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Saturday, December 15, 2007

Print Head Auto-Encapsulation

Millions of years ago, this prehistoric RepRap print head stumbled into a freshly emerging stream of molten PLA. It became trapped, the PLA smothered it, and it became completely encapsulated. Now this specimen is perfectly preserved, and industrial archaeologists can observe its primitive construction in minute detail. It may even be possible to extract early RepRap developer DNA.

This is going to be a complete bugger to chip free. I'll probably bake it at 150C for a while and pull all the crud off. The cable tie and terminal block will melt, of course. At least there is a thermocouple conveniently embedded in the blob. The girls, however, want me to preserve it as a memento so I may have to build a new one.

How the heck? I left the thing running overnight doing an X Axis Constraint and a serial error caused it to stall with the extruder motor and heater running.

Vik :v)

5 comments:

  1. The solution to that is, of course, to change the code from "Do this until you are told to stop" to "Stop unless you receive the signal to continue".

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  2. Either approach requires some feedback method for checking to see if one should continue. Is there any motion checking device in place? Maybe a periodic clock to see if the endstops have been hit at least every so often?

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  3. Arduino code seems easy to do, so such sanity checks seem possible. I'm Focused on such.

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