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More useful would be to have AOI able to export some form of Step file - that preserves more of the design intent, and is editable in most CAD packages.
I heard some noise on the Alibre forums that they were trying to introduce an open, cross platform file format for CAD. It would be a great thing if it happens.
Wade
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Wade
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General
I don't know anyone that uses the max endstops; none of my 3 repraps use them. Do you have 3 for the Min endstops? If not, what country are you in - I have some extra optos I could sell you from Canada.
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Wade
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Wanted
Generally they come across as mm, at least in this project.
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Wade
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3D Design tools
Give it a shot!
Maybe try a 1 mm fine diameter to start with, to minimze the friction. Nophead estimates the nozzle friction varies with the cube of the nozzle diameter, so going from 0.4 mm to 1mm would let you use about 15 times more nozzle length with the same polymer pump.
Wade
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Wade
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Plastic Extruder Working Group
Hey Steve, my extruder gives you about 3 times more torque and resolution than the standard Mendel extruder (which also requires a stepper). Also, you don't have to machine the stepper shafts, and the pinch wheel is really easy to make. Finally, the springs are a lot easier to adjust, and more reliable than the fixed version. In my expeience, it's way more reliable than my old Mk2, which has b
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Wade
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Reprappers
Simon - I like the idea of the monocoque shell. Sort of like the bumpers on the Parrot AR drone, but structural. I was imagining a spherical hull, with the propellers deep enough inside that it would be safe to fly around people. I think that the smaller propellors loose a fair bit of efficiency though; maybe 4 ducted fans might work better this way. The shell would be pretty heavy right now
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Wade
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Let's design something! (I've got an idea ...)
Assuming you're using the 5d firmware, it's in the configuration.h file for the motherboard firmware.
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Wade
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RepRap Host
Hey, neat, some of those are probably printable, once we get our resolution up a bit.
My first 2 RepRaps used plastic bushings everywhere, but they do tend to wear out over time - I've got about 50 km of head travel on one of the machines now. That's one of the great things about the Mendel - if there's any wear over time, (and there should be little with ball bearings and steel rods), it's ver
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Wade
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General
There's lots of ways to do it - those mods are setup to get rid of the ATX power supply. I can get ATX power supplies for $10 used, so I just bolted one on to the side of my Mendel. I put the upper circuit board on the same side as the stepper circuit boards so all the power connections would reach.
Here's a photo:
I think the XLR connector was just what Adrian had handy. Anything will do,
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Wade
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General Mendel Topics
It's not far off, although I agree with Nophead, in that I don't think friction is the only thing that matters here. Granted, my hobbed teeth are a lot smaller than his, and it's probably a combination of the two.
I tried looking up the yield strength of springs based on the dimensions I have, but it's not an easy thing to calculate. The numbers I came up with were either too high, or too low.
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Wade
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Plastic Extruder Working Group
Ah, sorry, got you confused with Liav, from Toronto - he has a Darwin that I printed for him.
A nema 23 won't fit on my extruder, but you could probably get away with direct drive with a Nema23. It will be pretty heavy though, so you might have to slow things down a bit, but not likely. You will get some bending of the X rods from all that weight though.
Good luck!
Wade
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Wade
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Reprappers
Working on a Wiki page update about that, but in the meantime, I use 1 mm diameter music wire bent on a 1/4" arbor, resulting in a spring with a 10 mm outer diameter. 4 active coils per bolt works well.
The maximum pulling force you can get out of this extruder is directly related to the compression force you get on the filament - stronger springs will give you more pull. 1 mm springs got me
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Wade
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Plastic Extruder Working Group
No one is saying that it will never be possible to make anything dangerous with a RepRap - in fact, I've hurt myself several times already just by being incautious around various high-energy bits here and there.
The point is, weapons research isn't welcome here. It's a bit like spam - just because it's possible to advertise unrelated business opportunities here does not mean that it is a good i
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Wade
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Administration, Announcements, Policy
Oh hey, meant to post here, but I've been busy.
I had a lot of trouble getting the no-spring stepper extruders to grip well enough and put out enough force at the same time, so I mixed up my own version:
So far it's worked quite well, for quite a few people. Send me an email, Liav, with your address, and I'll mail you the parts for one of those - shipping across Canada is pretty cheap. Th
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Wade
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Reprappers
It's worked for me on an Ubuntu VM running on a Mac with VMware. You need to make sure the USB cable is assigned to the VM though.
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Wade
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General Mendel Topics
In terms of the upper limits of part quality (without post processing), I think Nophead's parts are the best so far. Some of his parts are made on a RepStrap, and some on a Mendel, but they all look very nice.
Check out his blog here:
Or some of the parts he has for sale -
and
All of the reprapped parts do have a fair amount of surface roughness, and I don't think we'll see anything lik
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Wade
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General
Look up Ralith's gcdump - it's a simple command line gcode sending program.
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Wade
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Controllers
Neat idea. Steppers have a fair bit of mechanical advantage with a small pulley. They get many coils / mm that way; I think a 200 step stepper has about 0.2 mm/step res when full stepped (I half step mine) with the usual pulleys; that would be about 0.8 mm per coil on a linear rig, I think. If we can get away with 16x microstepping, that might be as much as 6.4 mm per coil; that might be do-a
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Wade
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Mechanics
No worries - I was just saying that tongue in cheek. Somewhat.
Although I own one of BfB's original products, a cast Darwin, since BfB has switched to closed source I'm less inclined to participate on their forums. I'd rather contribute to on the open source side of things. I respect your invitation, but politely decline it. Unless I'm wrong and they are posting their source files, but a q
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Wade
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Let's design something! (I've got an idea ...)
Well, you mentioned it here, and I like this forum better, so I'm responding here.
I was curious about the wall thickness, as I've found that warping is directly related to infill density - more solid objects warp more, in my experience with ABS. I've also thought a bit about breaking up the first few layers of a print to limit the length over which the thermal strain builds up, but I found w
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Wade
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Let's design something! (I've got an idea ...)
Zaking17, I'll print some parts for you. Let me know what you need, email me at wbortz @ gmail dot com. One of my Darwins is set up with a 1 mm nozzle, which is much more effective for building larger parts. I did a bit of work on accelerometer based sensors for prosthetics with Ossur a few years ago.
Wade
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Wade
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Let's design something! (I've got an idea ...)
I just tested my Makerbot Motherboard 1.2, and it doesn't power when I plug in the USB cable only. I think there's a jumper you can populate if you want it to do that, but in the default configuration you need to supply power via the ATX connector before you can talk to it.
The extruder controller is different - it gets power from the USB cable. Watch out - I've had my computer spontaneously s
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Wade
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Sanguino(lolu)
- that explains the M113 command. 1 would correspond to a PWM value of 255, or about 12 volts output. I use 0.75 on my geared nema17 extruders.
Wade
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Wade
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General
I wonder if a 2:1 pulley rig would help preserve accuracy over generations? The accuracy wouldn't be 2x, but it might be enough to keep things on the positive side.
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Wade
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General
How thick are the walls of your hollow objects? I'd be curious to see if the technique works with more solid objects - a hollow build does not have many layers for the thermal shear stress to build up in.
I've been getting around the warping by building the larger parts faster, in PLA, and with a larger nozzle size.
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Wade
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Let's design something! (I've got an idea ...)
Any file with a .dist on the end is generally for distribution - ie, that's the default "distribution" file that gets copied over to reprap.properties when you first run the software.
On Linux and Mac systems, the reprap.properties file can be found in the .reprap directory in the user dir. I don't know where it would be on a windows system, but try searing for reprap.properties, and you'll pro
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Wade
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RepRap Host