When: 1 July 2019
Members present: Claudia, Carissa, Vanessa
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) #1
Finally, AFTER A BUNCH OF TROUBLESHOOTING (where we almost fried our Arduino), we are done with our MVP !! YAYYYY!!
Modifications to our firmware (Marlin) during our troubleshooting:
- Firstly, we downloaded the U8glib and activated the LED interface settings.
- Secondly, we reduced the minimum temperature of our extruder under #define EXTRUDE_MINTEMP in the Arduino code to 10 degree celcius.
- Thirdly, we enabled our SD card function under #define SDSUPPORT so as to load the GCode files in our SD card to load various print jobs.
- Lastly, we increased the #define DEFAULT_AXIS_STEPS_PER_UNIT { 80, 80, 4000, 500 } to DEFAULT_AXIS_STEPS_PER_UNIT { 80, 80, 400, 50000 } to increase the speed of rotation of the stepper motor, which is connected to the extruder port.
Limitations of our MVP #1:
- The current Nema 23 Stepper Driver overheats very quickly within 5 minutes. Hence, making it not so desirable for long-term print jobs.
- The current jabbing speed induced by the stepper motor, which is connected to the LA, can still be much faster.
- Nonetheless, it will still be better if we can code the jabbing movement on Marlin such that the jabbing stops after a few jabs to give the printer enough time to move in the X/Y direction. Hence, minimizing the occurrences of having the needle dragged along with the printer. Thereby, reducing the breakages to the needle.
- The yarn feeding mechanism is not the most ideal although it does threads through and gets felt nicely onto the fabric base. Modifications to allow easier confirmation of successful felting by the needle during the print job willbe desirable.
- Lastly, the homing position for the Z axis can be further optimized to allow greater volume of yarn to be felted onto the fabric base.
Future Work:
Moving on, in order to address our above limitations, we are intending to purchase a new stepper driver (likely to be Nema34 4.5N 6A Closed Loop Motor + 86HSE4N-B32 Stepper Driver HSS86 Coding line – intl) that can last longer at higher speed without overheating too quickly.
While we wait for our stepper driver to arrive, we will be further refining our yarn feeder to better capture our yarn when printing.
Lastly, we can then figure out the optimum homing position for the Z axis after getting our stepper driver and yarn feeder mechanism to function better.