Hmmm, a rather funky design. Have any idea the total cost of the parts alone and how many printed parts are needed?

I heard some bad stuff about Core XY designs being a pain but I have never used one so what is its major advantage and this design's advantage?

 

The printer I designed had only 3 printed parts and everything else is from here or ebay because I am not too keen on printed parts but because of the lack of printed parts the cost of it is 500-590 dollars.

I don't move the bed like a Prusa design (bad show on that as I found out so I will never have another printer that the bed moves in any direction but up and down) and move it like an Ultimaker in the Z direction only. A shame these parts cost so dang much as it is keeping me gun shy to try anything with them.

As far as the 32 bit vs 8bit goes it really isn't so much the bit count but the clock speed and instructions per second because a ramps has a hard time keeping up past 150mm/s on a Delta.

 

Yep, due to the speed and the instructions per cycle it does it can easily blow away even an Arduino 2560 o/c (in liquid nitrogen) to 120mhz because the ARM is just so streamlined. I have two 2560s (1 on the ramps and 1 never used as a backup) and once I get a new printer up and running I will go for something ARM based but they are not cheap.

By the way the rod is that 5mm and is it flat on one side? If not you will need to do something to prevent the gears from slipping. If it is I am looking for a seller for just such a beast. Basically I am after the same deal as a stepper motors shaft but at what ever length I need (with the flat side as well).

 

My Z screws on my i3 rework boat weight is SS and you are right they tear the threads up but I must confess I can't easily get 5mm all threads anymore so I am stumped. edit: I know from experience that allthreaded 5mm rods wobble so are not dead straight like a smooth rod would be (reason I am looking for it).

As far as the ARM based processors there is the Smoothie which the Azteeg X5 is based off of. There are some controllers based on the Arduino DUE which is a Cortex M3 based CPU but I can't remember them off the top of my head.

 

I was on a reprap thread about that and there are pluses and minuses to it as someone bought one and tried it out.

http://reprap.org/wiki/AZSMZ_Mini

http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?13,486023

Another alternative - http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?13,499322

 

Well, I am no lover of 20t pulleys because if you do the math 16t pulleys/gears are evenly divisible which matters for Z (you can read up on Z banding). 16t is 10 micron layer height using a gt2 belt 1/16 microstepping where as a 20t is 12.5 micron which is fractional so you have to make sure you never have Z end up on an odd step with a 16t I never have to worry about that when slicing as I can use any layer height I choose. One thing I will say is a 2:1 is great and stick the 16t on each end that way the torgue is increased AND your resolution is increased.

What I am trying to figure out is if I have a 40t and a 20t then slap 16t on each end what did I just do? Did I just make my 200 steps into a 400 steps and the 10 micron is now 5 micron for the height? I think that is what would happen.

Oh, I still can't find 16t 8mm bore and I can't find 5mm smooth rod in any lengths greater than 400mm from Misumi so seems I am stuck (I need a 510-540mm M5 smooth rod in h5 or g6 if I have to or some pulleys with 16t and 40t with all having an 8mm bore). The 20t would be 5mm bore directly on the motor which is butt easy to find.

 

Smoothie was supposed to have pro versions coming out but I think China is whipping their buttocks. Smoothie was/is a far superior design BUT was just too over priced and the pro versions were going to be yet another 1.5 to 2 times the price of the current versions. I was reading and the AZSMZ uses two different pins (I forget which ones now) so if you take a Smoothie config those two pins have to be changed. I forget where I found that bit of info at.

I thought about the coupler but the coupler cannot be flexible so I am not sure if that is even available.

edit: Just went looking and found it - http://www.ebay.com/itm/2pcs-5x8mm-...r-Transmission-Connector-D14L25-/251977382666

 

LOL, I found some others but were all copper and just didn't look as sturdy and cobalt blue would look nice against black Extrusion, lol.

As far as the wifi thing I was told WiFi for print jobs was a bad idea and I was told this by a lot of people were the creators of the Smoothie as I would have loved WiFi printing but in this house no way Jose' and what they were talking ab out was if the wifi was right next to the transmitter so nothing would happen as the protocol is a bad dealio for it but I have no idea about any of that.

I would like to try an AZSMZ but I don't have a printer anymore as my boat weight (i3 Rework) left the building last April and that made over 1 year of thousands of hours of fiddling and "maybe" 2kg of printing and .5 kg of useful prints. People looked at it and could not figure out what was the issue so a boat weight it became. Now I just want a printer that works and I don't have to eff with once setup. No more spending 16-18 hour days trying to dial it in to get 1 print sort of nonsense.

 

My lord so their WiFi isn't even G? OUCH!! Why in the world should I care if I just pop the card into my PC and save to it instantly? I personally do not like printing via a SD card as I much prefer going directly from my computer as the controls on the screen are just too rudimentary for me.

I3 Rework was designed from the French and it was based on the i3 Einstein variant with more fixes. Right off the bat the first thing wrong was the Z endstop holder. Caused me 3 months of hell but now my printer (after a couple of hundred dollars to fix) will not lay down the first couple of layers. No matter who has looked at it, and checked everything out, all I could get is a "WTH? Why is this <bleep> still not working?" from them and they just get disgusted. Basically the printer can't be fixed and it only happens in the middle of the bed so I am hoping to try and level it one last time and print the parts I need in a corner. Oh, the first thing people checked was the bed itself and no issues so they thought it must be heat related so go buy this and same thing.

I am no lover of Josef Prusa's designs (as is well known) and I went on the reprap forums and someone laid out to me why his designs, in very great detail, suck. Josef Prusa made a design (i2) that propelled the 3d printer in so many homes and for that I take my hat off to him and acknowledge his contribution but his designs are made to to lowest denominator. What turned me off to Josef Prusa, after half a year of hell on the boat weight, was him finally acknowledging, on his blog, he designed the I3 to be aesthetically pleasing so a wife wouldn't be upset at it on the kitchen counter top or living room tabel AND was NOT designed to be functional. After that I felt betrayed but that is for the Prusa lovers to attack as they always do, lol.

BldrBot I have heard very good word about but I just don't want another 3d printer where the bed moves in any direction other than Z.

 

For the Z banding issue, I think the recommendation is to only use full step increments and not micro steps. The reason is that the true position of a micro step is less accurate than a full step position.

 

That is the theory also a moving bed causes ghosting AND for tall prints can, especially if fast printing, just shake the model clean off. None of those happen with a non moving bed (much preferred is a real fixed bed but very hard to implement).

 

Probably bad communication on my part. I was simply recommending choosing layer heights that correspond to full step positions rather than micro step positions. This only applies to the Z axis of course.
Edit: just read Mark C's linked article... good explanation of why you'd want to do the above. Just for the Z layer height. I still micro step my Z axis so it is smooth for homing, I just choose a layer height that correspond to a full step for my printer. In my case, increments of 0.04mm.

Mark,
Nice design, interesting Z axis! Looking forward to seeing build pics in the coming weeks.

 

I have a brace on each side and I made sure it was plumb and there is no wiggle. This is where the problem comes in at when people look it over. A really horrible design and the main reason it has been sitting in the den untouched since April-ish as I can't even look at it because I get nausea. So much wasted effort, expense, and time on a hunk of junk.

So, I am just going to build/buy something that does/did it right or I may just forgo 3d printers all together and use the money instead on a CNC router. That last part is especially if just the mechanical parts alone is going to run me 500-600 bucks.

 

Are the forces in a CoreXY really so well corrected that you can get away with a compression-only XY gantry like that? Even when making fast Y moves with the effector near min/max X? Awesome if so.

Great design. Mine has deviated a bit from your previous one due to a desire to keep everything as off-the-shelf as possible. I should start the build in the next week or so and will post when I do.

 

What does that mean "a compression only XY gantry"?

Mine was designed to do that and because of that the price skyrocketed.

 

The gantry only has internal wheels on the rails - no outer wheels clamping against the back side, too. If you were to twist the gantry about the Z axis hard enough, the rails would bow / the gantry would buckle, and the wheels would come off the rails. I'm not saying that this is a problem, BTW... in reality, everything may be stiff enough and the forces low enough for that kind of failure to be irrelevant. I've just never seen it before and am curious if it has been tested or used elsewhere.