Day 10 - nikkiverre/Teacup_Firmware GitHub Wiki

So this little guy might not be the most precious thing in the world but he sure has a lot of personality, don't ya think...?

... and then on the back, he's a mess

Today was a super exciting day... I 3D printed a Space Invader keychain that I stumbled upon Thingiverse. I must admit, it's pretty cool watching the 3D printer do its thing. Although it doesn't look perfect, I think it was a good first run. There are SO many settings to configure in Repetier Host, it's going to take a lot of trail and error to get it perfect... and I am looking forward to experimenting with it. For the first print, I just wanted to go with something small and simple, and chose the default settings. One thought is to make the printbed and the extruder a bit hotter.

Setting up the Ordbot for its first print I first hooked up the Ordbot to Repetier Host to see if I can manually control the X, Y, Z axes. You can simply do this by moving the X, Y, Z arrows in the Manual Control tab to watch Ordbot move (as shown in the picture below). At first, the Ordbot wasn't moving when I give it the commands and I kept getting this error: Serial com error:System.IO.Ports.SerialErrorReceivedEventArgs. So I figured it was a baud rate issue and messed with a few different baud rates. It finally started moving with the baud rate 250000. In the future, if your 3D printer isn't moving, make sure you have the right COM port and the right baud rate selected in the printer settings.

Again, one thing to note is that you cannot update the baud rate or any printer setting while the 3D printer is connected, so you have to disconnect the 3D printer and then change the baud rate or any desired settings and reconnect the 3D printer. The printer settings button is at the top right corner or you can access it via Config-> Printer Settings.

Once I chose the right baud rate, the 3D printer was responding to the move commands from Repetier Host. Next thing I did was to calibrate the print bed and made sure the filament was extruding properly.

Now, it was time to 3D print!!

1. I loaded the STL file from thingiverse
   

2. I sliced the 3D model with Slic3r and it produced G-code for the 3D printer

3. Lastly, I clicked "Heat Printbed" and "Heat Extruder" and "Run Job". The printbed temp was set to 55 degrees Celsius and the extruder temp was set to 200 degrees Celsius

A few mins later... Look at it go!

Almost there!

All done. Looked kinda promising, huh? Had some trouble taking it off the printbed...

Take 2

I tried 3D printing this guy for a second time... This time I lowered the Extruder temperature to 195 Celsius from 200 Celsius. And I think it turned out a bit better...

This was an opportunity to get familiar with Repetier Host with a live working 3D printer and the Ordbot hardware itself -- the quality of the 3D prints it can make and so on... Again, the idea is to replace the brains of the Ordbot with our Teensy 3D printer controller (once it's finished) and see if we can replicate the same process.

Tomorrow, I will need to look at the settings a little bit more in Repetier Host to make the 3D printing more solid. Also, need to continue working on getting the 3D printer software ready for Teensy 3.1.

Until next time...