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Funding Unsuccessful This project reached the deadline without achieving its funding goal on June 14, 2011.
Funding period
Apr 30, 2011 -
Jun 14, 2011
(45 days)
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The eternal gratitude of the Bayou Mendel Team and a personalized musical thank-you video performed by yours truly!
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Your choice of a small trinket (such as a bottle opener, for example) wrought in the fiery bowels of the Bayou Mendel!
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Small Custom Print - an object printed from an .STL file that you provide (maximum size of 2" x 2" x 2").
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Motor Package - four NEMA-17 stepper motors.
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Plastic Structural Parts for the Bayou Mendel.
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Bayou Mendel Hardware Package including belts, bearings, fasteners, threaded rod and smooth rod.
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Electronics Package including an all-in-one electronics driver board on a single PCB, plus end stops, power supply and USB cable!
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Electronics and Motor Package including an all-in-one electronics driver board, end stops, power supply, USB cable and four NEMA-17 stepper motors!
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The Complete Kit including all the parts needed to assemble the Bayou Mendel and connect it to your computer.
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Fully assembled Bayou Mendel with USB cable.
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The Educator's Package, which includes a fully assembled Bayou Mendel with interfacing laptop computer preloaded with software, plus a USB cable and an electronic parts library.
Creator James Sesler on May 3, 2011
Techzone also already makes a monolithic electronics set that incorporates all the electronics onto a single board. Here's a link to their site. http://www.techzonecom.com/detail.php…. . It's open source so anyone can make it.
Creator The Bayou Mendel Team on May 2, 2011
Bogdan,
Thanks for the insightful comments. Please let us know when you start your first project on Kickstarter so we can reciprocate.
The Bayou Mendel Team
Creator Bogdan Kecman on May 2, 2011
Well, yes, I am not impressed with the "single pcb idea for 20K$" because more then one "single pcb" solution exist attm and most of them are 100% open source. The project state that you need 20K$ to develop a single pcb for reprap - I just saved you 20K$ - here it is, and it works, it is open source, it is single board solution, it is fairly cheap:
http://reprap.org/wiki/Generation_6_Electronics
I personally prefer solution like http://reprap.org/wiki/Sanguinololu as it is single device but modular so you can easily replace stepper drivers as those do tend to die and replacing the single stepper driver on a overcrowded board ain't fun.
Anyhow check the http://reprap.org/wiki/Category:Electronics you can find many interesting things there...
As for the price of the bfb pcb, I really don't want to go into "how one calculates the price of his product", that was just the pcb I shown as example, you got another one that you can make yourself linked from reprap.org wiki .. and if you go trough the last link you will find more of the single board solutions... also I know of 2 Cortex M3 based solutions in the work attm.. and both will be open sourced when they are finished ..
Now, not to be understood in the wrong way, I do believe reprap project need investment and that there is a lot of improvement that could be done... I also welcome any research that will improve any reprap aspect, I just think that 20K for a pcb is kinda excessive ..
Creator Forrest Higgs on May 2, 2011
@Bayou "It seems that Bogdan is rather unimpressed with our single-board idea (personally, GBP 100 strikes us as way too much to pay for the hardware Bogdan describes"
LOL! Trust me on this, you're not alone in that opinion. Bogdan feels the same way as do a lot of other people. :-D
I think the business model for BfB is one where they'd like you to buy a whole kit rather than parts to use in another built up system and have priced their components accordingly. Personally, I'd wish they felt otherwise, but it's their company, not mine. :-(
The interesting bit about the BfB controller board is that it is using a PIC32 MCU rather than the 8 bit chips that the rest of the Reprap controllers typically use. That gives it a lot of punch for not that many more dollars. I'm currently configuring a next generation controller board around the PIC32 and using a proper 320x240 colour graphics touch screen with it. I'm also hoping to use the new board to test out the hot restart option they you need to go with your out-of-filament sensor. You might want to think about extending the capabilities of that sensor to pull filament off of the reel. Most printers depend on the motion of the xy positioning system to do that but I've noticed that when you are using heavy reels of filament,~15-30 lbs, that irregular pulling can actually bind the filament in the rest of the coil and jam your feed unless you check the reel every so often and make sure it's clear. The Chinese UP! printer has a device that feeds filament off of the reel that could serve as a starting point for that kind of development. Give it a look.
It's great to see you guys getting interested in doing Reprap development. Welcome to the fun! :-D
Creator The Bayou Mendel Team on May 2, 2011
Forrest and Bogdan,
Thanks for the thoughtful messages. The economic aspect of this project is obviously what brought our team to Kickstarter to begin with, but we're happy to accept any assistance at all from our backers or non-financial supporters - including design tips like these.
Forrest, you are absolutely right in your point about big donations - most of that cash would go to pay for the cost of the rewards themselves. Our team anticipated that our backers would be interested in the higher-level rewards, so to keep our margin high enough, we set a very high goal. If we had $10,000 with no strings attached, we could likely execute this project faster and with more ambitious design modifications. That ties into Bogdan's point, as well - the $19,990 that is apparently unaccounted for will actually go towards the cost of more expensive rewards.
Now, if 20,000 people give us $1, that's a different story! But we would be shocked if that happened.
It seems that Bogdan is rather unimpressed with our single-board idea (personally, GBP 100 strikes us as way too much to pay for the hardware Bogdan describes - outside of inflated Kickstarter reward prices, of course!), and that Forrest is skeptical that we can solve the empty filament problem (which has flummoxed and vexed us on several occasions...). To the extent that y'all wouldn't mind sharing proposals for alternative design modifications to the Mendel, we would be more than happy to consider those and incorporate them if possible.
Many thanks and keep the comments coming!
The Bayou Mendel Team
Creator Bogdan Kecman on May 2, 2011
Hi,
I'm bit confused still about what are you proposing? The "all reprap electronics on one board" is something that exists for two years already. You can get a fully tested board with OLED display that have real time info on it from BFB for ~100GBP. The board is allowing for a fully off-line printing - the G-CODE files are parsed from the SD card, it can control 3 extruders, 3 axes and can switch on 3 additional devices (12V out of the board) and there is SPI interface + 1 additional AD input you can use. The "filament is low" sensor is a simple microswitch connected to an input pin with a resistor and capacitor on a free pin on the board ..
On top of this, there are 2 other "single board solutions" available from reprap.org wiki page.
What are you going to use this 20000$ for? For research you need 10$ for coffee and few hours with Internet connection... that leaves 19980$ unaccounted for
Creator Forrest Higgs on May 2, 2011
Hi! I'm a Reprap project core team member of long standing. I think that the notion of Kickstarter being a means by which interesting developments for Reprap could be funded is brilliant.
That said, a couple of things about this particular proposal have me scratching my head just a little bit.
First off, the amount of money requested seems to be a bit high for the work being proposed, viz,
1. Consolidate all of the electronics onto a single PCB; and
2. Add a sensor that (a) detects when build material is running low and (b) sends a signal to pause printing, return to home, and then resume when the user replenishes the build material.
It's worth noting that the whole original Reprap grant which got us from nowhere to a fully operational Darwin printer was only about double the size of this request. Consolidating the Reprap control circuitry onto a single PCB and building a gadget to detect when you've run out of filament doesn't strike me as being that big a deal. As well, if you run out of filament, you can't simply pause the print and change the filament reel unless you are very quick. The reason for that is if the print surface cools to room temperature, printing on top of that cool surface tends not to work too well. If your print surface drops much below about 145F you get a weak layer connection.
That's not to say that that problem can't be solved with a hot restart. I suspect it can. It isn't, however, solved as it's described here.
Second and last, it appears that if these guys get some major contributions from just a few donors they are going to be spending a good bit of the Kickstarter cash simply creating the gifts they've promised.
I'd suggest that these guys need to rethink what they're proposing.
Creator Jakamoto on May 1, 2011
Hi.
First of all, your project looks great and very promising.
I alsways hoped for another 3D-Printer project here on kickstarter.
As always a lot of questions remain unanswered, so I'll start with a few.
At first, you don't mention any shipping costs, and since I am in germany I'd like to know
what I have to expect.
Do you have a working prototype and can tell how percise the prined parts are?
When you have a CNC milling maschiene at hand and could mill parts wich pakcage would suit you best?
I'm really eager to help you but as a (as always poor) student I really have to look at the costs