My, how quickly I've fallen back into the swing of things after my holiday. By dangling a pen over paper on the Da Witch prototype's stage, the RepRap is now producing squares, octagons and whathaveyou quite happily and repeatably in 2D. The pen lines go over one another without deviating, so relative accuracy appears good even if absolute accuracy might need a little in the way of callibration. No photos - you know what squares look like :)
Da Witch currently constists of 3 screw-driven linear axis assemblies all made from FDM-fabricated parts: Long horizontal, vertical and a horizontal stage - no Meccano anymore. These are all driven by unipolar steppers, using a mix of 2803 and 2559 driver boards. Due to the modualrity of design, this should work just as well with the bipolar motors and 754410 driver boards - Simon plans to put a stage or two together based on those over the next week or so.
I've used "poke" scripts so far as this gives a lot of debug output when prototyping, but I will now concentrate on getting the Java code going on my setup. Once the SDCC problem in the extruder firmware is sorted, we should be up to actually making something for real. Yeah!
Vik :v)
Moving right along there Vik! :-)
ReplyDeleteI'm beginning to think that the NEMAs don't have the torque to drive the big, crude Godzilla that I'm building. There wouldn't be a problem if I had better motor, shaft and coupler alignment. Problem is that I don't have that with out a LOT of finicky tweaking of the system.
I'm not particularly worried, though. I've got alternatives. :-D