Morgan 2 3D Printers

It is with great excitement that we can finally announce the coming of the second generation of professional Morgan 3D printers: Morgan 2.

Morgan 2 3d printersIMG_2371 IMG_2372 Made in House4Hack

Morgan 2 builds on every Morgan design that come before it.

Some of the notable features include:

  • Two main models: Pro and Mega
  • Super Easy for beginners!  Simplify3D license included in the purchase price, making you print like a pro from the word go.
  • New carbon composite arms – superlight and sturdy.  The new construction looks professional while performing like no Morgan before it.  Printing is fast,  precise and aligned properly.  Arm segments are built at exactly the same lengths using CNC machined jigs.
  • New frames in Stainless steel, aluminium and molded Polyurethane components are durable and rigid, ensuring the best possible stability during operation – translating to highest quality prints – at a much faster rate than previously possible on a MorganMorgan Pro 2 printing
  • 32bit Arm processor controller board takes care of the inverse kinematics of the robotic printing arms, ensuring smooth and precise movements without running into the limits of the computing power of the system
  • “Out of the Box” printing – the print dimensions are much larger than other machines with similar footprints and price points – 380mm x 220mm x 200mm (Pro) and 730mm x 470mm x 600mm (Mega)
  • Extremely low maintenance design with high dust tolerance – made for African conditions.
  • Back-up battery capable power supplies allows uninterrupted printing. (optional)
  • Professional Printing at a very competitive price
  • Proudly manufactured in South Africa

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RoboBeast launch and House4Hack open day

Robohand prints 3d mechanical devices to aid amputees (upper limbs).  The creator of RoboHand decided to create RoboBeast – a robust, efficient, Africanized 3d printing beast. 

RoboBeast

When: 15 February 2014 – 10:00 to 17:00
Where: House4Hack, 4 Burger Ave, Lyttleton Manor

Visit H4H to RSVP

House4Hack is proudly backing this event and will also showcase some other ventures:

* Meet Quentin, the designer of the award winning Morgan 3d-printer

 

* Quadcopter phun with the zarcdev team

 

 

* Solar braai – braai your boerewors roll using only the sun.  We are also planning to bake some breads and cake using our solar oven.

 

smalldish
It is an event for the whole family and boerewors rolls and cool drinks available for sale on the day.

Calibration makes perfect

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After replacing the noisy extruder (Morgan0 did a beautiful job here) Morgan01’s prints improved… A lot.

In the photo you see some calibration blocks, a 200mm high, 40mm diameter tube, printed spiral vase style in order to test the smoothness of the complete usable Z-movement, after adjusting the holding tension of the backlash spring. There were some strange artifacts in a large print I left to work overnight, which prompted this action

The Z backlash should be adjusted to the pint where the bed almost wants to drop down on its own when not powered. This allows a silky smooth movement, and is apparent in the consistency of the tube.

The piece of tape on the bowden tube was used for the extruder calibration. Did not take it off yet.

Stepstuck revisited… DRV8825

In April 2012 Nophead from HydraRaptor fame, brought us the micro-current hack for the pololu 4988 stepper motor driver carrier. http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2012/04/stepstuck.html

Now, it is my turn…

The amazing DRV8825 driver carrier has a similar flaw, strange jumping of steps in 32th micro-stepping mode.

After doing a bit of research, it seems that we need to put the chip in FAST decay mode, by pulling the DECAY line of the chip to 5V.  Luckily the DRV has exposed pins, so I carefully soldered the DECAY pin (19) to the M2 pin on the board (will be 5V when 32th uStepping is enabled.)

Decay mode modification - FAST mode
Decay mode modification – FAST mode

Movement as smooth as butter!

Calibration and tuning

Calibration of your 3d printer is sometimes even more important than building it, and being SCARA, Morgan is not very forgiving in this regard. You have to get it right in order to get something resembling the stl you fed to your favorite gcode slicer…

I don’t like working too hard though, and thus I spent even more time writing up a calibration routine that will make it child’s-play… Well, almost.

Here is the wheel I printed for a small tricycle. The orginal calbration routine zeroed the arm angles to a line drawn on the top platform. While it works well enough, it caused the wheel to be slightly oval. While this does not subtract from it use, it is not quite how it is supposed to be.

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In order to fix that, I had to change the way the calibration is done in order to focus on the angle difference in stead of the actual angles. Psi is now calibrated to Theta.

I am going to make some special phantoms in order to make the calibration process a bit smoother. After playing a lot with the steps per angle, I found a way to calculate the steps. The steps combined with the scaling factors makes it possible to get a perfect circle.

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And… it prints!

After a very long wait, my SCARA RepRAP is finally printing. I printed 4 calibration cubes and a piece of a tricycle wheel (in the wrong colour…)

In the video you can see the new hall-affect end stops, my “Mostly wooden Gregs’ Wades” extruder, the mounted hotbed all working together to print a tricycle wheel.

What you cannot see is the new additions to the firmware that sports:

  1. Quick calibration routines (in Mcodes)  Calibration of the arms can be done in as little as 2min without having to calculate the relative arm positions for the arms – for any size machine…
  2. Axis scaling: it is not possible to easily calibrate the x and y print sizes by steps alone, and therefore the machine has internal and Mcode adjustable scaling factors to ensure your prints come out the right size

You can check my Youtube channel (quentinharley) out for some footage…

Happy times!

I have a couple of upgrades to the frame coming, focusing on the z-axis stability without having to add another motor.  There might also be an upgrade to the arm configuration in the pipeline soon.  I also thought about a practical way to install more than one hotend on the arm – bringing multi-head printing to SCARA.

Big Weekend!

This weekend will see the pre-flight test and some documentation before the big test… How well does it print!

This week I had limited time, but I completed the firmware for the test, including a very nice electronic calibration section that will allow you to calibrate a Morgan SCARA in around 2minutes. No hardware adjustment needed after the build…

Can’t wait!

Ding!

The boards are ready and I am picking it up tomorrow evening after work.

Electronics wise my next task will be to inspect the boards, and get all the required components.  My Allegro chips should arrive next week Thursday.  If all goes well, next weekend I will be making my RAMPS!

I have also put together an experimental hinged XY carraige, at least in OpenSCAD, and will hopefully get one of our local 3D prototyping houses to make me a couple for testing.

More info to follow…

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