There’s been a lull (partly due to my becoming a parent, partly due to summertime/school opening blues) in work on the rapid prototyping system. It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise because I recently got my hands on something that will make this project a significantly different scope.
My company threw out an old solder paste inspection machine. It WAS a machine intended for use inspect printed circuit boards after they’ve had the solder paste applied to them but before they’ve had components placed. As far as I know, it is in full working order.
Before. After. The first accessory.
In short, this is a working X-Y gantry with sub-millimeter accuracy. It does have SOME Z motion, too, but not much- I’d guess in the end we can adjust the limits and get something along the order of one inch in Z.
For a platform to build a prototyper, you can’t get much better than this. And it’s in my garage.
See the forum thread for further details or schedule changes.
All Right!!!!
Solder Paste inspection, it seems like this machine could also have supported solder paste application as well with all of it’s movement capability, but perhaps that is a manual procedure.
There is a cool article on DIY solder pasting at Spark Fun here. http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorial_info.php?tutorials_id=58&page=
Limited Z access might be a problem for a 3D printer. HOWEVER, what about a painting robot? Connect 4 aquarium tubes with cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink reserves and figure out how to translate a digital image into a painting.