Sunday, February 14, 2010

Making the makerbot week 3

Making the makerbot week 3

After a small debacle/confusion last week over the assembly of the x-y axis, Bre emailed us and informed us that we had a 9th batch makerbot. This was very important because in the 10th batch many parts were changed. Today we discovered that, contrary to popular belief, the kit we had, as I termed it, was a frankenbot. As Darivanh assembled the z-axis, she discovered that she was missing the proper plates to support the z-stage on the 4 threaded rods. After searching high and low for the proper pieces, someone happened to change the assembly instructions to the 10th batch page, and lo and behold, the instructions for the 10th batch worked for our makerbot. We quickly found the parts that we needed and Darivanh, Kate, and Cristina quickly assembled the z-axis for the “frankenbot”. While this was all going on, I was wrestling with assembling the plastruder. Alex had soldered together the temp sensor and after Darivanh’s run to the AA wind tunnel (her friend who works there had a multi-meter) we were able to cut the Nichrome heating wire and solder it leads. After Alex soldered the these two items, we discovered that even though we had most of the correct parts for the 9th batch, we were missing a bolt for x y assembly, thusly we sent him on a quest for the bolt.

While he was out, and Darivanh and Katie were assembling the z-stage Katie had a question about the stepper controller. This was because the instructions for called for the installation of the z-stage caused a great deal of confusion. The instructions described the stepper controller using 2 different names. The other confusing part in the instructions was that the orientation in the following pictures was changed and the devices did not look the same. However, it only took a few moments to decipher the image and the image and help Kate on her way.

This week the makerbot made a significant amount of progress, and it looks more like a working product than ever before. Hopefully everything will continue fairly smoothly and we’ll have a working machine in no time.

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