Its been 10 days since my RepRap kit arrived and I must say I've impressed myself with the progress to date. I was expecting it to take a lot longer to build.
The wiki & forums at www.reprap.org contain a wealth of information, but to put it lightly, its somewhat disorganized. Anyway I love a challenge, and if this thing came with a simple set of instructions the job wouldn't be half as satisfying.
Last weekend a friend of mine (Stephen) and I worked almost the whole weekend on this build.
It was really daunting looking at the massive pile of bits and pieces in the beginning, armed with very little in the way of documentation or instructions.
Its funny how in the beginning you really don't know what to do and it seems like the task is impossible, but you kind of get into a zone where you pick up a piece and just by looking at it you can figure out where it fits. The RepRap design has been really well thought out.
The build started at about 10:00 on Friday morning and by 23:00 that night we had all the mechanical bits assembled and begun working on wiring up the electronics.
The new Techzone monolithic electronics really is a great piece of work, meaning we only had a single motherboard to work on. Previous generations of RepRap electronics have typically consisted of several boards to control the various motors and drive the machine.
Most of Saturday was spent trying to get the firmware loaded onto the card and getting the host software talking to the machine.
Eventually some time around midnight I received a response to my email which I had sent to Lambert from Techzone earlier in the day (unfortunately our time zone difference means that they are not available during our daytime) he informed me that the card had shipped with the correct firmware pre-installed, but in my haste I had flashed it with an older firmware which was not compatible. He had included the correct firmware in his email which I duly uploaded and like magic, the host software and the machine started to converse.
I like to quit while ahead so I decided to call it a day and go get some sleep at that point.
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