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.

Printing big

This is a pool drain ring ramp so the pool cleaner doesn't get stuck. Hole in the center is 8.25 inch ID with a 2 inch band.

Megarep printing video

Across town Dave is building his makerbot

A few tweaks and he will be primting Dave Thais for the conversation the bot is looking good.

An x axis shot to give it some scale

That's a half of a pool table used as a base.

Photo of the whole printer

That's a 24x24x16 inch print area

Mega rap still working out the bugs

Actual 3d object printed

First print a failure but it's a print

We can fix and tune it from here it's almost a printer.

Setting up steps to millimeters ratios

Using a digital gauge to determine distance of each move

3d printer stepper motor extruder

I am sure we will make this a more complete post some time in the future but for now here is a short version of the rabbit hole.

We built the Megarep to use stepper motor extruders. We figured by the time we were done building it eveyone would have it in their software.  This has not been the case, after working for a week trying to rework the the design to use a DC motor and finding that controlling the power was going to be an issue, it was time to start making the stepper motors work again. So here are the choices Comparison of RepRap software tool chains.

We began this project by using the makerbot boards with makerbot software path.  (makerbot firmware, replicatorg, SkeinForge compiler). This software is almost ready to support stepper motor extruder drivers, hopefully it will show up in version 2.1 of the makerbot firmware.

Our next choice was to upgrade the firmware to 5d and follow the reprap host software path. This also had it's trials.  More to come later but the bottom line is that tis was a very complex tool chain and just left us bewildered for a week.

Our current choice thanks to Matt at metrixcreatespace.com is starting to look promising. We are using 5d firmware with RepSnapper Driver software, and RepSnapper compilers. This tool chain has it's issues as well and is said to be a little unstable but we now have a system that can drive the stepper motor extruder for the Megarep. 


This has been a month long process to make the stepper motor extruder work. It would have taken even more time if we had not had the expert help from Matt. hopefully the next post you see will be the first 3d object from the Megarep. By the way it will be the traditional shot glass. :)

Extruding finally. Yeah hell yes!

Machined dual extruder head on the way

12 side circle print #1