FabLab improvements to do

I got a stack of buckets to make filament “dry boxes” out of so our filament doesn’t all get wet and go bad. Pretty much every roll here is so wet that it steams when printing & doesn’t print so well. Please don’t throw these out.

I brought in my dehydrator in and am dehydrating the filament we have roll by roll.

To improve things a bit, I’d like to suggest the following:

Maybe move 3d printing to annex? Not too much work space now…

Sealed storage for filament (buckets)

A couple actively heated dry-boxes.

A food dehydrator for drying out nylons and exotics that need to be “baked” for best results.

Making training videos for ultimaker (online certification – no fuss)

Couple more nozzles and doo-hickeys for printers to be well stocked.

Any other suggestions?

Lorin

Okay, I’m going to add to this:

Marlin on gigabot is really pissing me off. We keep trying to add code that just doesn’t work too well at 16Mhz, 8 bit (and marlin itself is a freaking mess). Should we consider a 32 bit alternative like smoothieware? Would it help? Tired of gigabot being a boat anchor.

Lorin

I casually associate with Michigan Tech’s MOST lab & run their firmware, Franklin, on my delta very successfully. It does not require new electronics, and would work with the RAMPS board / arduino. The system runs in 32 bits on a debian system (beaglebone in most cases, but I’ve successfully compiled for Raspberry Pi and the trade offs vs beaglebone aren’t a big deal). This could be a good way to run Gigabot, in fact, MOST has a gigabot and runs it on Franklin.

http://www.appropedia.org/GigabotHX

The advantages: TRUE, hyper-accurate mesh leveling (many many points with save-able bed mappings), 32 bit processing (arduino simply is a sort of pipe), can tweak everything - most in real time (I love adjusting the Z height by .1mm or so while the skirt is printing – don’t have to start over).

Disadvantages - not a big user base, functional interface (web server http based) – not as pretty or friendly as octo-pi, and the big one, presumes that you know what you’re doing (if you’re in full admin mode – there is a simplified can’t tweak it user mode too).

I’ll bring in my delta at some point and folks can play with it. I like Franklin, but I’m not sure others will take to it.

Lorin