Hi guys,

Just had some more face palm moments dealing with the kit.. but anyway..

I was comparing design between my Up Mini and the Prusa, and I realized it had these springs on the timing belts, these seem to just tighten the tension around the belts easily.

I'm gonna order some and try it out. Anyway of you have some experience with it?

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/10pcs-Timin...1712635698.html

Ok.. Altan's comment about not all RepRap sellers locally being able to deal with these things are really hitting home hard...

I've just discovered that the stepper motor wires which I were given were 4 pin connectors, where as the stepper motor has 6 pins... And the YAxis idler screw is still missing... *FACEPALM*

Pic of the motor

3d print your own belt tensions

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:261120

Well.. already bought, and they already SHIPPED it.. so..

Hi marauderz, to solve your problem, you can actually operate a 6 pole stepper with 4 wires only. In order to do that, you will need to find the schematic diagrams of the stepper motor internal wiring from the internet. From the 6 pole stepper diagram, you will notice 2 coils with 3 poles each. Two of the poles on a coil is on either ends and a cetral pole taps the middle of the coil. What this means is that you will need to find the two pins that connect the coils on each end and hook them to 2 of 4 wire connector. You will need to use a multimeter set to measure resistance to find out which two poles are connected to which coil and find the connected poles that has the highest resistance, which represents the full length of a coil. Once you found which of the 4 of 6 poles on the stepper motor are the two ends of a coil, then it's a matter of flipping the poles of the same coil until your stepper runs continuously and is not jerking randomly, provided you set the command from the host software to run the motor continuously.

I have tried this and it does work, just needs a bit of time to thinker with the wiring... I will also post a picture of the 6 pole stepper running on 4 wires later.

This post has been edited by altan: Dec 2 2014, 01:05 AM

Yup, that solution works as long as you initially have a working printer in the first place to print the parts. I had a problem once where my printer came with a broken z axis coupler and sad to say it could have been resolved if there was a working 3d printer to print the replacement coupler.

I have to scourage and strap an aquarium tubing to the z axis lead screw as coupling for the z axis motor to print the replacement part. Although that didn't work so in the end I used another printer that was utterly unreliable and hope it could print a coupler without any failure.

This post has been edited by altan: Dec 2 2014, 01:07 AM

The guy says he'll send me the right cables, I wonder if the control board needs to be changed...

You might want to check the connector end on the board but even with a 6 cable connector and a 4 pin connector on the board, you can still run the motor but you might have to flip and shift the cable connector around a few times to get the stepper to rotate in the correct direction.

Also, it unlikely you can change the board because, the reprap control boards like the ramps 1.4 board are designed for driving bipolar or 4 pole stepper motors. I have not come across a unipolar or 6 pole stepper motor drivers before for repraps printers.

This post has been edited by altan: Dec 2 2014, 01:16 AM

Fun....

Yup, have fun...

Maybe you've seen this for the wiring of the 6 stepper
http://reprap.org/wiki/Stepper_wiring

No I haven't, thanks for the link, it'll be interesting if I have to take care of this myself.

That's the spirit of reprap, you have to "take care of this" problem and that problem until you find the best solution to make your printer work the way you want it too.

About steppers, the thing about it is that they don't work like ordinary DC motors where you apply power to both the pins and it freely rotates the shaft continuously. As for steppers, each coil that is powered moves the shaft by a tiny fraction of a few degrees and to achieve continuous rotation, a special electronic circuit is needed to create a sequence or steps to rotate the shaft in a known direction in a timely sequence. Hence you see 4, 5, 6, and 8 wire stepper, the 4 poles are bipolar only and the rest are unipolar but can be reconfigured to bipolar.

Steppers are complicated and a lot of modern paper printers don't use stepper motor anymore, they use DC motor nowadays. We use steppers for their holding power and the controllability.

If you need help figuring out what bipolar and unipolar steppers and how to wire it to work, you can post your question and I will try my best to explain in layman terms.

i'm building Wallace. I'm currently at the stage that require the 3d printed parts. I'm considering between getting it from ebay and printed locally. any advice?

get it printed locally altan can help he not willing to I can do it also

wow that a lot of support material , normally for those kind part I don't use support at all seem it printed fine on my printer, but I'm printing PLA not ABS

This post has been edited by DarkTenno: Dec 3 2014, 02:06 PM

Thanks, I had pm him.

Thanks for the recommendation!

I give you free one piece printable replacement part for your printer on your next order.

Don't mind that much of course, and it's great that we have a support group here. hahaha.

Hi Guys

If you need to improvised or fix your prototype, you may try out this coolmorph:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc08-zOLwZ8

https://www.facebook.com/creativedotla

is now on sale in Lelong.my and ebay.com.my

This post has been edited by creative.la: Dec 4 2014, 02:35 PM