Got a diode backwards and another board finished

So Wade was having a look over the two boards I finished last night and spotted that one was backwards. He showed me how to desolder with solder wick and sorted it out for me. This is the third time he's spotted me doing something wrong and steered me clear before I blew anything up.

In other related reprapping new I got the DC motor board finished. This was a much denser board but didn't have any of those bloody diodes. Wade's reprap seems to be doing well at the moment, there's some clutching issues with the extruder motor but he's tweaking the config to play around with it.

Here's a few photos of what I've done:

The bottom right diode is the offending member post repair.

One DC motor kit pre soldering.

One DC motor kit post soldering. I've yet to stick in the chips and solder on the interface wires, called it a night a bit early.

Two more stepper motors

Got the two Stepper Motor Control Boards completed last night. Soldering is starting to speed up a small bit so hopefully I can blast through the remaining boards. I didn't actually plug in and test the two boards yet as I don't have my own PSU and I didn't want to fiddle with Wade's while a good build was in progress.


In other good news Wade seems to have his new extruder going well and sorted out the skips on the x-axis. So he's currently printing out a set of extruder parts for me. Oh I also set up the shuttle in the workshop. Man the shuttle is light. I wish I'd bought a shuttle years ago when I used to go to lan parties. Would have saved so much lugging.

As usual some photos of the current work.

Last set of Diodes to do.


Making some progress.

All done!


Here's the shuttle in its new home. Neo looks impressed.

The build Begins

Hi I've been lurking on the reprap forums and site since early 2007 and for a host of reasons haven't been able to get a build going. Moving to Canada from Ireland, sucking at soldering, living in a small apartment and not wanting to pollute my long suffering girlfriend with fumes all played a part.

Well last week I met up with Wade Bortz, the first guy to sell a completely repraped set of parts, for a case of beer (typical Canadians). He's workshop happens to be a block away from where we live and he's kindly offered to share his workspace and guide me down the pearlious path of building a reprap.

So this Saturday I got a start on soldering the electronics. Wade has kindly let me use a spare set of electronics that he had while I'm waiting for Zack to send me a set of boards. I'm a bit slow at soldering as my only other experience is a few failed attempts at making LED boards. But slow and steady wins the race as they say. I'm hopefully going to keep posting up my progress or lack there off. I've a few photos of my first motor control board being soldered.

First component soldered on!

Making a bit of progress here...

All those big lads are finished at last...

This is as far as I got on the first night, hopefully I'll speed up a bit once I get a bit of practice.

This is the Wade's RepRap Darwin printing out a new extruder part. I believe nearly all the pieces of this extruder were printed on the machine using a previous head.

While I can't be down at the workshop I'm also playing around with the java host software. I've run into a dead end getting it to run my mac so I've set up a ubuntu image inside vmware fusion and I'm going to give that a shot. Failing that I'll see if I can get it to build inside eclipse. I hope they used maven :).