Were back

Its been a while in the making but it seems to be on the right track.

Clean up complete for now

Control box mounted, pid extruder temp control box mounted, wires restrung rehooked up. Heat lamps are on an outlet strip for now. Heated bed is on the arduino pid and inside the control box. The new tempered glass is here ( the old space invaders glass had to many fractured and broke when we started cycling the heat.

Moved the extruder pid

It was time for some clean up work so we in taped the extruder pid and put on the side in an old project box we had. The switch might be for a set of heat lamps to soon to tell

Craigslisted out old parts ( sold)

Since we went to the ramps system we decided to sell our inventory of makerbot boards. We were surprised at the collection once we got it all together.

Had a driver board meltdown

We lost a capacitor on one of the driver boards It probably still works it's just a little burnt. We ordered another couple of boards. Multimachine you guys rock great service.

New multimachine ramps installed

We have always had some communication issues in this design with the old generation makerbot boards. We decided it was time to try the ramps package from multimachine. Our results were impressive almost all of our issues with communication errors have gone away.

Adding a heated bed and other things

Time to start getting this machine to a highly reliable state. Lots of improvements on the way.

First step add a heated bed. We used an arduino as a pid controller and this hotplate element as the heater. We covered it with an aluminum plate and set it under our glass. The photo shows the underside view.