The min works just fine. I was thinking of swapping the chips around to see if its an issue withby reece.arnott - Controllers