FAQ<\/a> it appears that a G5 with a big monitor can be problematic due to memory issues. Switching my display from “millions” to “thousands” of colors and closing most of my other apps has made it crash much less than before.<\/p>\nIt seems to me that the UI for ReplicatorG was branched pretty early from the Arduino world — some of the painful bugs of early Arduino days still exist in ReplicatorG. In particular, do not<\/i> turn off your Makerbot while the ReplicatorG control panel is open. I’ve hung my G5 several times this way.<\/p>\n
Design Notes<\/b><\/p>\n
A few things I’ve learned in my first few designs and test prints<\/p>\n
Small holes are hard<\/i>. I tried to make a 3mm hole in a 1cm thick drive wheel and ended up drilling it out. When you’re making an object, remember that the print head resolution is much lower than what you see on screen. (If you’re used to lasercutters and Stratasys machines, it’s like going from .3mm technical pencils to kid’s crayons. :-)<\/p>\n
Learn to dial in your raft while it starts to print. I’ve ruined several prints because the raft wasn’t firmly embedded in the print surface from start to finish. After a few layers, the raft would start to peel off the surface and the print would be ruined.<\/p>\n
Learn g-code. You might want to verify or change the code generated by skeinforge. In my case, I started adding a M01statement after the first movement to build the raft to verify that the raft would actually be on the print surface. I also had to go through and edit the temp settings at various places to account for my personal cupcake’s printing requirements.<\/p>\n
Get a cheap caliper, even a flimsy plastic one is better than a ruler for measuring things down to ~1mm. I’m making a housing for an LCD display and the art-store $10 plastic caliper is as good as my Starrett for the resolution the Cupcake can print.<\/p>\n
That’s all for now, will post more as I learn more.<\/p>\n
[tags]makerbot[\/tags]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some lessons learned during the assembly of, and early usage of MakerBot Cupcake #235. Assembly I bought the “Deluxe” kit for $950 that comes with pre-soldered boards, tools, and pretty much everything you need to get up and printing. Mine was missing a couple of random bits I was able to find in my spares […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacking","category-all-about-the-makerbot-cupcake"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions\/110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}