Spirit’s odds of becoming unstuck are pretty slim at this point, but hope shouldn’t be lost. He could use a break anyway…
Last last few moves before the Martian winter will be to get Spirit’s solar panels at better angle, hopefully, so Spirit will have enough power to keep it’s electronics operable, and continue to collect data from the rut it’s stuck in.
It’s been six years. I wont be surprised if we are still talking about Spirit, still, six years from now.
I will still slap this image on everything I can… If any of you have photos of a Free Spirit sticker in the wild, I would really, really like to see them, and post them here.
If you don’t have any, let me know (fynflood @ tentacle5.com) and I’ll see what I can do. If there’s enough interest I’ll see about getting more.
Mechanically, it’s 99% finished. I need to put the optostops on, and finish the wiring. Depending on print quality, I may or may not buy some drive pulleys for all the axis. The printed ones are moving them about, but I think there is some slipping going on.
The extruder gear will be here tomorrow, so it’s likely it will actually print something tomorrow. I’m ordering some ribbon cable this week as well, so I can wire it up all pretty. In the meantime, I’ll be happy with a working printer that has sloppy wiring.
Here’s a short clip of it printing pretending to print one of the Y axis parts:
Still a lot to do before it’s done by definition, but not long until I have it printing itself a sibling.
One question that kept coming up while assembling Mendel: “How will I make the Thermal Barrier stick to the extruder base?”
I wasn’t real sure what to go with. You need an adhesive that will bond to the PTFE, and be able to withstand some heat. I stopped by the hardware store and headed to glue section. I was kind of disappointed at the lack of documentation on most packages. I ended up going with Loctite® All Plastics.
I must say, this glue does an amazing job, and works perfectly.
The Mendel is near complete. The only thing left is wiring, and finding a gear that will work well in the extruder. I believe I have most of the firmware issues sorted out, but I won’t know for sure until it’s all wired up.
What a long day… I went to work, had to have t0ast to the airport before 5, and then spent 9 hours at Hive. It was as good as xmas eve could have been without Trent and Christina around. We drank beer, ate pizza, watched movies (Grandmas Boy during the video below) and built stuff.
Progress was made though. Not as much as I had hoped for, but better than nothing.
The best result, is that the Z axis works. I was worried that there would be too much binding, or that the steppers I got wouldn’t do the task. The steppers work fine, and I was able to solve the binding for the most part. I do plan on turning the X axis around, so Z has more torque on X’s heavy side.
I shot a video, of course. As usual, it’s pretty boring, and this one a bit slow.
I’m using ReplicatorG and a Stepper Driver. I haven’t gotten the extruder board to move the stepper yet.
Back to the grind tomorrow. I’ll post more about these final build stages Sat. probably.
Spirit’s odds of becoming unstuck are pretty slim at this point, but hope shouldn’t be lost. He could use a break anyway…
