On Wednesday I received my last part for my 3-D printer, the hot end. Now I just have to get some filament (the plastic you print with) and be on my way!
Another thing that I did this week was do my first (and only) soldering for my project. From what I had read I was worried that everything would have to be soldered, and secured with heat shrink tubing. Luckily most of my parts came with connectors at the right spacing that plug right into the board! I could shorten the lengths of the wires, but for now I am going to leave them at the lengths they are and secure them with zip ties. Anyway I had to solder the heat resistant wire to the heated bed (it gets up to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, which would melt the insulation on regular wire) and then add extenders on to the wire to reach the board. This wasn't very detailed soldering so I didn't have much trouble with it.I will probably still have to add plugs on the ends for easy access to the RAMPS board. I also had to extend the wired on my fan with a length of doorbell wire (it was what I had in my garage).
As I may have mentioned before there is code for my 3-D printer available online for free. The downside is that it is written for many different types of printers in many shapes and sizes. This means that I have to do some math to calculate the steps my motors need to take based on rod pitch, belt pitch, pulley size, gear ratios etc. I also have to get my end stops positioned in the correct way, select my power supply, fan type, hotend type and so forth. This is easier than it seems as you just have to un-comment some things in the code, but looking through thousands of lines worth to find the correct item to configure is quite monotonous.
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