Show all posts by user

Re: High performance motor controllers - 9 years ago

Hello, I've waited and hoped for a project like yours. Thanks for making it open source. How heavy is a board+4 motors? I'm in desperate need of lighter motor alternatives to drive the Hangprinter Project forwards. If you think that a oDriven Hangprinter a good idea I would like to work with you! PS! See my blog for pics and description of Hangprinter.

by tobben - General

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 9 years ago

A little uneven mm/degree on the belt driven axis it seems?

by tobben - Mechanics

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

Looks very good!

by tobben - Mechanics

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Swapping out all of gcode is a larger project than just portability. What do you think about moving machine specifics from ini-files to Configuration.h files? Would you use it? Would it make RepRaps better? Would it bring RepRap to people not currently RepRapping? Would you contribute?

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Thanks! Expressing alternate ways to fabricate an object (permutations in gcode) would be something to add if needed after we made static portable gcodes work well. I imagine it would best be done by expressing mappings from machine capabilities to gcode (one mapping per layer or something, I don't know), and not by expressing complete alternate gcodes. The permutations problem is different from

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Agree about need for good top-level languages for objects and how to manufacture them. I'm suggesting improved (but still sub-optimal) gcode as a compromise to save in on required work hours. If lots of interest build up around changing stl and gcode for something better entirely then count me in on that project =) Gcode has some fundamental limitations. Gcode files are ASCII-encoded, and theref

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Yup, portable gcode would be for the lazy and those designers with detailed fabrication instructions. I kind of envy designer that get to assume full STEP-NC support. Also the programmers that get to work on STEP-NC support in slicers and firmware are quite lucky. I have a Master's in engineering physics, specialized on scientific computing in C and some experience with firmware hacking for my

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Changing gcode after it has been sliced once doesn't seem rational to me, unless your machine has very special needs. Why not just slice the 3d model instead? Portable gcode won't make either stls or slicers go away... Most people own 0.4 mm and/or 0.5 mm nozzles, so I think you under-estimate the potential portability of tool paths.

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Wow! Careful and well thought out post-processing of gcode can give developers fantastic flexibility, that's very true Nice work!

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Nice, Pronterface hacking is a lot of fun =) Would the pre-converters allow a designer to tell my RepRap how it should manufacture an object? For example, "print with this face down, use 1 mm perimeters, at least 12% infill and 4 solid 0.25mm bottom layers" or similar. The kind of slicing instructions that often go into Thingiverse descriptions and read and written manually into people's person

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Changes to both firmware and slicer required to make this work would be small. It's just a matter of moving a few gcodes from the slicer to the firmware to begin with. Re-slicing gcode doesn't make sense to me. Why would you want that? Temperatures for different filament types are a real issue. Manual adjustment, the way we already operate, would work as a start. It would be nice to enclose fil

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Calibration constants will be the same whether you feed them into a ini-file or a firmware. You do not in general need to compile/upload firmware to feed it some constants. Machine specifics should be contained within the machines, and their interfaces should be kept clean if you care about design principles. Gcode is the interface between the desktop computer and the RepRap. Firmwares are not c

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

For convenience. It would make RepRapping easier and allow us to leverage on each others' slicing work as a community. Examples: I often run into damaged STL-files on CAD sharing sites. Portable gcode would save in on my time and attention even if it made my printer run slower, if it just worked. My teen workshop students want to "just press print" a couple of times before they dig into slicin

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Consuming STEP files would be great, but requires a huge effort. How do you suggest we start a STEP consumption project?

by tobben - General

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

Cool! Yeah, big printers extrude lots of plastic. I've seen people automate material costs calculation, so they don't accidentally print expensive things 12 mm rods are quite expensive where I live. How did you source them? Are they chromed?

by tobben - Mechanics

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

=) The best work is that who has already been done. Pressure advance compensates predictable delay (hysteresis) between extruder acceleration/deceleration and changes in plastic flow observed in Bowden setups. Useful for making corners sharp even if hot end decelerates before it turns. (Edit: Pressure advance is largely superseded by autospeed feature in Slic3r.) Instead of skirt, I thought eac

by tobben - General

Re: Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Yes =) Would you be interested in developing or using portable gcode?

by tobben - General

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

I see the overheating you mention in some places, but once again very consistent in putting one layer exactly on top of the previous one. Do you use 12 mm rods for the Z axis as well?

by tobben - Mechanics

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

Nice! What is your aim and philosophy with the design? Would you say you have prioritized print quality over price? Have you prioritized ease of assembly, low maintenance or other aspects highly? I find it interesting that you use only 1 smooth rod along each lead screw since I like to prioritize low parts counts.

by tobben - Mechanics

Interest in saving effort by sharing gcode? - 10 years ago

Hi All! I'm posting this thread to poll the attitude towards the portable gcode idea in the community. The idea is to avoid having to slice for oneself. One person slices and distributes gcode (or other kind of RepRap instructions), many people download and print. The idea has circulated in the community for some time, see gcode alternatives list on RepRap wiki. I'm interested in the idea becau

by tobben - General

Re: Can I get a stupidity check on my idea please? - 10 years ago

You're cool if you manage to implement such a map in a working fashion. If you use relative positioning instead of absolute, you could give the map a much smaller memory footprint. Divide long lines moves into smaller ones in firmware before applying map. Such a relative positioning map would only work by itself if there is a constant relation between motor rotation and hot end movement. In a p

by tobben - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

Looks like stunning layer consistency from what I can see =) Congrats! What do you think about the cornering? They look a bit on the round side on the pictures. Do they feel sharp in your hand?

by tobben - Mechanics

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

This one: Anti-Backlash Nut Block for 8mm Metric Acme Lead Screw ?

by tobben - Mechanics

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

Thats interesting. What are the specs of the two different stepper motors (the Motech and the Folgertech one)? I've noticed surprisingly high inductance in some shorter Folgertech 34mm Nema 17 motors before (see comments 14, 15 and 16 here: ). Are the axes much more noisy than belt-driven axes?

by tobben - Mechanics

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

Looks good!

by tobben - Mechanics

Master's about software for RepRap Assembly Workshops - 10 years ago

Hi all! I've written and presented a RepRap-related Master's thesis. I packaged Marlin, Arduino IDE, Slic3r, Printrun and OpenSCAD inside a small Gnu/Linux live OS. The hope was that the live OS could make the software side of RepRap assembly workshops faster and easier. It worked OK, and I have been continuing to use the live OS in my own workshops after the thesis experiment, finding it useful

by tobben - General

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

Hi, yes of course we must design the testing procedures carefully so that we test one thing at a time. A simplistic prototype doesn't prevent isolating individual degrees of freedom and measuring them. If your goal is to build one printer then you want to make it functional, of course. The mockup doesn't make sense unless you're interested in searching for the minimum unique parts counts and si

by tobben - Mechanics

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

Wow, thanks for all the response! You're right that a full realization of the mockup will be flimsy and fail in many ways. Constructing and measuring failure is what I do to learn. I'm not trying to build a prototype that is a working printer, well designed working printers already exist and I have many of them. I'm trying to make as naïve a first prototype as I can, to be able to learn and meas

by tobben - Mechanics

Re: Lead Screw usage for X and Y axes - 10 years ago

Hi albatroopa! Sorry for not updating this thread, I'm writing my Master's =) Here's a little prototype I built last week, just to see how simplistic linear actuators inspired by deaconfrost's printer would look like: I'm aiming for extreme ease of build, teach and usage because the Master's is about designing an assembly workshops. Here's my latest sketch of how to deal with alignment: I'd

by tobben - Mechanics

Re: Svenska användare - 10 years ago

Nice printer, intressant tråd!

by tobben - Sweden, Gothenburg RepRap User Group