I've been neglecting working on the backend of this site for quite a while, but in a sudden spout of boredom I've added some much needed functionality. The biggest thing is that now you can add your own comments on my posts. I've actually had a few people email me asking where the comments section was because they had an... uh, comment.

Part of enabling this meant I needed some sort of user control system. I decided no one would want to make an account for my crappy little site, so I've gone with openID. That means that to leave a comment on this site you'll need your own openID. Even if you don't know what that is, you might already have one. Have a look over at openid.net for more information. If you don't have one I suggest Versign's Personal Identity Protection as a provider.

To get an avatar you'll need to enter your email address into the UserCP. If you already have an account at Gravatar, you're all ready to go. If you don't it only takes a few seconds to setup your avatar.

Happy commenting!

Woo hoo! I'm finally printing things! Here's my first 'successful' print:

I use the word successful very loosely there. Yes, it fulfills it's intended purpose, it opens bottles. However, it's far from being smooth and clean, the walls are separate from the infill in many places, the top an bottom weren't solid, and most of all I don't think it'll hold up to repeated use. Still, it's an object that I printed on something that I built!

I actually printed that about two weeks ago, since then I've been working on getting the quality up. It's been going well:

Guess which one the the newer one. :P That picture is slightly deceptive, it's not quite as smooth as it looks and that side was much better than the other. That doesn't mean that I haven't been lovingly stroking it since I printed it....

Ahem, I'm still having issues getting my shot glasses to be water proof and I'm having some communication problems. Some times a line will not send properly dozens of times in a row and will actually pause printing for several seconds and can cause such erratic moments that it'll lose steps.

So, there are still problems to solve, but hey that's half the fun right? Hopefully it won't take me another month and a half to write another blog post.

This whole process is taking longer than I thought it would. We've been working on (or at least planning) this since November of last year. It'd probably be going faster if we would actually be able to work on it outside of the lab's hours, but I guess that's what I get...

Anyway, since my last real post we've completed the cartesian bot portion and it's looking mighty fine, in my humble opinion.

Most of my time has been spent battling the electronics. One of our biggest problems is building the cables that came with the kit. Two of the three 10pin cables we built didn't work, not sure how we screwed that up. Also, we don't have the proper tool to press the wires into the smaller connectors, so we've been using a small flat-head screwdriver with mixed results. A lot of the time the wires only make intermittent connection. I was also having issues with the RS485 communication between the extrude controller and the motherboard. This was a hug pain in the ass because I had no idea which side was causing the problem as I had nothing else to test it against. After about a week and a half of probing everything we could with an oscilloscope we finally figured out that the serial chip wasn't outputting anything to the microcontroller on the extruder controller. So we replaced that and it still didn't work. We got a fresh copy of the firmware and reprogrammed it. It Worked! Woo!

To top off everything one of the extruder driver chips exploded while we were trying to figure out what was wrong.

I think the current was set too high and the chip just overheated. Luckily it doesn't seem to have taken anything else out with it.

After all the chips had been replaced and reprogrammed the extruded was taking to the motherboard, but it wasn't reporting the right temperature. I put the test program for the thermocouple back on, yep works just fine... Ok, now what? Anyone know id it's a problem to use pin A7 (or A6) for reading the AD585(?). Like I said it works just fine in the test program. Also I did add a #ifeldef that sets #temp_pin to pin 7, so that's not the problem.

I know I need to have comments on here and I'm working on it, but for now if you can help with this sent me an email.

No, I'm not dead, classes have just been kicking my ass lately and I've been getting very little done. My progress hasn't been helped by the fact that any time I have spent on it has been a futile attempt to get the extruder to talk to the motherboard. If you've had this problem in the past why not come over to my thread and help me out.

I have gotten a few things done, I designed a new mounting plate for the Tech Zone Remix electronics. I guess that's about it, now back to my DiffEQ homework.

See I told you there would be more fun.

It's finally starting to look like a RepRap. Needless to say, I'm super excited.

There have been a few issues. First, the fender (or mudguard) washers that we ordered weren't big enough to hold the belts on the bearings, they were actually slightly smaller than the bearings. I solved this by simply cutting some out on the laser cutter using a scrap piece of 1/8" acrylic. I don't know if the extra space that they added will make a difference, but I can't find any reason that they should.

The next problem is that the gears won't fit the steppers that we have without filing them down. So, I need to find a way to modify them to fit the steppers or else change the STL files and beg the people who made them for us to make a few more for us.

Another problem is, we can't seem to find metric brass threaded rod or even metric brass bolts to make the extruder.

Lastly, we don't have our electronics yet so, I have a feeling that I'm going to be staring at a fully built, non-functioning RepRap for awhile.