A lot of people have asked me recently how I make extremely high-detail prints, such as this little gnome house: Using a better firmware (Marlin) and a gcode generator that creates more sensible paths (Slic3r) are the first two things you absolutely must do. Without using both Slic3r and Marlin, you’ll struggle to print your [...]
This whole DIY 3D printing thing is pretty awesome, but I’m convinced that it can be even more awesome. Today, we generate gcode with generators that are kinda slow and clunky, and we use firmwares that are good enough but limit your speed. The reason for my relative blogging absence over the last two weeks [...]
Update: This was a case of PEBKAC. The problem had nothing to do with Marlin in the end. I’d been merrily printing things at blazing speed (such as this SimCity 2000 building) and I’ve been really happy with Marlin’s ability to not only print faster, but smoother at the same time. Unfortunately, I’ve run into [...]
It turned out that getting Marlin to work with Replicatorg was drop-dead simple. All I needed to do was change the baud rate in the firmware to match the baud rate listed in the reprap.xml config file. Duh! In the past I tried changing the baud rate in the config to match what was in [...]
I submitted my first patch (or “pull request” in git-parlance) to Replicatorg to fix issue #4 that I wrote about in this earlier post. As usual, the most challenging part was actually figuring out what part of the code was being called where, i.e. just what in the heck is going on. Once I got [...]
Turns out there’s a relatively easy solution to Marlin’s connectivity problems on Sanguinololu boards: in Marlin.pde, change BUFSIZE from 8 to 4. Now it works like a charm and you can turn your perimeter federate back up to 50 mm/sec and your infill feed rate basically as high as you want. I’ve only gone as [...]
I managed to get Replicatorg working with my Prusa tonight. In some ways it was easier than I thought it was going to be. Here’s what you need to know: Upgrade to the latest Replicatorg, available at replicat.org Replicatorg doesn’t support SFACT, so you gotta make a real Skeinforge profile. Make one, if you don’t [...]
My Prusa is finished and printing. And man has it been a rush. I’ve been truly amazed by how my new machine required no calibration to start producing beautiful prints. Now, I didn’t say “very little calibration”, or “almost no calibration”, I said that it didn’t require any at all. Feeling ambitious, my very first [...]
In Replicatorg’s “Motherboard Onboard Preferences” dialog box, increasing the “Z home offset” value puts the extruder nozzle closer to the build surface.
Apparently the NSA with all of its billions of dollars of equipment, internet trawling, and email-sniffing were outwitted by these two-bit Russian spies for years. Ahh, I love it when my tax dollars fund unconstitutional, liberty-destroying surveillance regimes that don’t even work!