Greetings!
Time for some New Year's update.
First of all- hardware like things have not changed much. Well, I fixed the jamming axis.
The Z one required some twitching, levelling and some love, and started to work.
The X jam was present because of a moron who attached the wires using a clipper onto the X tray rod (yeap, that would be me).
After working out the hardware, I moved to software.
Gen 7 electronics is recommended to run with Teacup firmware. There was some fun with setting up the config files, but I think I managed to make it work.
I decided to use Printrun (or Pronterface) as a main end-user interface. Printrun is just for controlling the print. It takes G-code (low-end language describing the print) and sends it to the firmware command by command. It also allows for manual printer management. Unfortunately it does not have embedded programs that allow to change STL schematics to G-code. By default Printrun sends you to another program: Skeinforge, which takes STL, slices it and produces G-code. For some reason Skeinforge was too much for me and I decided to use Slic3r as a slicer ;) Unfortunately now I have to manually generate the G-code in Slic3r and then load it in Printrun. A little inconvenience, but will deal with it later.
Having software sort-of-set-up, I tried to print something. Not surprisingly it did not go as I planned. The best print so far looked like a ball of hair you get after cleaning your comb. Well, far from perfect. I played a bit with the software but it seems that I am stuck with 2 hardware problems. First: the hobbed bolt that pushes the plastic into the extruder is bad. I made it myself and have to say it looks as good as it can with the limited access to tools I have. But it is not good enough. Second thing is the lack of heated bed. The ABS plastic simply does not stick to the surface, and without a first layer... well you get it. In order to overcome both issues, I simply ordered the parts on eBay. We will see how it goes after they arrive.
That is it for today, see you next time!
