George Frick

What a busy couple of weeks I have had. Many upgrades for the printer have arrived, and work continues on understanding and possibly building Hexy before my Kickstarter version arrives from Arcbotics . In this post I will cover the upgrades I have made to the printer; why I made the upgrades, their cost; and finally show some updated Hexy prints to show off the new accuracy. First; I was printing the Seej Starter Set , in preparation for taking my printer to work on my last day. While doing so, the printer gave up the ghost. Badly. First, the z-axis was homing and went right down through the printer bed. So after a break and calming down, I put the z-axis back together, calibrated; and went to home it again. Same thing, it went right down through the printer bed; which was saved by being spring loaded. This time though; the z-axis couple snapped in half. So, because of this complete printer failure and needing to order new parts anyway; I decided to do the upgrades that are sugges...

So it has been a long time since I made a real post; but we won't dwell on it. Instead, let us get to the good stuff and share some information! This post regards my long term rebuild of my Prusa Mendel Reprap, which I decided to do back in March. If you saw my previous blog posts, you will have seen the state of the printer. It worked, but it didn't print well and there were wires everywhere. I even used some CAT5 as motor wire. Because of the setup, the printer experienced many problems: Wires would catch during the printing run. The printer could not be moved. The RAMPS (Arduino Mega + Shield) kept getting bumped around, etc. So, I took the entire thing apart and took the following steps: All wires now use connectors (pictured below).  These are available at Ultamachine: http://ultimachine.com/content/molex-4-pin-plug-socket-connector-kit The power supply and RAMPS are mounted on a small piece of wood, which is mounted to the reprap (pictured below) The thermis...

Hello, just a quick post about Hexy the robot. I was recalibrating the printer after finishing up the rebuild and wanted to do some printing. Since I was curious about the sizing of Hexy and also my ability to print parts for it; I decided to grab the STL files and get printing. There was trouble; not all of the stl files were ready, some of them needed to be run through http://cloud.netfabb.com/ first. It took me a while to figure this out; but once I found it everything went smoothly. You may be curious; so here are some leg pieces for Hexy; printed in blue PLA. That's all for now. I'm prepping a full post on the rebuild reprap; my robot progress, and another project that is coming along very nicely.

My long journey concerning this printer has turned out to be a glorious one. With objects coming off the printer with a pretty high quality; and my ability to design objects starting to form, it became time to share the progress and information. I will answer my own questions from the end of the previous post; outline more of the printer build, and share the general experience. Also, I will address the budget with an update. Alright, so let's see it! Above is my RepRap (Prusa) as it sits today. It is half converted over to version 2. I chose to do this conversion to understand the printer better, and more importantly to improve the prints. The original build calls for using printed clamps on the axis; and the plastic simply slides. This is fine; but the clamps have to be replaced periodically and you just don't get accurate movement. So I printed a new X-axis, new Z-axis, some stabilizers and purchased a set of LM8UU shaft bearings to mount the new parts. Here are close...

The long journey to building a 3D printer has been underway for quite a while now. With the complete set of parts ordered and much of the construction finished I decided to share the progress; outline my frustrations, and post about how you can benefit from my mistakes. I have been building the printer for over a month; and the last batch of parts arrived early this week. What can clearly be said about this project is that you will underestimate it. The original plan was to get this working in six months. Once construction was underway; it seemed more like a month. It now looks like this could really take up to six months (to produce a quality 3D printed part). In this part of the coverage; I hope to outline the budget and basic build so far; finally going over some problems and warning points. The budget for this printer is quite high. It is a mid-range open source 3D printer known as a Prusa Mendel. You can find the wiki for it here . I chose to start with the basics (more on thi...

This is the first part of my post covering my creation of the line following Arduino robot. In this post I will talk about the costs; setup and preparation for creating the robot. I will also discuss a few different approaches to line following that I explored. We will get the sensor attached to the robot and retrieving data. In the next part, we will cover the final approach used; tour the code, and see the full video. The budget for this tank is quite low, because we start with Robot 1. I chose to add a single reflectance sensor to the bottom of Wandering Tank; and remove the wall avoidance equipment. So, the budget: Robot 1 ($98.00) [See this post for building Robot 1] Sensor - Pololu QTR Reflectance Sensor $2.49 + $4.95 S&H (est) So Line Following Tank has an estimated budget of $105.00 to build. Since there is no need for the parts from Robot 2, the cost is very low. I would suggest coming up with a few other things to order so that you don't pay more in shippin...