Progress

Part of the progress on the build so far

First things first, I'd like to apologize for not posting any blogs for the past few weeks. It has been quite busy recently, in terms of working on building, schoolwork, and many other things as well.

However, quite a bit of progress has been made on the build. As you can see from the picture above, we have started assembly.  In fact we have made a tiny bit of progress since the picture was taken, but an issue has been encountered with some parts. We encountered this issue when we changed the extruder design from the original Mendel extruder to Wade's extruder because it functioned better. That means that before we can continue building, we need to order more parts.  We also decided to change the opto-flag system to a 3D printed design which will accomplish the same thing with increased rigidity.

The opto-flag system uses a set of three flags that, when moved to  a certain position by the motors, block a beam of invisible infrared light, telling a computer to stop the motor from moving. Think of the safety mechanisms on most garage doors. There's a beam of light that shines across to a light sensor. When an object, the equivalent of an opto-flag, passes through the beam of light, the light receiver stops receiving light, and makes the garage door stop, or go back up depending on your garage door. The opto-flag operates on the same principle; it stops the motor from crashing into the side of the printer and damaging the frame.  Having a flimsy piece of metal for the opto-flag is most likely not the best idea.


I'll try to keep up on the blog posts from now on, especially now that we've started building.  That does it for this now though, so have a good week. If you have any comments, post them below and I'll get right back to you.


Thanks for reading!

Preparing to build the printer

The RepRap Logo

Hello again! I write bearing exciting news. We have all of the parts we need to start assembly! 

We are still missing parts such as circuit boards, belts, and the printing surface, but we are going to try our hand at assembly first. If you are interested in technical specifications of the printer, interested in building one yourself, or want the bill of materials, you can find all of the information you need HERE.

We cleared off a table in our basement to assemble the printer on, and have sufficient room for parts. Our next steps are to start assembling the frame and perform a final sort on all of the parts to make sure we have enough of them. We've bought some inexpensive disposable containers to keep parts organized. The build manual we are using can be found HERE. This is an older model of the RepRap printer, however it has been perfected and is no longer in active development. This makes it much harder to source parts, but it means that the documentation is of a higher, finished, quality, as it is no longer a work in progress. 

That's about it for this week. Other that that, thank you for your continuing support. If you have any questions or comments, please do write them in the comments section below and, as always, have a good week!