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PrintNC – CNC

For those not familiar with the PrintNC project: Home page, Wiki. This has been a project that’s been in design and construction for over a year. Main delays have were due to shipping, manufacturing and poor quality replacements, over all poor communication from vendors, but mostly the reluctance to spend the money – What can I say, I’m cheap 🙂 This CNC was (as it is for many) to replace my MP-CNC that has been mostly unreliable and needed another rebuild. It got to the point the mancave was getting so hot, that plastic parts under tension were warping over time. For the record, it was 52 degrees C this summer. Design and Purchase I went with the default size as it gives me about the same size of work area as the MP-CNC for… Read More »PrintNC – CNC

VeloCloud 520 (5×0) to Opensource (WIP)

I was lucky enough to find and purchase a Velocloud 520 for $5AUD at a swap meet. After some research here and removing the case, I was able to work out enough of the systems specifications to get Ubuntu to boot reliably. Firstly I removed the press out plastic cover for the onboard USB serial port. This helped working out the bootup sequence. From there I tried installing any Linux distro that output to a serial console, but they all failed and rebooted after a few minutes. After a while I worked out it was approximately, if not exactly the same length of time. Thanks to bubbadestroy for this idea, I purchased a mPCI-E to PCI-E adapter so I could get video output using a low end NVidia graphics card. This allowed confirmation on the… Read More »VeloCloud 520 (5×0) to Opensource (WIP)

Cheap Pickups

Some more cheapies from the weekend – although not hugely successful, provided hours of interest. Solidoodle Press Ubiquiti Nanostation HFW5200-IRA camera Solidoodle Press This was a nostalgic purchase, I originally purchased a Solidoodle 2 as my first printer and it was kinda cool to have one of their production models. I purchased it with the intent of buying spare parts and priced accordingly. It didn’t come with a power supply so I soldered a PC PSU to provide the 12v. I have since found that it’s a 24v system, and by using a 20v 4amp laptop charger, I’ve been able great hot end temps and reasonable heated bed temps. Initial tests proved successful and it connected to Repetier Host, homed the axis’s and the heated bed and hot end warmed. I have plenty of spares… Read More »Cheap Pickups