Matthias's print blog

Assembly of the heated bed

matthiastt — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:55:19 +0000

Just a quick update on the build.

Electric insulation of the bed by covering it up in kapton tape.

After marking the resistors on the kapton tape I removed some tape to make place for the resistors and the magnets.

Then I placed the resistors on the board with a little bit of thermal paste between them and the board. (don’t know if it will make any difference)

Then I placed the magnets, I immediately noticed how strong they are. They attract metal tools and each other like hell. Something that asks some attention.

This is the result. Wiring has also been done and now I’m still waiting for an arduino to connect everything up. I’ll keep you updated.

Arrival of the heated bed

matthiastt — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:45:07 +0000

A few weeks ago I ordered a heated bed kit from László, today it arrived.

I liked the kit allot because it’s almost complete. You have everything you need for the build.

The kit comes with an arduino shield. This offers a lot of features/flexibility for temperature control. A sketch has been made, but I’m going to add some extra functions. (warning light T>40° and etc)

The arduino activates power to the resistors with a solid state relay. This is a good longterm solution.

The bed itself is a high grade precise flat aluminium plate.

It has al the necessary holes already drilled. You van see: square holes for the magnets holding the build platform,holes for the resistors, and some holes to mount the bed without changing anything to the RapMan.

It also includes a custom Z-switch.

It’s really a wonderful package, almost “build and use” More info can be found on the creator’s blog

http://blog.arcol.hu/

I’m going to document the build on this blog later on.

Motherboard problems

matthiastt — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:39:17 +0000

Today finally got the SD readings to work. A brand new Sandisk Ultra 2G did the job. Don’t know why that card works and the others don’t.(evendo some of them worked before).

After a few prints another problem started:

http://www.youtube.com/user/MatthiasPrint#p/a/u/0/Qnifbol71aI

It did print normally while displaying this. So there was no temperature change going on at the moment, evendo it’s displaying it. After I stopped filming it got worse. Looked like a lot of artifacts. So I decided to reboot the system, with a big suprise afterwards.

No display info at all: no splash screen,no menu. Think de display controller is faulty. With the menu layout in mind you can operate and print normally, but it isn’t that easy .

Problem reading SD cards

matthiastt — Mon, 31 May 2010 11:12:05 +0000

Today I’ve encountered a problem. The BfB board doesn’t recognize files on SD cards anymore.

I’ve tried everything:

formatting FAT,FAT32
different card
checking for dust
re-installed firmware

Nothing seems to help

First personally designed object

matthiastt — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:42:46 +0000

Today I printed a new piece, one of the largest so far. An iPhone holder for navigation in the car.

Because it was tall and long it started to warp fast. Which resulted in a crack halway. Aldo this presented not much of a problem since the basic feature (holding the phone) stayed preserved.

A problem that’s worse is the following you can see below. The edge of an object consists out of two layers. One inner layer making contact with the filling. And one outer layer making contact with??, sometimes nothing so its not connected and loose. I know warping had its part in the problem. But I’ve encountered this problem earlier also with objects with minimal warp.

So I was thinking of printing without extra shells

Started again

matthiastt — Fri, 21 May 2010 17:11:58 +0000

It’s been a while that I could test some more. Yesterday new plastic arrived so improving could continue.

I’ve tried the mini cup again with far better results.

As you can see it’s a big leap forward. The previous bad results were mainly caused by loose pulley’s.

This helped the most: glue/loctite on pulleys and a filled flat on the extension bar.

Next step: understanding skeinforge

First build

matthiastt — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:59:14 +0000

After the successful prints of the rafts, the next step was printing a real object. The mini mug, to celebrate. Unfortunately there’s not so much reason to celebrate. The result isn’t that good as expected. I knew it wouldn’t be perfect , but this

Feel free to post some diagnosing info.

Up and running!

matthiastt — Wed, 05 May 2010 08:39:18 +0000

After some further tweaking the machine was ready for the first extrusion. All went well

Then I tried the raft calibration file from bfb. Results turned out good, bed was not perfectly level but that was fixed fast. I just noticed that the extruder waits for the temperature increase at a wrong place. Bottom left corner, it waits for the temp increase just above the bed. (you can see the blop of abs)

We’re almost there

matthiastt — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:07:17 +0000

Building is going very well, the basic structure is almost complete.

I just noticed that, if I move the Y carriage totally to the side the micro switch does not get triggered. I think the X bar is supposed to trigger it, but the Y belt clamp touches the corner bracket first so is doesn’t move any further.

I’ve added a picture to showAny advice?

First building hours

matthiastt — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:31:32 +0000

The result after a few hours of building. No problems at all.