Skeinforge already has some code to do more cunning infilling, such as running filaments parallel to the side of slender construction elements. I'm not sure how useful it is yet, however. Radial ribs around boltholes sound interesting, though. I think that one of the current issue is contraction around holes causing delamination, though I don't recall enough of the discussion to know how it is hby Ru - RepRap Host
Octrees are nice things, in that they're pretty easy to understand and code. If you're going to slice the model up anyway (for reprapping at least, though perhaps not for milling) you can store each layer as a quadtree instead, which is twice as simple. The reprap host does all sorts of terribly cunning things which are not yet fully documented, and so are a bit of a pain to understand from reaby Ru - RepRap Host
I fear that we may end up drowning in Contrived Reprap Acronym Proliferation...by Ru - General
Quoteim using c# with the .net framework There's an outside chance that it will work with mono under linux. I've never played with mono, however. I imagine it is also fairly likely that .net assemblies can be loaded into a mono application, so it wouldn't be too hard to use th bulk of any code you write with a small compatibility layer which will probably be needed for the hardware interface.by Ru - General
QuotePeople often use the term "bandaid" refering to an adhesive bandage and the BandAid company doesn't have their panties in a twist, and that's actually using the company name That's because it is too late for them and their trademarks. Successful companies have often ended up having to fight very hard to protect their trademarks from 'genericide', whereby it becomes a generic term and anyoneby Ru - General
Whatever we choose, we're doomed not be be as cool as CandyFab's 'SHASAM', which always entertains me.by Ru - General
QuoteBTW I think I have somewhere a 128MB flash stick that emulates an IDE harddrive. Jumpering it differently, I think, would implement an old-fashined A0-AXX and D0-D15 memory with a few select lines. If these things are still a go, maybe they would give us the boost we need? This would require some hardware that spoke IDE, and then a microprocessor that would do memory mapped IO for you. Itsby Ru - Controllers
Quotethe current driver boards do clever things like chopping voltage etc Yeah, thats what I was thinking. There don't seem t obe a whole lot of obvious alternatives, and given there's already a cheap and convenient supply of the bits, I certainly wouldn't bother Quotethe z axis on the darwin is a screwdrive Ahh, so something like a motor housing that slides along a leadscrew with the aid ofby Ru - General
Quotefour outputs that will go through relays directly into the motors The driver boards make up a significant amount of the price of the electronics; if it were possible to replace them with something much cheaper I'm sure they'd have been the first to go. Given that they do their job pretty well, what would make you want to avoid them? Maybe I've misunderstood what a screw drive is. I'm ratheby Ru - General
If you're going the PC control route, have you considered using EMC? It would be a shame to reinvent another set of wheels, when I'm sure you can put your talents to better use!by Ru - General
Course, scanning is only half the problem when it come to reproducing things. And there's still the whole 'incentive to breach copyright' type issues, too. But, its a good first start. Now we have to make a scanning head for darwin quick, before the law gets changedby Ru - General
QuoteStill liking the CAN idea better, get the PC to do more of the workload I'm not disagreeing with you here... but you're going to need some hardware that can understand the CAN protocol, and it doesn't seem to be just leaping off the shelves at you. QuoteIm more curious to look into the PC side of things, I want to make a C,C++,C# port of it I'm still patiently waiting for the documentatioby Ru - General
QuoteIf we wanted much much cheeper controller we could chuck a arm7 on a board ( aboutby Ru - General
QuoteI was hoping to machine most of my parts from scrap metal for the Cartesian Bot Some of the bits (corner brackets spring to mind) have internal detail that will be hard to reproduce with milling. I'm not certain that you can just zap them all out of solid hunks of metal, thought I could be wrong. The STL files for darwin were designed to be reprappable. As you don't have a reprap or rapidby Ru - Reprappers
I could have sworn I'd posted a detailed reply to this earlier today. Argh. I wonder where it went. QuoteIm trying to avoid the pitfalls of a microcontroller! And, as generally happens with this sort of manoever, I rather suspect you're heading into a different sort of pit. You already seem to have stablished than CAN controlled motors are rare... assuming you find any at all, it seems sadly iby Ru - General
Sounds like it might be either awkward or expensive or both. But there are quite a few CAN-capable microcontrollers out there, so you could always rig up your own controller board... You might want to have a quick think about bandwidth and lag if you're having lots of things all of which will need to be talked to often or be polled often on the same bus.by Ru - General
tgz is a gzipped tar file. *nix machines will have no problem opening it. Windows XP at least needs another app... I use winrar. The files you want inside are in .eps format, which I imagine can be converted to something you can feed to a laser cutter without too much hassle, assuming it needs to be converted at all. There are also individual parts in .svg format.by Ru - Controllers
I might be more inclined to blame rxtx, as it happens. I'd be *very* surprised if you'd come across a bug in the jvm itself. I coudln't offer you any useful advice on troubleshooting the library however.by Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteOr has the company selling these parts got the right to only have this even though this is a licence free project? The basic reprap design is unlicensed, but anyone who makes their own plans own sthe rights to them. The notion of derivative works is much fuzzier in hardware land than it is in software land where the GPL was derived. I suggest you visit bitsfrombytes, and ask them about theby Ru - Controllers
QuoteIt has EIGHT PROCESSORS And making use of them all might prove tricky It would require a serious re-engineering of the firmware design, and significantly increase the number of ways stuff could go wrong, without any significant gain that I can see. The reprap doesn't seem to need to do lots of complicated things simultaneously. What it lacks is storage space, (we're hitting the limits witby Ru - Controllers
You can get parts from the reprap research foundation. They're listed on the website, handily under the 'obtain parts' bit! I think, but I could be wrong, that the bitsfrombytes kits include steppers.by Ru - General
QuoteSheesh, FUD time again I see. The minor garbage collections are only a couple of microseconds long, so they don't count. The major collections can take a couple of seconds. If this is problematic you give the jvm this option: -XX:-UseConcMarkSweepGC and the problem goes away. It uses a bit more cpu which is why it isn't enabled by default. Next time read the Java manuals before spouting garbby Ru - RepRap Host
The rep rap host uses java. The JVM will periodically run garbage collection, some minor, some major. Major collections (there's probably a better term for this, but I'm too lazy to look it up right now) will cause a noticable pause during a big and complicated build... this can be up to a second or two. Don't use Java if you want to avoid this sort of thing. I couldn't tell you how other implemby Ru - RepRap Host
There are still ongoing discussions about the use of servomechanisms rather than plain old steppers, and not just on reprap The general consensus seems to be that cheap or home-brew servos are inadequate, and expensive servos are *much* more expensive than steppers, and very often not better *enough* to justify the expense. It doesn't appear that we have reached the limits of the current cartesiby Ru - 3D Scanners, Book Scanners, and Optics
I can think of one reason... it's tricky! You need very sensitive switches and a precise cartesian robot to get accurate results, I'd have thought. It doesn't *obviously* have any advantages over the optical 3d scanner either, which is mechanically much simpler and more tolerant of an imprecise setup. Both mechanisms are going to generate loads of surface point data which is going to require theby Ru - 3D Scanners, Book Scanners, and Optics
QuotePrinting in layers would be very slightly slower due to one extra head movement per object per layer. I don't do that in case of a breakdown in which case many hours of work and plastic would be wasted. Might this not also cause the layers to cool slightly more than they would do otherwise, resulting in poorer adhesion of new layers and increasing the chance of delamination? I haven't beenby Ru - Reprappers
It seems like nophead's repstrap is one of the faster and better machines right now, and something seems to die after 20-40 hours of operation. Just save up and hit bitsfrombytes. There really isn't another quick and easy optionby Ru - Reprappers
With a text editor. Just open the .bat file in notepad. Or you can right click the batch file, and select edit, and do it that way... But The important thing is that your java installation is incorrect. I suggest you search the forums to take a look at the problems other people have had. The # thing is merely cosmetic, and doesn't really matter.by Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteAccording to an article I read to day it only takes a few minutes! I think complex components still take hours to print, rather than minutes. If people could churn out a dozens of reprap's worth of components over a weekend, they'd be unlikely to keep it quietby Ru - Reprappers
That's an impressively inefficient way to send a few lines of error text The # stuff is infact the way you usually write comments in *nix shell scripts and perl and so on. Someone presumably wasn't concentrating when they made a windows batch file. Replace any instances of # starting a line with rem instead. It will all work just fine. Worry more about your java installation. That's a much biby Ru - RepRap Host