Fun Projects, Firmware Updates, Belts in the Store!
Happy Wednesday Everyone,
We’ve got lots to share this week.
First and foremost on the shipping front, the next batch of PCBs that we are waiting for has finished production and are getting boxed up right now BUT there is a holiday in China today so that’s slowing things down slightly. We will keep you posted as soon as we have a tracking number. We're hoping that they arrive next week allowing us to ship out all of our remaining pre-orders. Until then we’re continuing to pack kits with everything except the PCB in them so that we can get those boxes out the door as soon as the next batch of PCBs arrives.
Forums Highlights:
There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on in the forums this week
Scuba_Shan showed cutting right up to the edge of the board:
Frank_Biebenga is working on a SPLENDID organization cabinet:
CPL built a very slick hourglass shaped frame:
Markus_Rinn created by far the most beautiful build of the folding chair design that I’ve ever seen using a glue up:
Mike_Clancy took on a project with MASSIVE pocket showing that it’s possible to do more than just cut around the edges of parts.
And finally this week Arichards made a great discovery that the play in the bolts holding on the motors and even the order that they are tightened in can have a big impact on how freely the gears interact making the arm retract and extend the belts more smoothly. You can read more about that and see a video in action here.
Firmware Updates:
Just because more and more people are getting up and running doesn’t mean we’ve found and fixed all the bugs yet. There’s still some weird ones out there and we’re still working hard to find them. That’s why we’re super excited to share that this week’s firmware update has a record THREE community contributors.
Firmware v0.71 brings us:
-10x faster computation of the calibration process
-2x faster movement and taking measurements during calibration
-More stable connection on iphones (thanks to @boxomatic)
-Better error messages for when calibration fails at the start
-E-stop now stops the running gcode file too (thanks to @ronlawrence3)
-Smaller frame size allowed for experimentation (thanks to @dlang)
-Hid that annoying and largely meaningless alarm about the current over 4000 during calibration
One more huge contribution that I want to call out this week is to @jwolter for making one of the most confusing steps in the calibration process more clear. When adding the arms to the router it is tricky to understand what order they should go on and I struggled to make that clear with photos and videos. This excellent graphic should save future generations of maslowians heartache.
And finally last, but not least, spare belts are available in the store if you want to stock up! You can find them here. As we’re getting closer to shipping all of our pre-orderd kits we’re going to be adding more and more spare parts and things to the store as quickly as we can.
Have a great week everyone!
-Bar, Anna, and Roman (plus the entire community clearly putting in the work this week)
