Circuit board construction
Contents
Go forth and use the good stuff!
These electronics still work, but as a community we have moved on; most folk building machines at the present use some flavor of the "Official" Electronics. Use one of those. Ask in the forum or on IRC what flavor to use.
And then, once you have your machine working, make the electronics even better and wave them at reprap-dev.
Have you joined the secret cabal yet? reprap-dev: the friendly but technical and technical but friendly mailing list.
All of us official developers hide in an an open mailing list called reprap-dev.
If you're reading this, then you are definitely an official developer!
Please join us in the reprap-dev mailing list, and help us take over the world make RepRap better and make better RepRaps: http://reprap.org/pipermail/reprap-dev/
Alternatives
IMPORTANT NOTE : These pages describe the standard RepRap electronics. The electronics have improved substantually since the G3 design so it is strongly advised that before starting here you should also check out alternative electronics to see if there is something there that will suit your needs better. You will find much simpler and cheaper solutions there.
What You'll Need
If you get kit boards or buy the bare PCBs and then get your own components to populate them you can build them for Mendel from the start, of course. Here are the instructions for building the kit boards yourself. One Mendel will need:
- 1 RepRap Motherboard (mendel/electronics/motherboard),
- 1 Mendel USB and power connector (no Eagle design - it's a simple piece of stripboard),
- 3 RepRap Stepper drivers (mendel/electronics/stepper-motor-driver),
- 3 RepRap Opto Endstops (mendel/electronics/opto-endstop), and
- As many RepRap extruder controllers as you have extruders (mendel/electronics/extruder-controller).
The locations in your download that you made to install RepRap on your computer of the Eagle design files for these circuit boards is given in brackets after the links.
MakerBot Electronics
If you buy the printed circuit boards for Mendel ready-made from MakerBot Industries you will get versions intended for their CupCake machine. These can be used as they stand, but by making a few small changes to them (pliers, forceps, a small screwdriver, and a soldering iron are all that are needed) you can make the Mendel wiring a lot neater. Details of how to do these
Related
- Testing RepRap Electronics - details of how to test each board
Back to How to make RepRap Version II Mendel.
