put this at the start of each post
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Airtripper form the Sumpod forum designed a hot bed for the Sumpod. Whilst they say its not necessary for PLA plastic, I hope to modify mine to do ABS (and 3mm filament) so thought it would be useful to build and see how durable it is. The weak point may be the glass I bought (the glazier certainly thought so and didn't charge me for two pieces!) but since it warms fairly slowly and Airtripper has had his working, why not.
During the construction my mind wandered to whether yesterdays 100% success rate was a fluke? So why not just design something here and now and see if it would print? I opened up Alibre 3D CAD and produced a small letter F, exported it to the desktop, opened Skeinforge, converted it to GCode and then loaded it into ReplicatorG.
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- Excuse the photo, forget to take specific picture of the printed F
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- Needed to ‘adjust’ the bracket design
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- The working bracket – design will be adjusted to version 3
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- Showing why it had to be adjusted – catches on the Z axis main frame
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- May not be needed but decided to protect the stepper
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- May not be needed but decided to protect the stepper motor
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- Hotbed with Thermistor central
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- Brackets hold it nicely in place
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- Mock up to get dimensions for real panel
Pressing print I was really pleased to say it worked! I had a nice letter F to show for it. I must however stop using pink!!!!I am getting so many comments about it! There is a picture below. One thing I need to amend/ adjust is the end of the print and remove the nozzle away from the part. So I will investigate this further.
When it came to try the hot bed it didn't work so I will need to debug this. I left it for today as I wanted to try a mock up of the front panel (again pictures should make cleared). There are some clever people on the forum and they are making enhancements to the Sumpod, some of which Richard has incorporated into the latest release.
The one that interest me most though is the SD card reader. that way I can leave the laptop in doors and just save my prints to a card and use it from there. However, there is also an encoder that seems to be worth doing (see Sumpod forum for more information). So I thought it would be interesting to see what I could mock up to incorporate all these new ideas. I envisage the LCD, rotary encoder, speaker, keypad and SD card to be amongst the items placed on the panel. It is a work in progress and one advantage I hope to get is the wiring run to the Ramps board underneath will be simpler as well. let me know what you think.
You need to add a line in the end.gcode file to move the nozzle away at the end.
Something like G00 x0 y0 z90
Or tag it on the end of the gcode file.
Thanks Richard, got there now.