On Tuesday, May 16, 2017, 7:31:08 AM MDT, Gene Heskett <ghesk...@shentel.net> wrote: Greetings all;
And the next logical question from me is: Has anyone put a printhead on a std moving table milling machine, and used it to do some 3d additive printing? I am "out of room" for more machines, and that seems like a possible to do project. Doing it well would remain to be seen. The printhead seems like the lessor of two aspects, as a heated bed that big seems to be the bigger problem. Discussion? Cheers, Gene Heskett TL;DR Buy a Monoprice Select Mini. Print volume is only 120x120x120mm but can usually be stretched to 125mm in X and Y. Comes fully assembled, weighs 16 pounds due to steel construction. Needs only about a 16x16" clear space to operate. V1 still available for $199.99 V2 $219.99 (Both can be found for less from vendors other than Monoprice.) It's been done with CNC mills. The biggest problem is speed. 50mm second is considered pretty slow for FDM printing. Then there's the inertia of the heavier table or gantry so it'll have to slow down more for corners. There are a variety of sizes of aluminum heated beds and PCB bed heaters on eBay, Alibaba, Bangood etc. Sandwich a piece of 3/16" aluminum, a PCB bed heater, fiberglass insulation and an aluminum plate on the bottom for a heated bed to mount to your mill table. Finally, there's the control system. The various 3D printer controllers that have been developed the past five years have control outputs for the bed and hot end heater (one or more of each) and dedicated motor controls for the extruder. Likely the easiest way to 3D print on a CNC mill would be to have some quick way of switching between mill and 3D printer controls. AFAIK nobody has (yet) made breakout boards to plug in place of Pololu stepper controllers for easily connecting to external motor drivers. Protoneer's CNC board for Raspberry Pi dose have that option, but they only work for that board to convert the motor connections on the main board to driver connections. So there's a project, a Pololu driver replacement board that has a plug connector or screw terminals to break out the driver control lines from RAMPS and other things with Pololu sockets. They'd even work on the Protoneer board if for some reason you didn't want to use the screw terminals on the main board. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
