Tuesday, August 23, 2011

The Best Laid Plans...

So much for the plan. Life events have made it a bit of a challenge to coordinate my schedule with that of the production team at work. So other than finding a time that I can actually make the test version of the glass HBP, I'm all ready to go. Here's a piece of the pattern that I'll be using for the first attempt (click to see it full size):

The lines represent the path that the Micropen will travel to lay down the conductor. The red path will be the heating element made with an overlapping 20mil line for a final line width of about 2mm. The blue trace will be a thermistor which will not overlap and be only 10mils wide and 550 inches long. I'll have to come up with a custom thermister table once I can test it out. I'm hopeful I'll actually be able to do this tomorrow or the next day.

Sadly, I haven't had much time for printing things lately. I managed to make half of the corners and the pins for a screwless cube gear, but the center is proving difficult for me to print in PLA as it's so small at the bottom that it's not cooling off quickly enough. I'm going to try printing it along with something else to see if that helps since I don't yet have a cooling fan on my x-carriage.

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