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Discuss any sort of mechanical stuff here: positioning systems, gears, extruding methods, etc.
Re: A classic revisited: the Ultimate Greg's Wade's Geared Extruder - 9 years ago
Thanks for the write up Andrew; I've been out of the loop for a few years, but I'm building a new printer now and was curious about the state of the art in extenders. Things have certainly improved in the meantime! It's good to have a nice overview of what's available. Wadeby Wade - Developers
Re: Is anyone here using Gen3 electroincs? - 11 years ago
Yeah, I resurrected my Mendel with the Teacup firmware running on gen3. It worked pretty much as is for me, with a little tweaking to get my thermocouple temp reading properly.by Wade - Canada, Toronto RepRap User Group
Re: Wade's extruder idle roller clearance. - 12 years ago
I set it up so that the idler bearing can more or less touch the un-hobbed bolt. That way, it will work with any size filament and depth of hobbing, as long as the hobbling isn't deeper than the filament is wide. It does create a problem though; it's hard to load a new filament if the idler block has to move a large (2 mm or so) distance to load fresh filament. Adding a couple washers betweenby Wade - Reprappers
Re: How do I attach a hot end to Wades extruder? - 13 years ago
If you use a 3mm drill to drill out the PTFE, you won't get as tight a fit, and your hot end may wobble during printing. Why not use the 2.3 or 2.5 mm bit as suggested? Wadeby Wade - Plastic Extruder Working Group
Re: Extruder thermal standoff/barrel.... - 13 years ago
That is pricy; I picked up 6 feet of PTFE for roughly that much. How does the thermal conductivity compare to PTFE? Wadeby Wade - Developers
Re: Herring bone extruder + Open X Axis - 13 years ago
Hey, where you at? An extra extruder body, I has it. If you need one, I can post it cheaply, just let me know. Wadeby Wade - General Mendel Topics
Re: Wade extruder slip - no grip - 13 years ago
That wiki page is starting to 'rot'; there are a lot of edits on there that I don't agree with, but haven't had the time to fix all of them. The extruder won't work as intended without springs. They have to be pretty strong springs as well; specs are on the wiki page still. The dremel cut slots are a bad idea as well, if you want even flow rates. You should never have to clean the teeth of thby Wade - Plastic Extruder Working Group
Re: RAMPS the Fire starter - 13 years ago
Any chance you've got a loose or intermittent motor wire? The datasheet mentions disconnecting the motor during operation will likely destroy the chip.by Wade - RAMPS Electronics
Re: Where can I buy makerbot extruder tips? - 13 years ago
jgilmore Wrote: > I'm under the impression that nophead said it > didn't really matter. (I think. Could be wrong) > The volume of extruded plastic is what matters, > and with higher pressure you can force just as > much plastic through a smaller nozzle as a larger > one. The main effects are that you can do smaller > layers, and have a higher nozzle pressure. > > Someby Wade - General
Re: Where can I buy makerbot extruder tips? - 13 years ago
Actually, assuming you're limited by the head speed of your Cartesian robot, the volumetric flow of plastic through your extruder varies with the square of the nozzle diameter (or your extruded filament diameter, whichever you want to measure). So, cutting the nozzle size in half means your print times go up by a factor of 4, as long as you're still printing about the same amount of plastic perby Wade - General
Re: 1 Axis Plankton Feeder - 13 years ago
Steppers sound pretty ideal for this setup - just one opto or mechanical limit switch at one end to establish the starting point, and you're good to go - you can calculate your steps/m without having the max endstop pretty easily. Servos are a bit more complicated, in my opinion, unless you buy something ready to go. As long as the loads are light compared to your stepper torque, you shouldn'tby Wade - General
Re: peltier junction heated bed? - 13 years ago
Hah, good point! You do cover the bed with a PCB heater, but not if you use discrete power resistors. I was imagining a single large Peltier element used as a build bed. You could use several smaller ones under an aluminum build plate, but you'd still need about 4 of those 50 mm Peltiers to get enough wattage, assuming you have a big enough cold side heat sink. Still, Peltier elements are pretby Wade - General
Re: peltier junction heated bed? - 13 years ago
Do they make them that big? A quick search found some 50x50 mm Peltiers for $40, but at that price it'd cost over $600 for a full Mendel. Then you need heat sinks on the cold side, and you're still limited to a max delta T of around 60 deg C. Seems pretty expensive relative to a PCB heater. Wadeby Wade - General
Re: RepRap builders in the Okanagan - 13 years ago
Hey, swing by the CoLab at 525 Great Northern Way; I've got several repraps there. I've not found a local supplier of belts; SDP-SI will ship to Canada for a price, as will Small Parts Inc. Lee's electronics over on Main St has Arduinos, and maybe opto's, but for specific parts Digikey.ca will ship to Canada for $8. Wadeby Wade - Canada, Vancouver RepRap User Group
Re: Firmware for Techzone Thermocouple A-D converter with OneWire - 13 years ago
Please upload it somewhere - I'd like to see how you did it. I'm trying to get the 20110207 firmware to talk to some Max6675 thermocouple chips, no luck yet, but I'm stuck just getting the firmware to talk sanely. Is that thermocouple board/setup available anywhere, and if so how much? Can you stack multiple thermocouples on the same bus easily? Id like to add a few sensors my Mendel withoutby Wade - Firmware - mainstream and related support
Re: Vancouver Makerfaire - 13 years ago
Hey, I'll be there, with several Repraps! We may even use our space at the CoLab as part of the Faire. Let me know if you want to share some table space. Wadeby Wade - Canada, Vancouver RepRap User Group
Re: Cloning reprap prusa parts in 30 mins LINK - 13 years ago
Hopefully it works out; my first repstrap was a cast Darwin back in 2008, and the cast parts really don't hold up like the printed ones do. I'll be more impressed with this when they show that the cast Prusas actually work well.by Wade - General
Repeatable, but random com errors with 20110207 release? - 13 years ago
Does anyone have the 20110207 firmware running yet? I'm trying to run it on some gen 3 electronics; I commented out the temp sensor defines for the motherboard as I'm using the temp sensor on the extruder board, but I'm getting crazy com errors, which are repeatable. Here's a sample after bootup: start ok ok ok rs 0Serial Error: line number without checksum. Linenumber: 0, line received: d(V6/by Wade - Firmware - mainstream and related support
Re: Wade's extruder stalling - 13 years ago
Can you post any photos of the extruder, showing the nozzle, insulator, and extruder body? I'm curious as to what's happening there; the type of hot end mount might be significant. I had an old 0.6 mm extruder that used to jam occasionally; there seemed to be some crud blocking the nozzle. Poking it with a 0.5 mm pin would clear it temporarily. More likely it's a problem with the barrel to iby Wade - General
Re: Threaded polar arm study - 13 years ago
Looks good, but can a 250 mNm Nema 17 really get 25 mm/s out of M8 rod? I thought the reason we were avoiding threaded rod designs was because they were too slow. I like the polar arm idea though - you get one heck of a build area! Wadeby Wade - Polar Machines, SCARA, Robot Arms
Re: Macs? - 13 years ago
I use a MacBook pro, but I boot ubuntu and run skeinforge and gcdump for reprapping. Skeinforge works fine on the Mac, and the reprap host runs, but I prefer gcdump. For most design work I use Alibre in a win vm, but occasionally I use Blender to edit meshes. YMMV. Basically, use whichever OS matches the software you want to run, unless you're great at re compiling stuff for your favorite Oby Wade - General
Re: Got it working again.... - 13 years ago
I've had similar issues with blue masking tape and PLA; a quick wipe with some rubbing alcohol usually clears up the oils from your hands and gets the prints to stick nicely again. Higher first layer temps can also help.by Wade - Reprappers
Re: Cannot stop the extrusion cleanly - 13 years ago
Yeah, it sounds exactly like noise to me as well. You might have a ground loop between your pc and Mendel; check for ac or dc voltages between the pc, motherboard and extruder grounds. The extruder ground should be connected to the motherboard ground via the RJ45 connectors. The step and dir lines are very sensitive though; running them anywhere near a motor wire will cause spurious steps. Thby Wade - Reprappers
Re: Syringe needle and soldering iron idea - 13 years ago
We usually wrap our extruder nozzles in nichrome wire and either kapton tape or ceramic glue to heat them. We also try to keep the thin section of the nozzle very short, ie less than 1 mm long, as long thin nozzles require very high extrusion pressures. Molten lead is less viscous than molten plastic though. I'd say just try it and see if it works. What kind of resolution, speed and build voluby Wade - Plastic Extruder Working Group
Re: Which electronics for Wade's Geared Extruder? - 13 years ago
I use the extruder controller 2.2 on my extruders; it works fine as we don't run the extruders too quickly. More importantly, find a strong stepper; I use a 5 kg*cm Kysan, although it's probably overkill. Wadeby Wade - Plastic Extruder Working Group
Re: Cannot stop the extrusion cleanly - 13 years ago
The "extrude" button sounds like it's working as well as it ever does; after you reset the extruder. are the stepper coils not energized? It could be that you're picking up noise on the step wire to the extruder controller, but you don't notice it until the coils are energized. Try routing the step and dir wires a different way, away from any motor or power wires; is this on a Mendel, or somethby Wade - Reprappers
Re: Hello Tronto Group - 13 years ago
Hey guys, I built my first Reprap out in Toronto, but I'm in Vancouver these days. Send me an email (wbortz at gmail dot com) if you've got any questions regarding where to find stuff in Toronto - I've probably already been to most of the places you'll need to go. Interaccess was a great help when I was out there - I used their workshop for my initial build, when I didn't have access to any woby Wade - Canada, Toronto RepRap User Group
Re: Complete drawing - 13 years ago
As for your second question - I too would love to hear about a CAD package for Ubuntu that could load the entire Mendel Step file; I've only been able to do it with Windows CAD packages. Wadeby Wade - General Mendel Topics
Re: Complete drawing - 13 years ago
Blender is a mesh modeller; those are Solid Edge CAD files; they're so different there are no direct translations. The closest thing you can do is get the individual STL files and import those into Blender. While it's possible to edit STL files, it's a bit like using Photoshop to edit JPG images of a Word document - while it's possible, it's not optimal. In my case, I found it easier to buy aby Wade - General Mendel Topics
Re: Repstrap vertical axis coupling problems and printable options - 13 years ago
A couple of hose clamps on the tubing might help a lot; you could also try stronger tubing, perhaps air hose?by Wade - Mechanics