Floating Extruder looks to me the best fit for MultiBot:
For movements in the Y direction the extruder does not have to be accelerated, for long travel along X the bowden absorbs forces and lets the gantry go smoother
The bowden tube itself becomes shorter what is better
Direct drive in my opinion may be necessary for extruding flexible filaments: how often we need to print huge flexible items?
Do you agree I go on with “floating extruder” or you have better options?
I’d say go Bowden as well. I doubt that square tube is very straight and it’ll probably bow in the middle with too much weight. Personally I’d suggest a solid piece of metal or one that’s at least a little bigger. That’s a really long distance to be very accurate. Honestly with an application like this I would recommend a machined piece of solid aluminum. Something like .75" square or more. Have the surfaces finished so it’s accurate. Granted that this’ll be expensive be that’s what happens when you go big. I just don’t think this piece of extruded aluminum is going to cut it unless you are using a really big nozzle diameter. Like 1mm or larger type stuff. Then, maybe it would work.
Kevin, the rail of the propelled extruder can be bent and rough as much as it can: it is not the rail of the effector. Some drag on the floating carriage is even desired. Regarding accuracy on a 1000 mm long item I accept 1 mm deviation because I’m not going to print hydraulic valves on this monster.
What is the best way of sharing short updates and tactical questions about the OpenMultibot on the makerforums? I do not like the idea of making a thread for each tiny update.
When I try to upload a video to here I get the following message:
“Sorry, the file you are trying to upload is not authorized (authorized extensions: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, stl, lbrn, svg, dxf, cdr, ai).” so I have to upload to YT - is that the right way?
The blog eventuall shall be for summarizing overall project.
I think that long-running threads here make sense — Discourse floats recent activity to the top.
Videos need to go through video sharing sites like vimeo, youtube, etc, as you did here, and they should be properly “oneboxed” here with an embedded player as you saw. I think that’s a Discourse limitation, but even if it weren’t, it would also utterly dwarf all other hosting costs for storage and data transmission.
The servers are digital ocean. We have a dual vCPU setup with a block of storage for hosting image content over a CDN network, which speeds things up. I cover the hosting cost through one of my companies, Revision 13 Prototypes, and will continue to do so until I feel that the costs are more than I can handle. This is my way of giving back to the maker community for all the support I have received over the years. We are looking into various fundraising ideas for the future to help cover costs, but for the next year or two, there should be no issues with covering these costs.
Thanks @funinthefalls ! Personally it would definitely not hurt me investing $10/month for example. I have been paying $120/year 10 years for an own website I got rid of couple of years ago.
