Printrbot upgrades

I have started working on some new upgrades to the printrbot lately. The first thing that I worked on was stabilizing the Z axis, using both a stabilizer for the smooth rods as well as switching the mount for the lead screws to a flex shaft coupler. I am hoping that this gives more consistent results in printing. I still need to switch to better lead screws as well.

In addition to the Z axis mods I have replaced the drive belts with GT2 belts and corresponding drive gears. To accomplish this the calibration must be changed. The following must be placed in the custom gcode for slic3r.

M92 X80 ; calibrate X
M92 Y80 ; calibrate Y

I have also added max speed and acceleration code aswell. This seems very useful for printing faster and precisely.

Notebooks

With my new job as well as summer I have been pretty busy and obviously not posted in a while. However, one thing that I figured I would share with my fellow math and science friends is what I have been using for exploring at work. We are primarily a python shop doing lots of novel bioinformatics algorithms, and thus I am writing lots of simulations and exploratory programs to try out ideas. Before I would do most of this in the python interpreter, however lately I have switched to using IPython notebooks. In many ways this is similar to a Mathematica CDF document, where you can interlace text, code, and output.

This is extremely helpful for working with lots of math, where I can write notes about it above, and then a code implementation below. Note, the text can be formatted in LaTeX annotation, making math look nice. I also find that I am spending multiple days exploring concepts instead of just a few hours, and having something that is saved and I can go back to without writing a full program is very nice. So if you do lots of heavy algorithms development or math I would recommend checking it out.