For the betterment of humanity, or at least the part of it interested in rapid prototyping, I’ll try to document the process of building my RepRap. So far, I have etched a shabby PCB — it’s the Gen7 v1.2 board — and I’ve tested it for shorts. It’s not the prettiest board I’ve seen and I’ll make a backup, but hopefully it’ll survive my cutting and drilling.
I’ve ordered a soldering station, having poured over reviews of different models and asking any person who has ever had a passing acquaintance with anything more advanced than a toaster, and ended up getting the Weller WHS40. I’m picking it up on Monday from ELFA, along with some solder, and will set it all up in the kitchen. Hopefully there won’t be enough fumes to kill any plants and/or people.
The instructions on the RepRap project wiki are confused and make me miserable. Many pages are not maintained properly and often seem to contradict each other. Using a wiki as documentation repository is all well and fine, but it’s not very pedagogical and frustratingly difficult to find even the PCB layout for the boards, as each new design is explained by the people working on it using whatever nomenclature — or lack thereof — they fancy. I don’t expect this process to be easy, but can for the life of me not understand why you would spend thousands of hours developing an awesome project intended to be a disruptive technology, and then fuck up the instructions. I found some excellent assembly tutorials though, which should be of great help once I’m building the actual rig.
I had a horrible time finding ready-to-print PCB layout schemes, so I backtracked the process and am trying out PCB CAD software. I haven’t been mired in learning new software in a while, so this will be interesting. Learning stuff while doing other stuff is a feature not a bug, so this might be an interesting way of learning more about electronics and CAD. As it is, I’m learning all skills necessary for the project on-the-go. I did some soldering in grade school, and I know how not to blow up my multimeter, and that’s about it as for my skillz. If I manage to build this thing — and get it to run — I suspect that most any primate should be able to.
The first PCB software I’m trying out is Eagle from Cadsoft
The build instructions for the Gen7 1.2 board are here: reprap.org/wiki/Motherboard_1_2
Layouts for the PCB are here: github.com/Traumflug and a ready to print PDF in Gen7Board Layout.pdf