Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Another Idea for Skeinforge...

Cool:

Minimum Layer Time...  isn't very useful.  It slows everything down unnecessarily... or doesn't slow it down enough.

What is REALLY needed is a time to cool parameter for the material, and a cooling temp to achieve before printing over the same spot.

In other words, imagine if you lay down the plastic, at 185° C, and as soon as you lay it down it begins to cool... it shouldn't be exceedingly difficult to map the estimated temperature across the surface area, and then give the start position for the next layer priority to print on the opposite side.

alternatively, how about just adding a setting to the "fill" plug to flip-flop the start at from lower left only, to alternate lower left, upper right.

anyway... just a few thoughts.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

IDEAS for Skeinforge

for Cool - it would be "cool" if you could have the extruder  head move such that the fan was blowing on some region - or orbiting some region, or criss-crossing over the whole model... but with the nozzle high enough it doesn't hit anything....

wonder if I could just add a relative hop-up in the cool start, have the print head start at 0,0 go to max,0 then max,30, then 0,30, then o, 60... etc....

silly for large layers I mean for tiny objects, all you need to do is have the fan blow directly on the top layer for a couple seconds, literally, and then do the next layer.

orbit sucks, and slow down doesn't do much at all.

Prusa Mendel is up and running - nicely.

OK I've been away for a while...

Prusa Mendel is up and running and doing so quite reliably - so far.

I've been broadcasting on http://www.ustream.tv/channel/peeringout

Anyway ;) just thought I'd share what I was up to.