troubleshooting – Monocultured

Doing the RepRap #9 — Ghost exeunt!

So I re-read the Gen7 1.2 instructions, and found there a note that one should solder the male headers onto the Pololus. I had thought that the pins were a tight enough fit not to necessitate soldering, but gave it a go regardless. And what do you know, it bloody worked. Getting this to work has been a major hurdle, and it’s been an ongoing bother the past two months. So yay me, and yay to Traumflug who has been a great help, and yay let’s move on to other problems now. Like for example finding spare parts to the hot end I just broke.

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Doing the RepRap #8 — Shooting the trouble

Having set up the studio space here in gallery Titanik I’m once again struggling with the electronics of the RepRap. I got the board back from Traumflug — in addition to fixing it he’d also made it shiny! — and he had successfully used it to move motors and such, so the board is OK. But when I plug in my Pololus and motors and PSU, nothing much happens. Frustration runs high with this one. I have two videos of the troubleshooting below:

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In the first video I have a 300W PSU hooked in to the board, and in the second video I try to use a DVD as a load resistor, after recommendation from Traumflug. Spoiler alert: In neither of the videos does the board move the motors, nor give me a reading on the meter. The next step will be to to add a proper load resistor onto the PSU instead of the DVD player— this is slightly more involved than just jamming a bunch of ¼W resistors in there, so I’ll have to do some research on it. The following links might give a clue:

How to Convert a Computer ATX Power Supply to a Lab Power Supply
Desktop power supply from a PC

An alternative to this would be to get a totally new power supply. I know that people have been using Xbox 360 bricks for power, and I’m sure there’s a crapload of alternatives which would work. I’m just hesitant to give up on the only part of the RepRap which I’ve actually scrounged myselft — The PSU was going to be thrown out with a bunch of computer trash at Chalmers, and I thought I’d give it a second chance at usefulness. Not that this project lacks DIY spirit and such, but you catch my drift; Ideally you’d be building the whole printer out of garbage and driftwood.

Doing the RepRap #6 — repair, rebuild, rejoice, despair.

In anticipation of fucking shit up I had ordered two ATMegas and having succeeded once it took me one try to get the bootloader to take this time around. The board looked fine, but after a lot of trial and error, error, and error, I resigned to the fact that my Pololus probably were fried and ordered new ones. And that, kids, is how you literally burn 600 SEK by being a lazy bum and not double-checking your solders. Lesson learned and so on.

Having received the new Pololus, and with an extruder underway from the States and the plastic parts coming over from Australia, I only need to get the motors to spin to have a semblance of a printer up and running. I have most metal parts except for some springs and wingnuts, and to celebrate the birthplace of the machine I got some SKF 608 bearings. Oh, and I still need two T5 timing belts.

In the IRC channel I was suggested to use Pronterface.py instead of ReplicatorG as a computer side controller of the board, but after the first few times I couldn’t get the thing to launch and reverted to ReplicatorG. Not that it matters at the moment, because even with the ATMega replaced and properly bootloaded and running Gen7 Teacup, I can’t get any readings or functions out of it. I made a video of my attempts and you can watch it below; it’s dry but you get to watch me prod an inanimate object with clumsy fingers.

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Mom and Tomasz decided to visit now as well. I’ve shown them the archipelago and then my allotment garden and then the KKV workshop and then mom left and now Tomasz is stuck with me while I whine about the RepRap and hush him while recording troubleshooting videos. You can actually hear him in the video above, so it’s well worth watching for that alone! Also, I totally destroyed him at pingpong earlier today, and have video of that as well.