Exactly one month has passed since Lawrence arrived. Here is an update, continuing from the last post on the project, up to the progress of one week ago:
Torch Table Build Part 3 – Rails from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
For those interested, here is a discussion of some of the electronics issues, here is another video:
Torch Table Build Part 2 – Electronics from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
Lawrence will continue with an update up to the present point. Here is the funding basket for the project, so chip in:
Hello!
This thing looks absolutely great!
Especially clever to use a piece of the rack itself to align the the rack pieces!
If you want to cut lead time you can use your stepper driver box and just make an adaptor from an Arduino board to the parallel connector of the stepper driver. I tried this myself on a smaller machine.
The reprap/Arduino operates in exactly the same way as emc^2 on the physical level, with one pin for the step and another for the direction (dir).
This means you don’t have to build any reprap electronics, just buy an Arduino off-the-shelf and focus on getting the software (g-code interpreter) to work!
There are a lot of reprap threads on this, here is one:
http://dev.forums.reprap.org/read.php?13,23272
On the parallel port issue… Unfortunately the real time properties of USB makes it unsuitable for this type of applications. The lag can get rather large. If you want to retrofit a newer laptop, I recommend buying a PC-card parallel card instead. You can get these from places like DealExtreme and also at a larger pc-shop.
[…] been working fast and furious on another one month project proposal and finishing up the Torch Table. Saturday I hit a milestone which I thought I would share. We have possibly the largest, open […]
hay u guys should try mach3 http://www.machsupport.com/
check out http://www.machmotion.com/