MakerBot - 000023
MakerBot 000023, yet to be named, was purchased by 20 people in the metro Boston area that decided to band together so we could all share in this awesome rapid-prototyped future. Included in this group are people from the Willoughby and Baltic, Dorkbot Boston and others. We will be posting pictures here and documenting our adventure. Don't mind us if we get a bit over excited.
MakerBot Build on Flickr
And So It Begins…
MakerBot Opening Party on Flickr
Things We Learned
This will be a place for us to rattle off things we ran into that were of note. They can be later subsumed into the MakerBot documentation if appropriate.
- Solder Stencils! Wow did this make our lives easier! Our friend Ryan at OHARARP LLC. was nice enough to donate FREE! stencils for our MakerBot build. We are going to get the files up for others to use or you could of course purchase them from Ryan. We will also have instructions and pictures up soon.
- Pay attention to part placement! I was rushing on Saturday night and put the microcontroller on the motherboard wrong. I only realized it after a solid hour of troubleshooting the next day. Thanks to some Chip Quik and some time consuming rework I was able to get the chip and the motherboard happy again. This is common sense stuff of course but sometimes you get excited because your building a freaking Makerbot!
- More common sense electronics advice. If any of your boards don't work right off the bat first order of battle is to check for a short between power and ground. Actually you should always do this before applying power. Secondly check all your solder joints. On one of our motor drivers we had a few caps that didn't have good solder joints. Once cleared up with a touch of the iron and a bit of extra solder the board ran great.
- The uploading instructions for the motherboard could be a bit more clear. When uploading firmware Arduino style you need to have the ATX PSU plugged in. This provides a 5v standby voltage to the AVR. You can then use the FTDI cable to upload your program the board needs to be reset manually. We found about three seconds between hitting upload and pressing the rest button was about right. Blink, Blink, Blink, Blink, Blink, Blink….
List Of Contributors
- Aaron Falk
- Christian St. Cyr
- Jimmie P. Rodgers
- Jon Schwartz
- Leander Harding
- Paul Symansky
- Roy Pardi
- Darius Kazemi
- Peter Olson
- Sam Gerstein
- Brett Beauregard
- Claudio Topolcic
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(I am only listing contributors from whom I have consent to do so. Feel free to add your name to the list.)
page revision: 16, last edited: 20 Nov 2011 04:48