Quotenebbian Use 1 perimeter. It stops the warping in its tracks. Ah, cool - I wouldn't have thought of that. Finding out how others approach the problem and seeing what works is exactly what I was hoping for with this threadby JamesK - General
I was a bit taken aback by some recent changes to the info screens in repetier firmware that have left me continually flicking between screens to monitor print progress. I decided to have a go at an info screen that showed me everything I wanted on one screen. I ended up with this: I haven't used it much yet, but I think it gives me what I want. The top three lines are current temp/target tempby JamesK - General
That's interesting. My test with OHP film and abs the adhesion was good enough to pull the sheet off the adhesive holding it to the glass (but the adhesive was poor, so that may not be saying all that much). I guess one of the problems with using OHP is that there is likely to be a lot of brand to brand variation. PETG works very well on my OHP film, but has very little warp so perhaps isn't a chby JamesK - General
Oh, I wouldn't detract from your contribution at all, I was just surprised that Mike didn't get a mention. The idea of putting the throat through the middle of the piezo was brilliant. This has been a great collaboration all round.by JamesK - General
QuoteLykle Thanks DjDemonD, Moriquendi and Huntley for some great work. And Mike (LeadingLights) of course, for getting this started...by JamesK - General
Ah, 1/4" - I was caught out by the scale, thinking it was only about 1/8 or 3/16.by JamesK - CoreXY Machines
Is that flat plate or angle bracket? If it's just flat plate, it looks a little skinny given the size of your machine.by JamesK - CoreXY Machines
That looks very promising. QuoteYes, I know, the milling is sloppy. Nothing is ever as easy at it looks. I despair of my (lack of) machining abilities.by JamesK - CoreXY Machines
Interesting. We had mixed results with neural nets. It seemed to me that often you could get to 90% of a solution very quickly, but closing that last ~10% was next to impossible. As a result of that I tended to put NNs into the over-hyped category, but it sounds like you had more positive experiences. I was fond of simulated annealing for optimisation problems - if you could cast the problem domaby JamesK - General
I don't remember the exact dates, but it would have been the late 80s. We had a couple of papers published that were dated '91 but there was quite a latency between the work and the publication. Early 90s I moved to an outpost of Southampton University and we did a lot of interesting projects bridging the gap between hard-core academics and industry. Good times There are plenty of applicationby JamesK - General
I guess we must have been contemporaries Viktor. I started my career writing parallel applications on transputers, mostly for military applications and running on Meiko computing surfaces. Our standard reference for comparisons was a Vax 11/780. The transputer software written in Occam and assembler did pretty well. We did some more blue skies stuff which used the transputers to provide enough ooby JamesK - General
Ah, well done! Do you use a part cooling fan, and if so any chance of a photo? I was wondering if poor part cooling was factor in the tips curling up on my first prints. The lower surfaces of your print look a lot better than mine.by JamesK - General
It's surprisingly difficult isn't it? I thought it was going to be easy when I started, so it came as a bit of a shock. Quotedeckingman What size are the cubes? The model was 50mm to a side with 8mm thick beams, but I printed it at 80%, so it should have been 40mm sides with 6.4mm beams. I had lofty plans of making a circle of connected cubes - thank goodness I started with just the two! I staby JamesK - General
Hi Tom, thanks for the link, I'll keep that in mind. Sure is a lot of belts to run for that config though! Agreed on the trucks - they are top quality 24mm units and will laugh at anything I can throw at them. The plastic cantilever - not so much. I have a small bed to test with (roughly 400x200), we'll see how that goes before I put down the $$$ for the full size 650x300 tooling plate. Finishinby JamesK - Reprappers
With the low cost of modern op-amps, and the ease of including filtering in the amp stage as well as threshold and gain settings I'm not sure it's worth trying to ditch the amplifier, even if it becomes unity gain. Maybe I'm just a control freakby JamesK - General
I'm a little embarrassed to show it at this stage, but I finally got to the point where I can slide the XY axis around by hand, and suddenly it starts to feel like a printer It's going to be coreXY initially, but I have a plan B to fall back to a more conventional Cartesian layout, in which case I would likely go with dual X carriages on that long X rail. Biggest concern at the moment is whetherby JamesK - Reprappers
Great stuff. Now I'm caught between adding piezo's to the bed as I'd originally planned, or trying to figure out if I could put one in each mount of a dual extruder. I have a dovetail slide made up - if I added a small stepper to drive the dovetail I could use piezos in each hot-end to automatically set the level of the two nozzles Not sure if it's worth the weight penalty, but it sure would beby JamesK - General
Quotedc42 How about printing it flat on the bed, with support material under the corners of the cube that is raised off the bed? Ah, I hadn't thought of that! Clever. I wonder which of the slicers can auto-generate the best supports for that config in terms both of print success and getting the stuff off afterwards. It turns an over-hang problem into a bridging problem (unless you also support tby JamesK - General
Oh, the nozzle sprang a leak from the side? That's unusual, must have been drilled too close to the wall I guess. What is the large knurled section above the hotend, below the heatbreak, for?by JamesK - Printing
Note - this is intended to be in the spirit of the printing challenges of old, it's not a request for help us such, which is why I haven't given info about the settings I used. So, this morning I happened upon a random photo of two interlocking cubes on a mendel type printer and thought it looked like an 'interesting' thing to print. Each cube was stood on a corner and apparently printed withoutby JamesK - General
Interesting design. My initial reaction was that it seemed a little over-complicated, but looking again it seems easy enough to construct, and the usability should be excellent. I can't actually think of any down-sides, so I think this gets a I've not seen those screws before, I'll have to have a search for them. Edit: Ah, used in RC models, and I think sometimes in delta printers. Fairly readby JamesK - CoreXY Machines
What an interesting looking hotend you have! You're using a collet vise to hold the throat? Looks like a very neat idea Without a low conductance heatbreak and active cooling, you may find you have rather a long transition zone in your hotend which might give you a problem with ooze control, but let's not leap ahead. Your ABS looks very strange indeed. I'm not at all sure what happened there, bby JamesK - Printing
OK, so the 'sweet spot' (and people will probably argue with me here) for ease of printing is roughly layer height of half the nozzle diameter and extrusion width of between 1.2 and 1.5 times the nozzle diameter (the 1.5 is on the high side, but a lot depends on nozzle geometry). If you go squarer than that, things tend to get difficult because the flow of plastic is becoming under-constrained aby JamesK - Printing
Which slicer are you using, and are you setting the extrusion width manually or not? The small holes are fairly typical, I normally live with it and clean them out with a drill, but the larger U-shape does seem a bit off.by JamesK - Printing
QuoteI wonder if Solar sintering would be appropriate. What a stunningly brilliant idea! It takes a certain amount of courage to take mechanical high-tech into a desert though.by JamesK - General
QuoteWhy not turning that big Fan 180° and let him suck like your vacuum cleaner? That should be much more effectly. Sadly not the way it works. Suck vs blow makes very little difference to a fan - it can't really tell the difference other than the temperature of the air passing over its bearings. High volume/low delta pressure vs low volume/high delta pressure requires significantly different dby JamesK - General
Awesome. A fine example of why it is so helpful when people follow-up after finding the cause of their problems. No problem is so simple or obvious that many of us didn't already make it, and others will make it again in the future.by JamesK - Printing
Glad you got it sorted out, well doneby JamesK - Printing
QuoteSrek Using two different types of material is way more interesting than just a seperate support material. Absolutely. Interesting observation recently - if you print ABS inside a PETG exterior the PETG keeps the ABS warm enough to eliminate warping.by JamesK - General
Quotedc42 BLDC motors come in two sorts: ones with commutation sensors, and ones without (so the controller has to use back EMF sensing). The ones without commutation sensors might not work in this application, because at low speeds there is probably insufficient back emf to detect. The ones with commutation sensors should be ideal if the price is right, because you won't need a separate encoder.by JamesK - General