Thursday, February 12, 2026
PIKA With Relative Axis Driver Sizes
I roughed up a model of PIKA with V0.05 Axis Drivers positioned in the appropriate places:
There's a couple of things that have become apparent. First off it needs to be quite large. In the model shown, the outside box bit is 130mm on a side due to current design needs: There's a minimum size of flexures and beams, and the platform in the middle needs to be 40mm across so that bed levelling screws are adjustable by mere mortals.
This is certainly no show-stopper. It'll still be well within the realms of a modest 3D printer to fabricate. But I was hoping for something a bit more petite. So it goes.
The second thing is that the size requires me to change the Motor Pillars on the Axis Drivers. Again, a trivial change, but I'd hoped to avoid it. My apologies to those who have already printed them. On the plus side they're not *that* hard to print and replace. Price of progress, I guess. I'll try to keep them shaped to fit the V0.04 frame.
Now I have an idea of where things are going to be mounted, I can start designing linkages between the axes and the Axis Drivers, and adding mounting points to the PIKA frame. Then I might print one and see what goes wrong.
Should I shift PIKA stuff to a new directory, separate from the existing MAUS stuff?
