I can give it a try. Is there any reason you can't upload the model, so anyone can try it ?by Petrus - General
A time-lapse of my last print :by Petrus - General New Machines Topics
Wow, this model is way too complex. Do you have a simpler model that can be printed smaller ? I don't want to spend too much filament and time for a print that will certainly fail badly.by Petrus - General
Thanks for the tip, I will do that the next time I take apart my extruder.by Petrus - Plastic Extruder Working Group
I don't know if an FDM printer can print Warhammer 40k figures but it can definitely print ponies I printed it on my EMC repstrap using support structures and a layer height of 0.1mm, the material is PLA : A fine tuned reprap mendel or prusa can certainly do the same, it's the same technology. If some people want to start an high quality printing contest I'm ready !by Petrus - General
The fan cools down the cold end of the extruder and the printed part. I made a picture from the part view : The hot end is insulated by the inner section of the duct, so the air only cools the printed part. I noticed that active cooling is important when printing overhangs but not much for other stuff, for example the 3 domes I printed to test resolution are printed with the previous version ofby Petrus - General New Machines Topics
I lighten the Y axis using 5mm MDF instead of the 8mm Plexiglas LCD screen light diffuser and replacing the glass with a failed PCB board, it's flat enough for small prints. With theses modifications, I am able to multiply the acceleration and speed by 2. I've also modified the raft plugin in skeinforge to add a "Support Feed Rate over Operating Feed Rate" setting. my extruder tends to clog whenby Petrus - General New Machines Topics
Très intéressant ! D'où viens la pompe à engrenage ?by Petrus - RepRap Groupe d'Utilisateurs Francophone
There is an interesting successful design in the French section :by Petrus - General
Cooling improvement : There is now only one powerful 40mm fan that cools the cold end and the print. I found out the ventilation is very important for printing overhangs with 0.1mm layers. The duct is drown with google sketchup and print in PLA with 0.3mm layers. The wall at the right is wasted material like the support structure. I printed it to absorb the inertia of the extruder between theby Petrus - General New Machines Topics
Sorry, it was also salvaged so I don't know the reference, but they are not necessary in this configuration.by Petrus - General New Machines Topics
vertical resolution test : From left to right : 0.3mm, 0.2mm ant 0.1mmby Petrus - General New Machines Topics
What are your drivers, Rodrigo ? I used LB1845, I set the current with a trimmer :by Petrus - General New Machines Topics
Support structure test : After cleaning : Not that bad. I set the support flow rate ratio to 0.5 (less didn't work well) I didn't found a box to change the support structure angle in skeinforge, so I had to rotate the part 45° and change the infill direction to get that result.by Petrus - General New Machines Topics
The software is not finished but it works, at least for the extruder : I will make a wiki page for the printer, the extruder and the extruder/bed controller when I have time (ideally during a long print) but right now my top priority is to improve the printer.by Petrus - Controllers
It was the insulation of a cable, not an ethernet cable but about the same diameterby Petrus - General New Machines Topics
Now that my extruder is reliable, my DIY mill is officially an EMC repstrap : The extruder is supplied trough a tube to a spool dispenser in order to avoid parasite forces caused by the extruder pulling the filament. Some successful prints : The tape I print on is tesa N°4657 I borrowed from work, the PLA stick well to it but not too much, I can pull the printed part out without damaging it orby Petrus - General New Machines Topics
I improved the extruder, it is now more compact, and the most important: way more reliable, the previous design was constantly clogging up.by Petrus - Plastic Extruder Working Group
I don't have a blog, but I use the forum to share my progress. I made a topic for the extruder : and for the extruder/bed controller :by Petrus - General
kyleeamonahern Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > o so there is no way to get around paying for all > the electronics, i was hoping that i would be able > to salvage everything from some old commodity and > only have to pay for the printed parts, what a > bummer That's what I did : Almost everything is salvaged (steppers, stepper drivers, power supby Petrus - General
I built a leveling platform with glass bed for perfect flatness and mounted the extruder, now it begins to looks like a repstrap : the building size is 230x230mmby Petrus - CNC Routers, Mills, and Hybrid RepRapping
Yep, here is a .zip with schematics, board and the kicad files: I designed it to work with both an AD597 integrated thermocouple amplifier or an instrumentation amplifier + a 10k NTC for software icepoint compensation. To use the AD597, you will need an adapter :by Petrus - Controllers
I am building an EMC repstrap, all the axis are controlled by a PC but I needed a controler to regulate the temperature of the extruder and heated bed, so here it is : It is based on a Atmel atmega 324p microcontroller, there is 4 multiplexed thermocouple inputs, 2 for the extruder and 2 for the bed. The outputs are : -1 high current PWM output for the bed -1 medium current output for the extby Petrus - Controllers
I just thought of something, we can use Takashi Utsumi's bottle cutter to cut strips of plastic and make a special pinch wheel that fold the strip to prevent it to curl on the entrance of the hotend. I tested the concept by folding a strip of PET from a bottle and feed it manually thought my 3mm hot end. It extrudes, but I have almost no control of the output flow.by Petrus - General
Some temperature measurement : The heating wire is a kapton insulated alumel wire from a K thermocouple. The result are even better than I expected, with the heater at 7V (I=1,3A) the temperature of the tip rise up to 250°C, and the entrance of the hotend does not rise above 50°C with the fan turned off. With the fan at 6V (low speed) the entrance fall below 30°C. I pushed it to 400°C, the enby Petrus - Plastic Extruder Working Group
I made some progress on the hot end : The first vertical lathe I made was too high to drill the barrel, so I made a new one much more flat with a brushless motor from a laser printer : The stainless steel rod was very hard to drill, I had to reshape a cobalt drill-bit with a dremel : I also had to sharpen the drillbit several times during the drilling. With the original shape, even if the dby Petrus - Plastic Extruder Working Group
Someone already made an interface for these calipers : And by shorting pins 2 and 4, you can add more functions :by Petrus - General
You will need a translator for each axis to use the epson's steppers drivers. I made them with scavenged atmega48 microcontrollers. End-stops are also managed by the microcontroller. Here are the schematic and source code : But if you can't have microcontrollers for cheap, it may be more economic to buy stepper drivers with built-in translator.by Petrus - General
I am building an extruder like this one : With wire heater too. What was the problem with your nichrome wire heater ? Did you found why it failed ? I think we can improve the design by using a brass insert to increase the thermal mass and by winding some copper filament on top of the heating wire to improve the thermal conductivity. RepRot, Nice design, very clean and it looks indestructible,by Petrus - Plastic Extruder Working Group
This is the extruder I made for converting my DIY CNC mill into a repstrap (the mill was designed for this since the beginning). The extruder is mostly made from polycarbonate, other parts are standard screws and bolts or parts salvaged from epson printers. Milled parts : The extruder is composed by 9 parts milled in polycarbonate and held together by M3 screws. The ball bearing (13mm ext,by Petrus - Plastic Extruder Working Group