The Hippie is alive!!!

By Bob on Jan. 23, 2012 Comments

Got a lot accomplished this weekend, but not without a few struggles.

Friday night I started working on wiring up the controller. I have to say that I don't think I've had so many problems trying to assemble connectors than I had Friday night. One minute (actually more like 60 minutes) I think I've got one of the cables installed in the connector and I move on to the next one. Then all of a sudden the first one pops out of the connector.

I finally decided after a very long night to use a different method to connect things to my Sanguinololu. I first was going to try deans micro connectors but the offset was going to be an issue. My next option was to use another micro connector that is pre-terminated with wire leads. I bought enough to wire up all the stepper motors Saturday and put them with the printer until I had time to work on it Sunday.

Sunday afternoon I got over to the hackerspace and started to wire up the motors. I first just wired up the z-axis to prove out the choice I had made. After three attempts I had motion on the z-axis and I went ahead and connected up everything else except the heated bed and thermistor. Late Sunday evening I was ready for a full test of everything, had a little trouble getting it to connect to the USB port, but once I got it connected everything was moving and heating up!!

Of course I had to load a strand of ABS into the extruder and make a bunch of .5 mm threads of plastic, much excitement was had by all :)

You can see the videos of the first power up testing, along with the goofs I made while doing it on my YouTube channel.

I've ordered some SS threaded rod for my z-axis as I have installed the upgraded supports for them and needed longer rods anyway.

For now things are on hold until that comes in, then I'll install the new rods, re-align everything, then finish up the build with the heated build plate and start calibration and final testing.