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Board is looking good by the way. I have my Gen7 V1.2 board running on a Prusa. Everything but the extruder is hooked up and working. I'll get to the extruder soon.
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bryanandaimee
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Next Wave Electronics Working Group
I'm not a real pro at toner transfer etching, so I generally oversize the traces and undersize the holes in the pads. This makes it more likely to get a good board. Toner transfer can be a bit of a pain. It is kitchen science in every way. Plus, since you are often drilling pads by hand it helps to oversize the pads too. Wider traces and smaller holes help the most. The wider traces help avoid o
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bryanandaimee
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Next Wave Electronics Working Group
Build volume is about the same. Construction would probably be about the same. Adjustment and calibration would likely be easier on the ultimaker since more of the smooth rod constraints are defined by the laser cut board rather than nuts and a jig. Never built an ultimaker, but I have built both a Prusa and a Makerbot. Ultimaker boasts a very fast print head travel speed. Don't know if that tra
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bryanandaimee
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Reprappers
Here is my "work" bench. Though I generally go there to avoid work Cupcake is printing happily with a glass platform and kapton on heated bed. The prusa is nearly done, Gen7 Electronics, everything moves correct distance on command, extruder isn't hooked up yet. Above the prusa is a prusa repstrap I worked on a little using composite deck board as vertices. Below is a mendel variant I am messing
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bryanandaimee
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General
Realizing I didn't actually answer the question, here are the requirements.
Si wafers -- You'll just have to buy those
Photo resist/developer-- ditto
Light source -- perhaps a scanned blue laser would work well enough for small scall integrated circuits
Optics -- grind your own ??
Masks -- this is where it starts to get hard
Ion implantation for doping the transistor regions -- good luck with
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bryanandaimee
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Controllers
Having been in an older generation fab in college, I doubt it would be possible. Current fabs cost billions. I think the best anyone will do in the near (20-300 Years?) future on a desktop at home will be small scale integrated circuits with at most a few tens of transistors. I would love to be proven wrong. Not sure what the point would be though. You would likely replace a $5 part with somethin
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bryanandaimee
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Controllers
I like it. Great work. Maybe make the size of the circles/font size indicative of # in the wild (rough estimate of course) or something so the more popular bots draw the eye immediately.
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bryanandaimee
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General
I bought a Makerbot with which I have printed a few prusa's for friends and for myself. If I had it to do over again I think I would do the same. The learning curve is steep, and having built and calibrated a makerbot allowed me to get my feet wet without getting too discouraged. It also gave me an easy way to test the steppers I bought for my Prusa without the added frustration of trying to trou
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bryanandaimee
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General
The 1.75mm stuff seems to have a few inherent advantages. Less force required to push the filament through the hot end. Smaller melt volume resulting in less stringy stuff. Others I may have overlooked. The major disadvantage is that the cost is far higher per pound/kg.
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bryanandaimee
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General
Having never done any large scale manufacturing design, what would a manufaturable reprap look like. Would it end up being a pre-built makerbot/ultimachine type bot or do you have some other design in mind? I guess the question is what are the basic differences/ requirements of your design to make it manufacturable?
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bryanandaimee
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General
Seems like it should be possible if you can change it over to standard arduino+sanguino environment, and if it has enough pins. Then it's just a matter of mapping pins to the connections. Looks like you might be pin constrained on that board to me, but I am not an expert. You might check the pinout of the RAMPS shield and see if you have the correct connections available. Especially check to see
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bryanandaimee
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Controllers
Well, I don't have a Github account, nor do I know how to use it other than downloading firmwares, but I'll get an account sometime soon. I will not likely have much time to start development in the near future, but I do plan on ordering some of the toshiba drivers and start breadboarding up some circuits to see if I can get them to work. It may be a while before I have anything worthy of a Githu
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bryanandaimee
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Next Wave Electronics Working Group
Just remember you will likely not get the full 2A theoretical max out of the pololu, so source your motors accordingly. You would want motors that get rated torque sufficient for the job at something like .5 to .75 amps such that the total amps on Z would be 1 to 1.5A. I have 2amp motors and the pololu will not drive the ganged Z axis. I'm going to have to buy different motors for Z. That's fine
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bryanandaimee
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Sanguino(lolu)
Any thoughts on substituting through hole 2.5A continuous Toshiba drivers for pololu modules? Maybe a Gen7T sub-version (T for toshiba/tightwad Seems like a step in the direction of cheaper/easier. You would save $6-7 per driver or so and they are higher current drivers and easier to heatsink, so the dual stepper on the prusa would be less trouble. Plus Mouser and Digikey seem to keep a couple th
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bryanandaimee
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Next Wave Electronics Working Group
Some of the linked firmwares for Gen7 are I think from1.0 so pinouts are a little different. I had the most success just downloading the most recent teacup firmware and using the pinout guide on the Gen7 Page to adjust pins in the config.h.somegenericwordhere (I forget what the generic config.h file is called in the teacup directory then save it as your config.h. You can use the published confi
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bryanandaimee
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Next Wave Electronics Working Group
Being a tightwad myself I would offer to test them, but I have never soldered surface mount stuff before, and I just built a couple gen7 boards, so my electronics budget is shot for a while.
Plus my motors are currently 2A so I don't know if your electronics would drive them with sufficient torque, especially the two ganged Z steppers on the Prusa. I'm having trouble even with the pololus (with
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bryanandaimee
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Next Wave Electronics Working Group
I saw that too. It looks cool. I am trying not to get my hopes up too much about the price though. These types of projects always seem to go over budget. Put a real time Linux OS on there and you could run reprap plus all sorts of peripherals off it. Plus the display is your TV (or a pico projector? Doesn't seem to have too much IO though, so you might have to put an IO expander board or somethin
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bryanandaimee
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Controllers
Hadn't seen the progomez bot yet. That looks great!
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bryanandaimee
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General
Sorry, most of the cool pics and explanation of the hacklab bot has been on the blog. Here ya go.
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bryanandaimee
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General
Since this is a thread on next gen repraps (and no one has mentioned any specific ones I thought I might as well chime in with the ones I will be watching. You should check out the Orca by mendelparts.com and the hacklab revision of the prusa mendel. Orca is supposedly comming out soon and is to be cheap and high quality, and the hacklab bot has seen some recent dev work and I'm hoping it will h
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bryanandaimee
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General
I don't know. I think a prize could be worth something if done right. My experience with reprap/makerbot prize competitions is that they often are either too ambitious, or too trivial. For instance the holiday prusa competition was a great idea, but most of the friends I had, who wanted to build a printer, didn't think they could get it done by the deadline and didn't want to be on the hook to fi
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bryanandaimee
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General
I am a physicist with hobby level expertise in electronics and microcontrollers. I bought a makerbot cupcake as my intro to the world of 3d printing. I would have bought it at the price if it had been closed source. I am now building a couple prusa mendel printers. I would not be building them if they were closed source, as much of the point for me is learning stepper control etc. So I guess I'm
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bryanandaimee
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General
If the user is going to want to pare down the expense to the minimum, then it might not be unreasonable to just have a set of largish surface pads to solder wires to. Or maybe a few through hole pads just for the high current connections. It might still be a good idea to have a few standard ATX power connectors as used by most for the high power supply, and maybe even some through hole stuff for
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bryanandaimee
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Next Wave Electronics Working Group
Mouser has it for $3.36 in qty 10. Is that not a decent enough price? Does shipping to your local kill the deal?
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bryanandaimee
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Controllers
Lower cost? Where are you getting your power supplies. I haven't seen anything around that will equal an ATX supply for power at the same price.
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bryanandaimee
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Controllers
OK, so I understand that the PID function needs to be able to control the PWM each time it wants to change control output, so the PWM frequency must be at least equal to the PID control frequency (not necessarily equal to the sampling rate) and the PWM frequency should also be different than the sampling rate to minimize interference. From Nophead's comment, it seems that there are a few altern
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bryanandaimee
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Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future