The other night I finished assembling my first 3D printer, a Printrbot LC. I am very excited about this, and for the most part had an easy time assembling the printer. One issue I did have is that the instructions are video, and not completely up to date, however it seems like they are starting to also produce some instructions using Dozuki or some similar system. I think that this combination is great.
The first issue that I did run into however when getting everything configured is the wiring of the motors. The big thing to realize is that the printer does not use the standard Cartesian coordinate layout. Instead it seems as though the Y and Z coordinates are reversed, such that the Y coordinate instead of the Z coordinate controls the location of the printbed. Consequently the Y coordinate controls the height of the extruder above the printbed.
The symptoms that lead to this realization was that it was impossible to get the bridge assembly to rise very far above the printbed. This is because those motors must turn more for a given distance with the leadscrews. So if you are experiencing the same issue, go ahead and switch Y and Z motors and endstop connections.
Another issue that I am dealing with is with filament not feeding well into the extruder. I am noticing that I am unable to get a good 5mm test extrusion; the last little bit will not flow and the motor will meet lots of resistance. I believe that there are two issues going on leading to this. First, I think that the temp. might be a bit low, so I brought the extrusion temp from 200 to 210 in the _Filament_ section of the control software. Additionally I think that the idler is too tight, squishing the filament and causing the hobbed bolt to grind away material and become clogged. So I have cleaned that out and loosened the bolts for the idler. Hopefully this will lead to a good extrusion.
In addition to getting this going on the physical side I have been playing around with some of the digital side of the equation as well. I have been using Autodesks 123D Design program to learn the basics of 3D design and CAD. One good place to start is to try out some of the simple examples on the inhale3d site related to designing electronics enclosures. Additionally I have been looking into being able to generate STL files from Processing. So watch for a modification of the Menger Sponge class for a version that can generate an STL file for printing in the coming week.
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