Because the foil also goes over part of the thread it does not move easily once the tape is on it. You dont need to cut away the blue section. It triggers about 1.5 mm above the end of the nozzel. I have been using it like this for about 2 months and it works well.by SouthT - General
After a bit of testing I discovered a couple of interesting things. The 4mm inductive probe had a better detection range on a single sheet of thin aluminium than when I doubled the foil or used thicker foil. I also found that you can extend the range of the probe by simply taping some foil around its end. (see image) So I did the following... Powered up the probe and adjusted the foil until theby SouthT - General
Hi I have the latest stable version of Marlin running on a Ramps board. I am using the single output to control an ATX power supply. The ATX power supply is only being used for the Heatbed. I have a different power supply connected to the other 12 volt input for the motors and hotend. I had a strange problem where just before finishing a print both heaters showed that they had been turned off.by SouthT - Firmware - Marlin
Simba "Incidentally, the fuses on RAMPS are rated for 12V, but you can run them at 30V supposedly. " It is not the voltage that blows the fuse. It is the current. The controller that I was using was something I made myself using l297 and l298 chips. There are newer chips but at the time they were fine for my use. BTW I have a project which requires various i/o and am thinking of putting a boaby SouthT - Developers
> *edit* something really interesting about the > china chinese way of driving steppers, everything > that is a stepper seem to drive at 30volts ... > even if it is rated at 12v. Most stepper motors can take about 10 times or more than there rated voltage. Many systems I have worked on use 12 volts for slow speed and then 36 volts or more for high speed. That is why the stepper driveby SouthT - Developers
On some old large printers from the 1980's which used server motors they used a PCB instead of an optical disk for feedback. It was simply a circular PCB mounted on the motor shaft with a whole bunch of fine tracks running from the center to the edge. There was a brush on the center and one on the edge. This might be a cheap way to mass produce position encoders??by SouthT - Developers
When one reads various post here and on other sites about 3d printer design there are many articles about making the moving parts as light as possible. This often translates to making sure the steppers are not on the moving axis and using a bowden extruder to keep the weight off the moving parts Makerbot Replicator 2 claims to have superior accuracy compared to the many other designs out there,by SouthT - General
I have done some FPGA projects and sometimes it would have been easier with an MCU. FPGA are great for doing things in true parallel There are open source FPGA stepper motor projects. Open Cores has open FPGA projects to suite most tastes. Here is a link to a stepper motor project: I see that they say it is a beginner projectby SouthT - Developers