Haha, don't worry I'm making sure J-Day is completely called off, since some NZ radio guy blew my cover. After all, having it repeatedly written in the Bible that no-one may know the day/hour when it will happen, well, it needed to be rescheduled 'cos he figured it out.
So I picked the biggest one. When I bought it, I didn't realize that they used a lot of proprietary parts. So, I want to use these Volcano nozzles that are really cheap and easy to find instead of what they have, which are like, modified Volcano nozzles
They are just a little bit longer than the regular ones. Like, we're talking .5mm or some shit. But that little bit makes the nozzle just long enough to extrude past the rest of the hardware on the extrusion system, I can't find my notes on it but I think it's like a .25mm gap from the end of the nozzle to the bed mesh sensor. Very small.
So I bought a bunch of different parts to try and figure out how to make this work, and in the process changed some of the electrical components like the thermistors, but never got around to figuring out how to make the firmware account for the different hardware. Resulting in it not interpreting the voltage change to mean that the thermistor was above temperature, so it didn't shut off the heating core and it just kept pumping heat out
I have most of the stuff I need to build an enclosure so I can heat the chamber for different plastics that need to have a pretty consistent temperature through the whole model, and then I can get my other ones set up too. I have a shitty Ender but that one is super easy to modify, but it's also very outdated and kind of a nightmare to work with. I think I'm going to cannibalize it for parts and just run my big one and another little one.
Like Super 8 reels. Actual equipment to do it is like, thousands and thousands of dollars, and the cheap ones are useless, so I'm trying to build one so I can just use the same camera I use for slides and negatives. Much cheaper
Anyway, it kind of works, but the take up reel is kind of tricky because you need to spin it directly to wind the tape onto it. And as it fills, you need to slow it down, and that's kind of complicated. More complicated than I wanted to try and account for, anyway.
So I have the first motor that has gearing pull it from the original reel, through a set of pullies to keep some tension, and then a second motor synced with the first to guide it through the projection port so I can capture the images
So, as the tape comes towards the take up reel and makes slack, that lever is pulled up by a spring to keep the tension on the film, it hits a limit switch to engage the take up reel motor at some point, and as that winds in the film, the film pushes the lever back down to a second limit switch to disengage the motor again. Slack builds up, spring pulls it back, ad infinitum
I'm guessing it's going to be much harder than I feel like it is going to be right now, but I think it's a pretty elegant solution that doesn't rely on software to control it. The less software I need to use the better