Adopt-A-Bot community school program

I was contemplating doing the same thing with a small heater mounted to the plate, but ran into a mental snag on the whole idea of swapping plates after sourcing some additional ones for them to use.

Probably better off just sourcing plates and coating each one with PEI on the print surface side if that doesn't interfere with the probe.

 

I was thinking more in terms of having plates so that they can remove a plate for a kid to work on cleaning up/removing while the next kid started their print.

Having that work in practical terms for rural school kids though probably just means eventually having enough machines for a class.

 

Maybe if every kid was printing tiny things like benchies and Marvins or something, but even then you'd still need at least half as many printers as you have kids to get two prints done in a class period.

 

That will make it strong. What infill are you using? I did 55%

 

100% or go home.

 

yeah the MPCNC parts are mostly 55% infill. That gets way more stress than this little guy is going to have. I found a guy on Twitter yesterday that took an old wooden Printrbot machine (fishing line and sandpaper disks instead of GT2 belts and aluminum pulleys type old) and stripped the parts to make an adoptabot. Cool idea.

Also there is a part in the STL files to collaborate your printer for the hole sizes if you want. I've just been drilling where needed.

On firmware, I did see Brook mention on Twitter yesterday that he recommends using the version for the Printrbot Simple Metal and just use gCode commands to adjust build volume.

I mentioned to Geof yesterday that these motors may need some voltage adjustment with the drivers. Not sure how that is done on a Printrbot without pots. Maybe there is a way in the firmware or some gCode command? Anyone have experience with that on a Printrbot?

 

You can't really adjust stepper motor voltage via Gcode unless you're using something that runs Makerbot firmware (that would be G130).

Might be worth a shot to see if they incorporated it into their custom firmware and see if it changes anything though.

For Makerbots, it'd be G130 X (1-127) Y (1-127) Z (1-127) E (1-127) with some value between 1-127 given for each axis.

Mcodes work if the pots are digital controlled though.

There is M906 & M907 where you specify the axis and then the current in milliamps (for M906) and straight up Amps (for M907),

M908 is another method, but it's a bit more dangerous as it expects the Pin value and then some undocumented current value after S.

So M908 P(pin number) S(electrical current number). Don't fool with this one, try M907 with Amps per axis first.

EDIT: These codes are recognized across the most commonly used firmwares, but which ones are best for a given machine depend more on how they're originally set up than anything.

 

Thanks @daniel871. I just found this slideshow that shows how to do it on the rev F boards. Looks like previous boards have the pots. Not sure if everyone in the set of 50 bots sent in phase 2 got the same boards or not.

https://printrbot.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/209540226

 

Huh. Looks like M907 behaves like G130.