So we got pretty far along with the MakerBot tonight. Here's where we are:

• The X and Y stages are assembled and mated
• The body has been assembled
• There's a power supply in place, but the main 20-pin connector is a bit too short to reach the controller. Either we need an extension for the connector, or we need to move the controller down a bit.
• The XY assembly is fitted in place, but not completely bolted in

Things that still need to be done:

• Z stage assembly
• Finish the XY stage install
• Z stage install
• Plastruder assembly
• Final electronics assembly

The plastruder looks particularly finicky. If you want to tackle that, read through the instructions before you start...

Great job, guys!

The x&y stages were cleaned of the globs of glue someone used and they move freely now. The back plate of the enclosure was removed, new holes drilled, and put back on backwards so the power supply cables now reach. The plastruder is assembled, tested, and working. At the recommended 220 degrees it wasn't extruding so I cranked it up to 230 and it worked. There was a little bit of smoke so I think a little more fine tuning is in order before we adjust the thermistor settings.

Edit: oh, forgot the pron

http://yfrog.com/40dmxj
http://yfrog.com/b61qpj
http://yfrog.com/6cpwojj
http://yfrog.com/jpqz0j

We might need to calibrate the thermistor. I've got an IR thermometer*, I'll try to remember it on Wed. Hopefully the smoke was just oil/coatings burning off the nozzle parts.

[* A meter with a thermocouple attachment will give a more accurate reading, if anyone happens to have such a beastie.]

You guys rock!

Someone finished building sometime friday night or saturday morning. Jude, Wayne, and I spent some time calibrating. Jude made a plastic spacer for the build bed. The magnets were not glued flush to the wood so the build bed wobbled a lot and was not parallel to the z-stage.

Jude and I are still here working towards a successful print. We solved the problem of the gcode only telling it to heat to 200 degrees, and are currently debugging other issues, update to follow.

The makerbot is now more or less complete. We need to designate a computer for it and the rest of the calibrating will be done by customizing the skeinforge settings to generate the gcode. If I can find a way to export the settings from my laptop they would be a better starting point than the default.

What specs does the computer need, the Asterix guys dropped one off today that is modest, and I have one at home here that I was looking to fix up and bring in too.

I also have an old, P2 266 with XP and 192meg ram (laptop) that is perfectly functional, but it depends on what needs to be loaded for applications. If I recall correctly, it was really not much.

Booka, I'm sure the 266 will be sufficient if it can load some form of Linux distro, but for copying/pasting code into the programmer software, we'd have to determine if it works well enough to surf the Internet without a lot of fuss.