Thursday, March 18, 2010

Slow progress

Two weeks ago I spent a few days getting bluetooth communication working with standard drivers in Windows XP. So I now have wireless comms, though the host is still buggy on windows.
The week after I tried installing Ubuntu 9.1 32 bit on a flash drive, which ended up screwing the GRUB bootloader on my computer, forcing a reinstall of Ubuntu on my computer, so I decided to just install the 32 bit version only this time and be done away with a flash drive. So with some setup me the RepRap host finally working on Linux, more stable than Windows, I now have another way me testing my printer, though no wireless yet.

This week my buds at NextWindow devised a plan to change how I am to run the thermal part of the extruder, will see how that goes in a couple of weeks. In the meantime i've made the drive cables and one opto end stop and tested that last night.

Now for the bad news.
The end stop I made doesn't work.
Worse yet, the dummy heater doesn't heat up, and the x y steppers are working always in one direction, so it doesn't matter if it reverses cause it just goes forward anyways.

Any ideas to why?