Finally some pics

Here are a bunch of pics of my machine and the progress I've made over the last few weeks/months.

Here's a shot of my electronics setup at the moment.  You can see the yellow shield board that used to hold the carriers.  You can see the blue screw terminals that used to hold the stepper controllers when I first started.  The green boards on the right were my first stepper carrier board version.  The board in the lower left corner connected with the large rainbow cable is my new 4 axis controller that I am testing.

Here's a pic of my heated build platform.  it is an electric skillet.  It is nice because it has it's own temp regulator.  I set the dial by checking the temp with an IR thermometer.  It holds the temp very stable.

And here's a pic of my brutstruder with the geared stepper.

And here's a pic of all the pololus and the LEDs going all flashy flashy

That's all for now.

a new extruder and another revision of stepper electronics

So I got my geared stepper in and it worked ok my MDF extruder, until the MDF started to split where I had some screws going in through the thickness of the MDF instead of through the face of it.  I went to my local hackerspace and printed out a brutstruder.  The print took about 4.5 hours on the slow Darwin in the space.  The makerbot was being calibrated at the time for a mendel print (a bunch of these were being printed and settings tweaked http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4730), so I had to use the slower machine in the space.  The extruder works well now and I have to adjust my settings to get it working.

My plan for a heated build platform is to use an electric skillet sitting on my Y stage.  The first tests with the new extruder failed because the filament did not stick to the painters tape I had on the platform.  The heated skillet should help with adhesion.

I have also made up a new 4 axis stepper controller that has further reduced my electronics footprint.  You can see it and read the build instructions at http://www.johnyang.com/p4ac.  I had a batch made up, so if you're interested in one, drop me a note at lj.johnyang*AT*gmail*DOT*com and we can work things out.  I'm still testing things out for the next few days/week to make sure there aren't any problems with the design.

The next thing I have to do is to calibrate my machine and get it printing.  It is very close now.  I'll be trying to print a cathederal for my kids as a holiday present.  After that the next thing I have lined up I want to print is a mendel (most likely the imperial prusa mendel variant) and a replacement shell for the key fob for my car.  it is cracked and I have not had the remote for some months because of it.  I've had to actually use my key to open the car door, the horror!

Anyhow, I hope to be fully printing soon!