DWG 3D Printer 2nd battle

After the initial build of the printer several issues with SPECTRA line and printer size made it clear that it will not work with required precision with sufficient speed.

So my observations are as follows:

• SPECTRA line should be over 60kg strong (mine was 20kg)
  
• bigger the print area and more visible is SPECTRA stretching (this was most noticeable in the long Z Axis)
  
• Spools for the SPECTRA for big printers are easily getting BIG. Also printing them in PLA is a no go.
• Building Z Axis with SPECTRA longer than 200mm can get tricky quite fast

Because of this issues I went with more proven design with GT2 belts in X Axis. I left SPECTRA line in the Y ...

5" Waveshare LCD raspberry pi

If you would like to run Waveshare LCD without their special image try this - I've got mine to work on vanilla raspbian with dtoverlay and no special hacks needed.

As I was tring to setup this LCD I'v come across all the information that was intended for pre-dtoverlay world. As this is something that is going to stay I wanted to go "the right way" on this.

LCD Display

First of all, to get LCD displaying image - despite being HDMI connected display - you need to edit config.txt in /boot directory. Type nano /boot/config.txt

Add/change lines to look like this:

# uncomment to force a specific HDMI mode (this will force VGA) max_usb_current=1
hdmi_group=2 ...

Dual wire gantry 3d printer

As I have come across excelent build by RichRap I have decided to build 3d printer described in his post at youmagine. 

Main goal was to build printer that will: 

be fastbe acuratebe huge :)

As I have alredy build my first extruder now was the time to build printer frame. I have decided to go with 30x30mm aluminium extrusions and welded them together (as this is another new practice exercise for me).

After checking all the angles frame and gantry was TIG welded together and 12mm rails was bolted to the frame. Other axis uses 8mm rods. 

With my small lathe I did the wire spools that will ...

DIY epoxy CNC milling machine

Reading all the CNC & DIY forums I have grow up to building my own CNC milling machine.

Mill is designed to accomodate working envelope of X: 50cm Y: 50cm Z: 45cm 

• epoxy granite gantry design with moving table
• scraping table as a solid base
• THK SHS20/HSR25 linear rails
• wather cooled "chineese spindle" 2.2KW with ER20 collet
• Servo motors P3 Sanyo Denki 750W SGDM-08 Yaskawa 200V 
• servopack yaskawa step/dir SGDP-08
• Mach3 
• controller ethernet based CS-LABS CSMIO-IPS

Gantry was created by mixing various sand grades (0.8mm and 2-3mm diameter) some micro spheres and epoxy (polish made Epidian 61) with slow hardener called PAC (also from epidian). Going slow is crucial if we do not want any srinkage or ...

ARMBra!nz

New toy – ModuBra!nz controller

This design is intended for more powerful robots. I need this to interact with NokiBot. But have experimented with VaioBot and prove that ModuBra!nz is very capable controller. It features:

• I2C at TTL and LVTLL levels (5V & 3.3V)
• SPI at LVTTL
• integrated footprint for Nordic nRF2401 RF-24G Transceiver
• Modular dual H-Bridge (4A & 8A)
• 8 Outputs for RC Servos with power cut off
• 8 ADC Inputs
• connector for Serial / Bluetooth / RS485
• Integrated USB for Bootloader and communication
• Encoder inputs

Also with ModuBra!nz there are libraries for BASCOM for interacting with nRF2401, Encoders, Vector V2Xe Compass, I2C Sonar etc. all put together as a project framework.