Reprap is an inspiration.
They have a not-for-profit research foundation which helps people like us. I am a very new member and hope to prove to be a valuable member sometime soon...
Here is a picture of our first objective:
In my opinion, there are a few principles that it would be nice to follow when building and deploying the thermoplast extruder:
- We should build the extruder in such a way that it can be used in a RepRap printer. That will mean that we need to design a fitting to put the extruder on our mills.
- We should try to enable the extruder's use in Mach3 and / or EMC as opposed to specialized software.
Honestly, I have no idea how we are going to easily get from CAD drawing to gcode with commands to enable the extruder, but it should be a fun experiment!
All parts are on reprap's site, for now, and we will post design information on attaching the extruder to a mill when we actually have said information.
External Links:
Reprap home page
Reprap Thermoplast Extruder
RepRap Research Foundation (RRRF)