QuoteHere I though the plan was for the reprap to embed all the components in plastic, and then wire them together with molten solder? This sounds like a far greater technical challenge than doing isolation routing, which is why I'm very skeptical of it. If a complex working circuit is made this way I'll be pleasantly surprised, to say the least. It seems like a very contrived way of making ciby Ru - Controllers
QuoteI guess you could also construct a hot air blow gun and nozzle Tool Head to reflow in situ on the Darwin.... That wasn't something I had considered. I vaguely assumed that it would be easiest to toast the finished board. It would be very nice to have an all-in-one solution, certainly. QuoteWhy wait for dispensable metal tracks ?? I regard those with a certain amount of suspicion, to be hby Ru - Controllers
Quote You might find that some folk object to that choice being taken away from them. QuoteThrough Hole mounting packaging is certainly dwindling though and I guess we need to look to "what next" at some point. So, surface mount isn't an option. Through hole isn't an option. You have a plan C? Doing surface mount yourself is not impossible, in the same way that building your own extrusion heaby Ru - Controllers
QuoteWith simply refiltering or resizing of your file this displacements are resampled and intermixed with random noise, so it's useless when someone skilled wants to vialate your properties I already said this QuoteSo better look for 'material-branding' And as I may also have mentioned, restricting production in this way takes away the major benefit of the reprap. But how are you going toby Ru - General
QuoteSo if Mr home constructor cannot construct his own breakout boards then the means of production are again removed from him and you are back to square 1 pre RepRap. Then he can obtain them elsewhere, as we already have to do with large chunks of the reprap. People are already quite happy to purchase arduinos after all.by Ru - Controllers
QuoteNow we have TWO objekt with exactly the same pattern printed on or embedded in it. How do you know which one is "the real thing" ? If you look at the marks as a sign of authenticity, you're doomed. I'm more interested in the value of watermarking them as a way to track 'leaks' of your design. If I hide the watermark in the model cleverly enough, it will not be easy to spot in the design fby Ru - General
Quote"Standing on the shoulders of giants" to quote Linus Torvalds autobiography. That particular quote is a Newton one. If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants Much as Torvalds has done for us, being an arrogant OS kernel engineer isn't quite on a par with what we got from Newton QuoteThrough Hole mounting packaging is certainly dwindling though and I guess we neby Ru - Controllers
There have been quite a few threads on this matter. It is worth doing a little searching to check... here are some I vaguely remember. which has Forrest talking about his attempt to use home-brew servos and which I mostly remember cos I spoke in it. Ever so roughly speaking, For low speed, low load projects like the reprap cartesian robot, a servo system is likely to prove more expensive thaby Ru - Controllers
QuoteCAN for the reprap is hard work, either useless, insanely expensive , or impossible to find You're never going to save much money by purchasing complex commercial devices, unfortunately. The RRRF motor controllers are not that expensive really... their profit is minimal and the price is competetive with the handful of other open source stepper motor driving systems. If you're driving stufby Ru - General
QuoteOr at least that is what I understood it to be, I am happy to be told that I have got the wrong end of the stick and apologize in advance if this is not the case. Ahh, we do appear to be talking at cross purposes here. I was interested in a network between boards with smaller CPLDs on each board, rather than on-board peripheral interconnect with a single large FPGA. Reading back, I note weby Ru - Controllers
I'm still not seeing why you think it is inappropriate. You're using lots of metaphors, but they aren't actually casting any light upon the subject. Why are you likening it to a humvee? You clearly have experience in this area, which I do not. I would genuinely like to be enlightened in this area. You seem to be implying that it is overkill, but that implementing your own network stack upon, sby Ru - Controllers
Quoteyour obsession with CAN I'm bringing it up now precise because you're being so discouraging. But since you mention it, it is cheap and hardware support is common. Quoteit's simply a case of horses and courses. For me personally CAN is not the horse for this course So what is the course that CAN is suited for? I simply cannot see why it is not suited to reprap. It is simple, lightweight,by Ru - Controllers
QuoteThe term "symbolic link" is Unix/Linux speak for what Windows users would call a "shortcut" Tragically, windows shortcuts are only a pale imitation of symbolic links. You'll have to do some copying and pasting instead, if a symbolic link is definitely what is needed here.by Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteIf you want protection, don't care about signs logos and stuff, There is probably mileage is creating trojan horse design files for seeding on torrent trackers and the like. Thought it was one of my nice new widgets? WRONG. Congratulations. You just replicated yourself a brand new KneeBreakerBot (tm). Enjoy.by Ru - General
QuoteI think if that is what I wanted I would be buying Zigb modules At 40USD per radio module, I doubt I'll be joining you in that any time soon! It would indeed be a very sensible idea, were it not for the cost. QuoteCan has it place/s I am not sure this is one of them. I really cannot see what your aversion to CAN is. It uses differential signalling so it will be capable of communicating beby Ru - Controllers
QuoteBut i was wondering if anyone knew of any control area network enabled drives and encoders that would be usefull on this scale and power Hmm, deja vu It still looks like you're going to have to roll your own electronics if this is the sort of thing you want. Shouldn't be too hard, though.by Ru - General
QuoteIt is clear that the trend is currently away from the networked boards of the first generation. I am not at all sure that this is a good thing, for reasons that I've listed elsewhere, but to summarise: simple and modular is good, toolhead logic belongs on the toolhead. Monolithic firmware and huge, expensive and complex control boards capable of doing everything under the sun do seem to bby Ru - Controllers
QuoteCertainly getting off the ground with SPI based peripherals is a winning idea. The problem with SPI is the requirement for lots of IO pins... two plus one per slave device. A centralised control board is going to have to use up lots of pins to support a handful of peripherals. It is mainly of interest because there are a few relatively complex devices that can't conveniently be accessed iby Ru - Controllers
QuoteIf you had a copy of the "Lord of the Rings" it would be just like any other copy of the book. But if you had one signed by JRR Tolkien, then that book, evne though it is physically identical in all other ways to an identical book, is worth more because it is signed. If I had signed by here, is it of any particular interest to you? Or to anyone else? A Tolkien book signed by the author iby Ru - General
Quote3 modern stepper controller chips and a serial link to a smaller CPU for the extruder and the job is done. The total electronics should only be about $30 in parts. The steppers where where I was particularly interested, as moving to a CPLD based chip rather than an off the shelf controller saves you a few pennies (by Ru - Controllers
QuoteTotal system cost reduction is the goal. Don't forget the real estate and assembly costs too, then factor in being able to redesign the hardware without redoing the PCB's etc. The major cost I see is the learning curve and relative sparsity of HDL developers compared to, say, C developers... even using developer in its loosest sense as 'someone who knows about it and can fiddle with it a biby Ru - Controllers
You will probably find that the expense of an FPGA capable of running a microprocessor core is rather high. A swift glance at Farnell suggests that little FPGA is going to be at the very least a few times more expensive than a microcontroller, and you won't have little things like ADCs or DAcs on board. I've been looking at using programmable logic to potentially replace some of the more expensiby Ru - Controllers
QuoteBut a randomly generated code would be very unlikely to resemble a non random code. This could be detected as a signature of authenticity. Okay, so what does the signature demonstrate? The pirate does not care about authenticity. Their 'customers' might, but they will be more interested in paying less or or not at all. It is of interest to customers who want legitimate products, or to proby Ru - General
QuoteBut a randomly generated code would be very unlikely to resemble a non random code. This could be detected as a signature of authenticity. Okay, so what does the signature demonstrate? The pirate does not care about authenticity. Their 'customers' might, but they will be more interested in paying less or or not at all. It is of interest to customers who want legitimate products, or to proby Ru - General
QuoteWait, what about the spare infill of an object. If that is part of the design file, It isn't. As you guessed, it gets calculated by the host software, Having to ship part files with infill paths in them would make them enormous. You might be able to hide some data in the less significant digits of vertex coordinates. Given that slice'n'dice will quantise points to a .1mm grid (if I remembeby Ru - General
QuoteI wonder if digital watermarks in 3D design files could be more robust than ordinary 2D graphical watermarks. Unlikely. YOu can digitally watermark 2d images because the subtle changes that are made are not visible to the human eye. Design files don't have the sort of headroom needed for this kind of trick... certainly not anything that couldn't be destroyed by tiny alterations to the data.by Ru - General
QuoteWhy anybody bothers with 8 bit MCUs and assembler these days, when 32 bit are the same price, I don't know. Heh, now you point that out, I don't know either. Those little TI chips look quite nice... I guess 'twice as big' and 'twice as expensive' aren't really quite so important at these sizes and pricesby Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteYou've got to be joking, nothing in RepRap needs assembler with MCU's designed this side of the millennium. But this isn't something in reprap; I was suggesting additional uCs. 8-pin ATtiny chips cost pennies, for example. To be fair, you could probably make something in C that would do the job, but there seems to be a handful of trivial examples like that skip the whole compilation stepby Ru - RepRap Host
QuoteI'll use java apps generally only if there is no other suitable app. Java apps have a terrible rep. I've never worked out why so many java desktop tools are just so plain awful. It is possible to write high quality, fast, stable java. One day, I'm sure someone will QuoteAnd sometimes I'll even rewrite it in a real language instead if it irritates me enough. What would you class as a reaby Ru - Reprappers
It might be worth your whlie looking at adding extra hardware to handle all that stuff. Is this There are plenty of servo drive projects out there, but they will add non-trivial amounts of expense, by the looks of things. It seems to me that you might be able to do something cunning with a fairly small uC between the controller board and the motor driver board... have a device that takes step aby Ru - RepRap Host