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