Stepped Extruder Upgrade

I've finally had some spare time to sit down and order all of the parts required to upgrade my Thing-o-Matic's extruder to be stepper driven. I was originally going to get the StepStruder MK6 upgrade from MakerBot but decided that £100+ after shipping and customs clearance fees to get it to the UK it wasn't worth it. With so many alternatives on Thingiverse I though I'd be silly not to give it a go myself. It also seems that MakerBot's StepStruder upgrade has problems of its own, most notable is the delerin plunger used to tension the filament working loose after making use of reversal. This problem is easily fixed by printing one of the many Wade-inspired filament tensioner mechanisms though. The design I've decided on is TheRuttmeister's Improved Stepper Upgrade for MK5 for the motor and gear mechanism and ScribbleJ's MK5 Wade's-Style Tensioner for the filament drive.

I've ordered a NEMA 17 hybrid stepper motor from Technobots which is labelled as SY42STH47-1206A and also sold by Zapp Automation and Pololu. It's a 6-wire unipolor which I will be wiring as a bipolar to a Pololu A4983 driver. I looks like it should be up to the job, I'll find out as soon as I finish building it. I will be building a board to hook up the Pololu driver to the v2.4 ToM motherboard, I'm not sure if anyone else has done this as all the designs I've seen use Gen3 or RepRap electronics. The last piece in the puzzle is all of the hardware and fasteners, I placed an order on Sunday 22nd for various M3 bolts, bearings and other bits for the extruder assembly. Unfortunately they have not yet arrived, they were posted on Monday 23rd but the supplier is trying to find out where the order is. I can at least work on the electronics whilst I wait for the remaining hardware.

I'll be posting updates as I make progress with the extruder upgrade as well as other project I'm working on.

Thing-O-Matic Camera Trigger

Welcome to my blog! I've finally managed to get this thing up and running. I'll start off by introducing the work I've been doing on the Thing-O-Matic camera trigger. I am building on the work of Marty McGuire and his excellent Automatic MakerBot Camera project he did last year.

The video above gives you a little preview of it in action, I'll be posting some how-to's over the coming weeks on how to get it all working. The aim of the project is to be able to create timelapse videos of prints by positioning the build platform in the same place after every layer. This results in a really cool looking video of the object growing up from the platform.

I aim to keep this blog up to date and post at least once a week so stay tuned for some more updates on this project, I know a lot of people have shown interest in this.