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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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!

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…

Changing one’s mind…

The Morgan project will one day be famous (in my eyes at least) for the design that had to withstand the most amount of paradigm shifts…

The year is at an end, and only one year remain for the completion of a GADA prize candidate system.  Nice.  I need deadlines. So, the Morgan deadline is set for August 2012.

That leaves 3 months to (with a working 3d printer) design and build my home filament maker.

December for documentation.

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