If an extruder deposits some filament and then turns off and moves back over it without changing its Z position, does the filament get smeared? Given that the filament expands slightly after deposition and that the head has to be pretty close to the build surface, I'm assuming yes, and it would be bad. In the case of a two-head system where both heads are effectively stuck together and moving ovby Ru - Reprappers
QuoteIt's definitely possible. It's not even particularly hard any more. Indeed; I intend to write a web service interface 'at some point' because it is so simple, given that there is no need for anything really fancy when talking to host software which drives a darwin. Upload, reset, a handful of bits of diagnostic information and a few bits of configuration are all that is required after all.by Ru - Controllers
Quote1. (Control via Internet) Yes, it is possible. But you haven't given any reason for the expenditure of effort required to make it so. What is the point? What is the benefit? It makes the system run at human operator speeds instead of machine controller speeds, and it puts the build process at the mercy of the internet connection linking the machine with the builder. I see nothing that makby Ru - Controllers
Okay, this turned into a bit of a 'Too long, didn't read' posting. I do apologise QuoteThat's all for now. So if anyone feels like doing some programming... There's a cliche on the internet, referred to as the 'idea man', who may be typically found on forums with grand plans which only need some designers, engineers and programmers, though happily he is there are the project manager... Anywaby Ru - Controllers
QuoteRu, what about for designing parts? Designing and printing parts are totally different tasks. There's no reason why both kinds of software should be installed on the same machine. More importantly, the software being discussed here was the reprap host, not CAD tools. If people want to run CAD tools, they can do so. They can find the minimum requirements for their software package of choicby Ru - RepRap Host
Quotemost of us don't have darwins afaik. Straps are pretty prevelant Well, I'm not sure what can be said to that, aside from 'better build a darwin then' or 'build a better repstrap'. We don't have a common repstrap design, so discussions on the widely varying capabilities of people's unique cartesian bots seems a little futile. When answering general queries, talking about the Darwin seems toby Ru - Reprappers
QuotePS epias start at $60 used, complete with ram/hdd and powersupply as for carpcs around $100 And for that much, you can get complete desktop machines that are more powerful than the epia and more easily upgradeable/maintainable. Unless you have a pressing need for a very compact or very low power consumption machine, then it isn't worth you paying a premium for something like the EPIA seriesby Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteIt makes sure that a lot of Darwins get into the field in a hurry, but doesn't advance the notion of viral distribution in the slightest. I'll disagree on that one... you can't have viral distribution of repraps without an established manufacturing base. And that, surely, is what the repstraps are supposed to be? In a year's time, I'd like to think that some of these will have made a set ofby Ru - Reprappers
Quotet was my understanding that bot speed was the issue 2, not extrusion speed I'm pretty certain it is the extruder limiting the system, though I don't have many useful references to back that one up. Take a look at though. The current darwin steppers/stepper drives are far more powerful than the system really needs, so there's plenty of headroom there. Designing a faster extruder is going tby Ru - Reprappers
From hackaday, though I assume that a fair chunk of you read that already Mostly interesting because the platform has a nice built-in absolute positioning system, which various people have been talking about. Probably not so practical for a reprap... I'm anticipating a certain amount of innacuracy and speed problems when drawing short arcs. But for smaller cartesian bots this might be practicby Ru - Mechanics
QuoteI don't get it because someone does well in business by making the right decissions re buying other companies/ staff they become the devil Not at all; and in fact I don't see anyone here saying so But they are as much our angelic saviours as Steve Jobs is. Google are mildly unpleasant, mostly due to their cavalier attitude towards privacy, their effective monopoly on the search and ad marby Ru - General
QuoteWhy not use another type of plastic as support material? The problem there might be finding two materials that have similar melting temperatures (cos you don't want the build to melt the scaffold, or vice versa) which don't fuse together nicely. I don't doubt that such materials exist, however we have only managed to extrude a fairly small number of plastics to date so I don't think that aby Ru - Plastic Extruder Working Group
QuoteI've always found them to be directly proportional... Heh, guess it depends how you do the maths. Being able to work to 1/10 of the scale would suggest a tenfold increase in price. It made sense to me at the time, anywayby Ru - Mechanics
QuoteWeb search? Adsense? Gmail? Google docs? Google reader? They did a serious number on search, and they turned ads from animated annoyances into multibillion dollar and relatively unobtrusive text strings. This is impressive work. Gmail gave us giant inboxes, and provided a welcome replacement for the lousy yet free incumbants. Gmail was announced in 2004; thats a little while ago now Googlby Ru - General
QuoteDo you find that 0.1mm resolution is enough? I ask because nophead's commercial table has, iirc, 0.001mm resolution. For thermoplastic extrusion, this level of resolution should be fine. After all, STL models are quantised to a grid during the slicing and dicing process... I don't recall the resolution of the grid, but it is probably somewhere between .1 and .01mm. Finer positioning than thby Ru - Mechanics
Ooh, thats a dead useful page. Well found. I'd never even heard of the measurement of 'slug feet' before.by Ru - General
QuoteSounds like now that Paige and Brin have got greedy and begun to run off all the brilliant people who made them billionaires On the contrary, this is google business as usual. Pretty much all the exciting products that have popped out of google have been designed by someone else, and then purchased, ajaxified, rebranded and released. I can't think of anything that they developed solely in-hby Ru - General
QuoteThere is no reason whatsoever that the electronics cost as much as they do with Darwin. Looking at the electronic parts, one of the biggest cost items is the stepper-driver boards That is very true; I've made quite a few posts elsewhere talking about possibilities for replacing the L297 I guess also that moving to unipolar motors would lend itself to replacing the L298; but I'm not at allby Ru - General
QuoteI've always asking myself if self-replication/low cost is something that goes hand to hand Are non-replicating designs any cheaper? The bulk of the price seems to be in the electronics right now; a cost that must be shared by any other design. These other, non-replicating designs will not be capable of building spare parts for themselves. nor upgrading themselves, and so their 'total costby Ru - General
QuoteIs there a way to identify which service is claiming /dev.ttyXXXX in OSX? There's a nice *nix command line tool called lsof. It appears to exist under OSX, or so google would suggest; my familiarity with OSX extends to 'Darwin is a little bit like FreeBSD', so I can't provide more detailed adviceby Ru - Controllers
QuoteIt supports VB.NET just fine. I am pleasantly surprisedby Ru - RepRap Host
If you felt really brave, you could always look at Mono, which might possibly support visual basic.net. For my employers, visual studio is the killer app of windows... no-one else seems to make a decent IDE. Eclipse has proven to be adequate for java, but somewhat lacking for everything else. It is a shame that the commercial IDE market has given up... no-one seems to want to compete against VSby Ru - RepRap Host
Quotethe basis for a cheap, variable-resistance-based gauge The difficulty is making it *precise*. As it stands, you have to make a strip, and then you need to calibrate it carefully using and external measuring system which you need to be able to do to sub-millimetre accuracy. You then need to recalibrate at regular intervals in the future. The advantage with magnetic and optical (and possiblyby Ru - Mechanics
QuoteWouldn't a more simple (read cheap) solution be to use the I2C interface for communications and have a single I2C master and several slaves if you were going to do this? Almost certainly. Moreover, I'd be looking at dedicated slave arduino boards which lacked a USB interface entirely, thus saving a penny or two... but then I suppose you'd have to sort out power some other way, and I don't kby Ru - Controllers
That sort of processing power isn't necessarily overkill, but the price most certainly is. If I had 200 quid to spend on a control system, I wouldn't spend it like that at all! The underlying design appears to be pretty similar to the original dual-arduino setup, using a simple token-passing network between the two uCs and the host PC. That design appears to have been quietly abandoned, in favouby Ru - Controllers
Quoterigidness (is that a word?) I think I'd go for 'rigidity' myself. It gets about two orders of magnitude more hits on google, so I guess thats some support for itby Ru - Mechanics
Quoteit would only be a matter of time before a more viable material that isn't quite as fussy as Nylon is found Nylon is mechanically pretty sound, which I guess is why it is used. Its melting point is pretty high though (at least compared to the stuff we usually use) so I imagine that using a powder form of any of reprap's more common materials would make things much easier.by Ru - Laser Cutter Working Group
QuoteI think that Satori has a legitimate point here. It certainly merits further investigation. I'm not convinced. The production of fabric very readily lends itself to mass production, and indeed that is what is done. It is the conversion of such raw materials into parts and finished items which is complex, expensive, time consuming, etc etc. This is where the benefits of automation show, andby Ru - Mechanics
Quoteleads me to think that it senses mass vs. non-mass extremely sensitively Not even slightly. It senses changes in magnetic fields, and so with a suitable piece of control logic you can locate various magnetic or conductive things. Sure, people aren't generally magnetic, but the stuff they carry is much more likely to be so. Skiing equipment has various metal fastenings, for example. QuoteI'by Ru - Mechanics
It also occurs to me that the choice of material for a long term storage medium is a very important one. If you can't outlast a DVD or magnetic tape, then your storage capacity is academic. There's something to be said for widely supported standards after allby Ru - Mechanics