Friday 12 December 2008

My visit to the Braes

Hi Guys,

Just a quick update on things.

Thoroughly enjoyed my trip through to see you all this Wednesday (10th December). It was great to meet you and to work with you for a little while.

You did some excellent work in putting the individual Reprap subsystems together. There were certainly a lot of bits to organise. I hope that the exercise of matching the drawings to the individual parts gave you all an idea of what the project entails and what we will end up with at the end.

Next thing is to work out what we do with all the spare bits that we couldn't find a home for!!

Anyway, best wishes to all the staff and pupils involved in the project and have a lovely Christmas and New Year.

Brian

Monday 24 November 2008

The brains behind the operation

Hi all,

As promised here's a couple of images of the Arduino board and the breakout board. The boards connects to a computer through a USB connection. This allows the operation programme and part files to be uploaded onto the board and allow the prototyper to operate. So it really is the brains of the machine. The breakout board makes it easier to connect the Arduino board to other devices.

Hector's already run a quick test of the Arduino board using a little test programme and it came through with flying colours.

I'll add some more on the software and what the boards do soon.

Brian

The Arduino Board



The Breakout Board

Sunday 23 November 2008

Reprap.org

Here's a link to the main RepRap website so that we can all get our heads around what this project is all about.

http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

The brains behind the RepRap machine is the Arduino developer board. This allows us to programme the prototyper to build parts. Here's a link to their website.

http://www.arduino.cc/

Bits and pieces

Now that we've received the kits that we purchased, we can get about the business of building this thing!

Overall, the kit cost somewhere around £650. The good thing is that we don't have the hassle of sourcing individual parts and lots of ordering to manage. The downside I suppose is that this might have been fun and added to the sense of pioneering work. Anyway, the electronics kit that we're using came from The RepRap Foundation's online store, who are based somewhere around New York, USA. The mechanical kit came from Bits From Bytes, who are based in Somerset, England.

Anyway, Hector, our technician at the Robert Clark Centre has already starting building and testing the electronics system, which comes as a series of printed circuit boards (PCBs) and individual components. It all seems to be going smoothly up til now.

We're looking forward to getting parts of the kit over to you guys at the Braes soon so that you can get up and running too.

Here's some pictures that I took of the various bits and pieces to give you an idea of what they look like.

Electronics Bits



Mechanical Bits



The Stepper Motors
There are three of these in total. They will move the extruder head around in three dimensions (X, Y and Z) when the machine is building parts.


The Extrusion Motor
That's the little cream coloured device in the image below.


I'll post up a photograph of the Arduino board, which is the brains behind the operation when I get one.

Brian

Monday 17 November 2008

The Braes RepRap Project

Well, this is the first post on our RepRap blog. Let's hope that there are many more to come. A big welcome to all the guys from Braes High School who are supporting the building of our own Rep Rap rapid prototyper. We've got a long way to go, but I'm sure that it will be an exciting and interesting journey.

Brian