User:Stefanst

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Who?

I'm still a noob. Living in Levittown, PA- that's approx. 15-20 miles northeast of Philly.


My RepRap

Built a wooden Mendel from parts purchased on Ebay Germany. It seems to be a rip-off of the Techzone Wooden Mendel. Built my own electronics, based loosely on the RAMPS design with Pololus and run by a Seeduino Mega. All axes are moving and I printed my first calibration cube. Now I'm off to re-design my extruder. It's been oozing like crazy.

Mechanics: Lasercut Wooden Mendel

Electronics: Home made, based on RAMPS and other Pololu designs.

Firmware: Teacup

Slicer: Skeinforge 41

Extruder: Wade's extruder with home made hot-end based on some other designs using PEEK as thermal barrier material, a simple brass rod, aluminum resistor block heater. You can find some more info in the forum here.


Experience so far

Well, it's been quite a journey. I started building it in serious in March of 2011 and now it's June and I have printed two calibration cubes. Early on I made the decision to go with the latest and greatest everything, as well as building and designing as much as possible myself in order to keep cost down. This lead to the decision to use SF41 for a slicer and Teacup (was Arduino 5D) as a firmware. It looks like this should give extremely good results, once I really get it working. In the meantime this means that the learning curve is quite steep. Just learning Skeinforge is nothing for the faint of heart and with the extremely rapid development cycles much of the information available is outdated. On top of that I'm using Teacup firmware which is still under heavy development. Triffid who seems to be the main contributor does an outstanding job in helping out in the forums and is always willing to adapt and re-write immediately. But it seems that he still has no working hardware himself, so he has to rely on others for testing his code. On top of that I'm using my laptop for this and it's running Windows 7 64 bit. Not exactly an OS that is heavily supported by the RepRap community. Even things that should be quite simple, like installing Python, take hours to make them work.

But we're getting there!