11. Mechanical Design, Machine Design¶
Group assignment page¶
We decided to make a Ceramic printer.
This week was quite interesting because we needed to work as a team. The correct division of work is very important in every project, and we did it according to the strengths of each of us. I and Elen found an interesting name for our printer TANJANQ which in Armenian means struggle, because we already knew that we decided to make not easy machine and needed to put effort into achieving results. We also emphasis the name JANQ part which means effort and the name becomes JANQ TANJANQ.
I suggested dealing with machine programming. I had programming experience, but I never programmed or changed the firmware program. At first, I thought I could learn firmware programming but realized that I didn’t have enough time for that. We also discussed the kinematic that we wanted to use. We decided to use Polar kinematics. The reason why we chose it is that 3D printers with polar design allow us to create large objects, using less space and being energy-efficient. These machines lack accuracy but with ceramic, it doesn’t cause a problem.
Research¶
First I did the research to understand which firmware is used in this type of printer. I found these options.
After that, I found Circa Polar 3D printer that had really good documentation and also open source files including firmware and controlling software.
Testing the stepper motors¶
For testing, I used GBRL firmware and this article helped me a lot to understand how I needed to install, setup and used it.
However, after testing, I understand that I can’t control 4 motors independently, because the fourth motor needs to be mirrored version one of the other 3 motors.
Thats why I decided to use Marlin.
As I mentioned before I wanted to use the version of Marlin that was in Circa Polar 3D printer documentation. But when I uploaded code to our Arduino Mega 2560 board I got the error.
Here is the error I got.
I tried to find the solutions for that but nothing helped, that is the reason why I tried not to use firmware and codes that were written by other people. I need to spend a lot of time to understand which part of the program error comes from. I asked Maxime for help.
As you can see from our faces we really tried to understand the reason but unfortunately can’t find the solution. Because we had little time and a lot of things to do I decided to find other firmware and understand if the error was the bug or not.
I found another firmware from babyBear 3D polar printer project
At this time firmware worked and I could test all 4 for motors.
Here are videos of how they worked. First I tested all motors without putting any parts on them (before assembling the parts of the printer bed, and extruder).
After that, I tested the motor for extruder.
And also the rotating bed and we put a load on it.
Then 3 motors for x,y, and z together.
After that, we tried to understand what slicer we could use for creating Gcode and tested the Polar 3D Repetier-Host software it has in it.
Here are the print settings that we added.
Here is how a cube looks when sliced in the polar printer.
After assembling the model I tried to control the machine as in Armath we used Pronterface I suggested using it for our printer.
On the left side of the window, we have an axis movement controlling menu. And we can select steps of axis movement. And with this menu, we tested our machine. On the right side is the space where we can write a command and send it to the machine.
And we tested the printer with Pronterface to understand how all axes work. We had troubles with the z-axis the reason could be the force of the motor because it didn’t manage to move the extruder because it was heavy. In the future, we plan to use a more powerful motor. Here is how the machine worked.
Conclusion¶
This week was really hard and interesting as I like teamwork very much. I think we are a good team because we easily understand, encourage, and help each other. I enjoyed working with this team. Special thanks to Maxime he has always helped me a lot with electronics and programming. Also, the FabLab team(Mkhitar, Onik, Babken, Anoush, Rudolf, Onik, Anna) helped us and supported us. Without them, we can’t manage to make this machine. This week for me was really challenging. I think it would be easy to find firmware change the settings and test, but I have to test a lot of versions of Marlin firmware to find the version I needed.