Quote| o| | () | |o___| You'll probably find your diagarms work significantly better if you wrap them in code tags. It isn't perfect (leading spaces still get stripped) but internal spacing gets preserved. ie, .____. | o| | () | |o___| Now I'll actually sit down and read itby Ru - General
QuoteHow do you drop the next layer of powder down over the previous one? I know the build tray lowers before each new layer. This got touched upon in another thread. You use a hopper of feedstock, and a counter-rotating roller to push the layer to the desired thickness and compact it somewhat. Or at least, that sounds like the best plan. QuoteTheres a homemade RP machine out there called theby Ru - Powder Printing and Selective Laser Sintering
NVidia are not particularly open source friendly. They've made interesting comments in the past along the lines of 'writing graphics drivers is very hard. you won't be able to do it, so we don't release sufficient documentation'. My last upgrade was an ATI card for that reason They're a little better. QuoteBUT... why paying for a graphics card if you can have a driver for free ? Crappy, unreby Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteAlso, maybe this is a loaded question, but what does the magnetic sensor output look like? For example, if its PWM, does the velocity AND position get encoded in the width and frequency somehow? It can do both absolute and relative encoding, I believe. With quadrature you get two waveforms so you can get direction and speed, and it is up to the controller to count pulses and work out whereby Ru - Controllers
QuoteI was thinking of using my printer parts (pwm driver ic, and the optical encoder / motor) The optical encoder will certainly be a useful tool. All the more so because it is already mounted to one bit of a cartesian positioning system. Whether you can easily make the printer's servo obey your commands is another matter, but I think it might be one worth persevering with. Quotebut is it perby Ru - Controllers
QuoteAnyone know a good source for these silicon pieces? I imagine you could make one, given a suitable slice of silicone. They don't look like precision instruments. QuoteI'm worried that if it's too thick it will make extruding unpredictable That sounds like a much more sensible argument against them. From careful study of sauce dynamics, I'd say you might have to worry about a buildup of pby Ru - Mechanics
QuoteOne idea that I though of is to have a 2 dimensional array of heads with the heads evenly spread across the array and all attached together so they move as one object. This rather sidesteps the issue of making a faster or otherwise better extruder though It would only work with large parts, or multiple small identical parts, so it lacks a certain flexibility. You've not only got the expby Ru - General
QuoteHas anyone tried low fire clay? I'm sure someone has, but I can't for the life of me find any mention of it anywhere. I guess my search-fu is weak, or my brain is clogging up or something. Or maybe no-one has. I'm sure it wouldn't be too much effort to try.by Ru - Mechanics
Would non drip things be strong enough to cope with fairly dense, viscous fluids, though? And what happens when the plastic cools and sets around them? Interesting idea, though. Might be worth a play.by Ru - Mechanics
If you already have an optical sensor, there's no need for a magnetic one too. The sensor (magnetic or optical) is just that; a sensor. It can't actually do anything other than tell another device about rotation. It needs to talk to a microcontroller, which can interpret its output, and drive a motor controller. So: Sensor -> Arduino (or whatever) -> Motor controller -> Motorby Ru - Controllers
QuoteWould be some sort of that much easier and cheaper to build ? Well, of course. The importat question is, "will it work?" I doubt you'll get anything like the same intensity from a digital picture frame as you would from a projector. A nice big CRT is better, but still nothing like the amount of light a projector is kicking out. You'll need that bright light to make the photopolymer congeaby Ru - General
I don't think that you want extruded plastic to cool too fast, or you'll get lousy inter-layer adhesion and the final part will be crap. I also don't think that any of the reprap materials will be buoyant enough to use in this way. I'd worry about one design at a time, if I were youby Ru - Mechanics
Quoteas you print.it slowly adds water in Powder and water? I don't see this working at all. You'd have to add it in very carefully so as not to disturb the powder, to start with. Also, with any sufficiently fine powder you may find that you get capillary action effects which make the water soak the whole build area, making it impossible get 'just below the build layer'. Not to mention the extraby Ru - Mechanics
QuoteI think something like a roller should do a better job, because it compresses the powder slightly in the same step. Yeah... I'd just remembered the work that Scorch had been doing and posted about in another thread (zcorp ink one, maybe?). He used weldwood powder rolled out with water sprayed on to set it.by Ru - Mechanics
QuoteHow would you quickly and evenly build up each layer of powder? I forsee a two step process, involving a hopper full of feedstock, a waste powder collector, and a blade. The hopper traverses the long axis of the build area, liberall coating it with powder. More powder than is needed, so that everywhere is covered. The blade is then lowered, so that the height between the base of the bladeby Ru - Mechanics
QuoteThere is a very good reason for ZCorp using cyanacrylic glue instead of a laserbeam to fuse the powder even in the monochromatic zPrinter That isn't any reason not to try a laser sintered powder approach. In fact, other people not doing something is probably one of the worst reasons ever not to try it yourself. Obtaining suitable feedstock, and assembling capable optics and a suitable carby Ru - Mechanics
Quoteordered 2 PWM control boards. I ordered a compleet pcb kit, so I know I have the right amount of each board. That would have been the easiest thing for you to do! It also meant that there was no danger of me getting or using obsolete bits. QuoteOrdered a power control board I'm too lazy to look, but is this the same as a 'power comms' board? One of those was used in the dual-arduino setby Ru - Reprappers
Quotewhy all the fus with building it from crash when you can extrac most of the components out of a old printer I don't have any old printers here. I spent a little time searching for some, to no avail. Not everyone has access to such things. Quotegrind the abs plastic to powder This is slightly more tricky than it sounds. Freezing the plastic and blending it might work, but producing actualby Ru - Mechanics
QuoteI wonder if it might not be simpler to adapt an existing open source Gcode generating program, instead of writing our own? This would of course be the best solution, but I think it is reasonably safe to say that if this *could* be done, it *would* have been done. Our particular needs (slicing and dicing) are sufficiently different from the way you'd run a milling machine that it will probaby Ru - RepRap Host
CSG has the potential advantage that traversing curved surfaces could be described algorithmically, ie using gcode arc drawing codes, rather than expressed as a series of short straight lines, so you'd get a nice smooth finish without faceting. Possibly. I had thought that it might reduce the final print job size too, but of course the bulk of any layer is probably going to be infill instructioby Ru - RepRap Host
QuotePossibly, though there are some other details to work out: Are you new here? I can recommend reading the following threads: which is about standalone repraps and is a teribly long and rambling thread about the use of gcode with a reprap. I'm pretty certain it covers the points you list above. I'll not repeat nor summarise here, as I don't have the patience to re-read 200 odd old posts.by Ru - EMC2
QuoteIf there was a post-script like language for reprap jobs: GCode?by Ru - EMC2
I'm thinking of two different purposes... I work for a small consultancy firm, and it seems that every project has the need for small bits of equipment or mounting jigs or other sorts of prototypes. Sure, I can bodge something together (I currently have aby Ru - General
QuoteCumbersome for the end user or the developer? Having had a quick browse through some STEP information, I'd definitely say 'the developer'. It is a pretty complex standard, even if you're only implementing a tiny part of it. It does look like an ideal sort of format, as it is pretty encompassing. Good as it is, it requires a few fairly skilled developers to implement it, not just for reprapby Ru - RepRap Host
Quoteimagine if you could take the 40+ Volts DC from the phone In the UK at least, I believe this is illegal. I imagine it would be elsewhere as well. I don't know what the distribution hardware is like, it wouldn't surprise me if this was the sort of thing that might like up a warning light somewhere at an exchange, so they can send the engineers round to fix you.by Ru - Controllers
Oh good lord. This turned into an enormous long post. No ranting intended! Quoteproblem with using slices is that its less computatoins but still trying to fit a 3d object into a 2d box Doing filament deposition in 3d would be possible, rather than doing it in a succession of 2d layers. But there are a few little problems. Firstly, you still have to build upon existing material, and if you're mby Ru - RepRap Host
Or wait for the atmega328 to turn Soon enough, memory isn't going to be the problem... it'll be IO pins, and that's probably a very good reason to move to a second board. Keeping all the endstops as well as having extra toys like a nozzle valve or and extruder rev counter isn't possible with a single board, even if you've painstakingly written a super-efficient tiny firmware program in assembleby Ru - Controllers
Quoteprinted support it can double or triple the print time depending on the shapes Thats the way it goes, unfortunately. Given that you have to cover extra area, how can it be otherwise? Perhaps a clever dual-headed print setup would reduce time a little, but only by so much. Quoteswitch back and forth between extruder heads I mentioned that I thought that having a dual-headed printer was a goby Ru - Plastic Extruder Working Group
QuoteI am, I have been continuing to develop an XML / polygon based toolpath format that only takes up about 10-20% more space than gcode Good stuff. I think intermediate formats are a good thing, as they allow a nice modular toolchain; something we lack at the moment.by Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteAny thoughts about using multi-page tiff (or other image file type) to store 3D model data. This will rapidly become enormous in size. What is wrong with STL, anyway? It isn't exactly ideal for our needs (a more abstract constructive solid geometry model would be much nicer, for example) but on the other hand it is widely support and, all thing considered, pretty easy to parse and manipulaby Ru - RepRap Host