a blog: some things happened, a few were documented.

  • A Box of Bits and Bobs

    A Box of Bits and Bobs

    A box of bits and bobs that will be a 3d Printer My recent iteration of a Prusa Mendel that made the ‘box of bobs’ Well almost a year since my last post… better late than… well whatever. I’ve been working slowly, ploddingly, but unfortunately not documenting much because work has been so sporadic on…

  • Extruder drive-screw

    Extruder drive-screw

    It seems there is only one way to mount the dremeled transport screw. That is with the nut in the gear. The gear it self imparts a slight twist to the filament, if the head of the screw is in the gear it’s counter-clockwise. If the nut is in the large gear it is clockwise.…

  • Transport screw testing

    This transport screw has been working well, much better than the other hobbed bolts I had made. This way of making the drive screw is a lot more consistent and quicker to make.  I’m making a cut area of about 22mm, this way the bolt can be put in either direction, with the head in…

  • Transport Screw on drill press

    Transport Screw on drill press

    http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:9291I remade Elk’s Transport Screw

  • July Fixes

    July Fixes

    So I started thinking about the endstop problem I was having while using the teacup firmware. I had wired my endstops to be normally open, when everyone else… on the planet… wired theirs to be normally closed.  a G28 would send whatever axis away from the minimum (the second part of homing), and when I…

  • July 2011 Updates

    July 2011 Updates

           I found that the firmware I had been using would require too much work going forward and I started a switch to using the Teacup Firmware.  Here’s a diff of the changes I made.  I mostly made some small changes to my hardware to match closer to the firmware standard.  It seems to work…

  • Back to Work.

    Printing parts for a geodesic dome

  • April 21, 2011

    April 21, 2011

    I replaced one of the broken TIP120s on the pwm heater boad with a MOSFET, testing with a multimeter looked like it was working properly, so I connected it to the heated on my extruder. Testing that proved, or created, a short in the nichrome heater somewhere. Instantly smoked and fizzled. So I killed it…

  • rethinking…

    I’m rethinking some things I thought were obvious decisions previously.  Well decisions is probably not quite accurate, since I didn’t really think it through, which why I am now.  I’ve been making SAE parts… because I live in the US, one of the last foolish countries using imperial measurements. I’ve thought for years that continuing…

  • April 18, 2011

    April 18, 2011

    I’m posting this set of PLA Prusa Mendel parts to Ebay in a moment… (here it is) it’s been a long to trip to finishing this set.  There was a power brown-out here about 2 weeks ago, I’ve never found a need to buy a UPS until then. I was in the middle of a…

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