Sunday, February 21, 2010

Big couple of weeks, eh?


Well, I have been busy lately. Obviously I got my printer working as you can see in earlier posts, but I also got to visit my younger brother in Boston and several day after we got back I proposed to the most beautiful and wonderful woman in the world (she accepted). No offense to nerdish people, but I was quite a bit more excited for the latter most point than I was when I saw my printer first spring to life after a year of technical challenges. I'll leave it at that and just say I've been happily busy with life, but I've still have had time to work on printing and optimizing the Hapsrap.

In fact, yesterday afternoon a fellow local enthusiast, Chris Keller, came by and helped me figure out some of the key skeinforge settings I needed to tweak. He's just embarking on his project (and was quite pissed when notification of makerbot's sellout of the build 12 units came out.) and so I hope the first hand observation of some of the systems and issues helped him. I definitely know it would have been great for me, never the less, I managed and now hopefully more of a community of reprappers can start coalescing here in Chicago.

As an aside, Chris and I discussed what would be the best way of reaching operational status. Obviously I went the route of lasercut repstrap, but a lot has changed since I chose my path. The biggest thing should be obvious to anyone who follows the community. Makerbot has sold 500+ units of their cupcake system and that install base and forum community makes troubleshooting much much easier. there are definitely limitations to their system (one of which is their constant lack of stock at any given time. good for them, bad for Chris). Plus once you get it working, you can go ahead and build your own Mendel, AND thats after the first learning curve, though more slight than if you built a unique system, you will learn quite a bit and carry that forward.

Now that I have better parameters (probably not the best I could have, but certainly decent) I've started printing more practical parts, with more complex geometries. I've printed a couple of the part shown above, a bearing block used to make a component of Wade's geared pinch wheel driver. Should certainly be functional (even with one being warped), but the best part was actually getting to click the "I made one" button in thingiverse.

Below is a video showing the part mid-build (another end-build vid showing the decent surface is available on my youtube page.)


Now I'm going to move ahead and try to print some of these other parts.


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