Simon Kühling

Well, that’s awesome. I have never seen a 3D printer live before – and now this bootstrapped contraption on my desk is fabricating three-dimensional objects from plastic.

Absolutely fascinating.

Time passed quickly last week, so i’ll try to give a brief summary of the final steps to a working RepStrap 3D printer.

When our RAMPS-board and microcontroller arrived last week, the electronics were completed. The PCBs came pre-assembled, so i just had to stick the Stepper drivers in place, add a little cooler on top of each and solder some female connectors onto the stepper cables and opto-endstops. I crimped the hotend heat resistor and thermistor onto their cable instead of soldering due to high temperatures near the heater block.

As a power source i pulled an old ATX computer power supply from the junk box. There is a great page in the RepRapWiki on how to wire those up.

That’s for the hardware. On my Controller i installed Sprinter, a powerful and extensivley tested RepRap firmware. As a computer-toolchain i am testing SFACT (Slicer) and Pronterface (RepRap host software). For now i am quite happy with those.

In further posts i’ll go into more detail on the first extrusion, my first spool of filament and tuning all the parameters for good print quality.

Tagged: Open Hardware, Open Source, RepRap