Wednesday 16 June 2010

More electronics fiddling

Some more progress, I've had a chance to test the rest of the electronics (yay). There seems to be some kinda problem with the extruder board, I cant program it as it keep complaining about sync issues. So I've left that for the moment. Instead I've been working on testing all the steppers/stepper drivers etc. Heres a quick video of each of the axis moving.

Once I had tested those, I moved on to the opto end-stops. I only had time to test the Y axis one, but that worked fine (video below). However I did blow up one of the end-stops in the process which will teach me not to trust circuit diagrams and just use a multimeter!

So tomorrow I will try and get the x end-stop in place then maybe try and repair the one I broke. Then I will have to sort out the extruder driver board, not sure where to start with it but hopefully it's fixable.


Saturday 5 June 2010

First play with electronics

So I had time for a quick play today, I managed to upload the firmware to the motherboard and ran a test using the Reprap software to talk to it. It wasn't, however, a pain free experience. The instructions were poor at best, stable versions of bits of code weren't easily available and it didn't play nicely with windows 7 (didn't really expect it to though).

Anyway after fiddling around on my xp netbook I got it working... sort of. It seems that the motherboard firmware I uploaded, when asked for the the extruder temperature (M105), reported the extruder temp AND the heated bed temp. Well the Reprap software didn't like that, not one bit. There were NullPointerExceptions and IntegerExceptions everywhere as it clearly tried to parse "0 B:0" as an int. Luckily being open source, and having the source at hand, I removed the offending code from the firmware, reuploaded and - tada all was well. I was going to test more of the electronics but, that requires making up some cables to the right length, so that will be a job for monday.

The usb/serial adapter and motherboard with the happy yellow light of workingness.


Look it works, g-code commands being sent and replies being received, hurrah!



Tuesday 1 June 2010

Electronics are here!

So finally the electronics are here! Everything seems to be intact, despite the box looking like it had been driven over. Time to resume work I on the reprap I think!

Obligatory pictures: