Foie gras

For some reason the current extrusion progress makes me think of force-fed geese and Pate foie gras.
Anyway, pulled the extruder apart to replace the PTFE insulator with a PEEK version. Realigned and now the extruder does extrude. Though very slow and only by hand-force helping the extruder feed :-(
So things are not allright yet. Looks very similar to the Detroit RepRap builders' experience.
Ordered a heater barrel set at BfB to give it another try.

Throw in the towel

Spent my RR Saturday on improving the heater barrel isolation using glasswool. Then lost quite some time on figuring out why the extruder motor would not work anymore. Finally backed out to Gcode_interpreter SVN version #2483. I suspect the preparations for stepper motor extruders to be the culprit so I will leave the code in development a while for what it is.

Anyway, I tried to get the extruder to work and did not succeed. Better isolation of the barrel only slightly helped in that a little more HDPE comes out of the nozzle now. Tweaking the thermistor lookup table (with createTemperatureLookup.py and setting Beta to 6000 :-) to achieve higher temperatures which didn't help much either. Btw, the heater shouldn't get too hot for the PTFE insulator.

I conclude I did not build the heater barrel correctly. So, I mailed BfB for a new heater barrel kit :-( and for that matter, a second extruder for future (two material) use.

No extrusion (yet)

First extruder-test with ABS is not successful, same for HDPE. For some reason the feed stops when halfway the heater.
After cooling down, disassembled the heater and checked alignment. Due to the melted plastic no idea how to re-align again. Maybe the temperature gauged is incorrect. Heating up to 254 degrees Celsius extrudes some ten measly millimeters with the feed coming to a halt.

HydraRaptor on ABS
More ABS on HydraRaptor
RepRap thermoplast extruder testing

Unknown huh?

I got these error messages from the Gcode_interpreter (one advantage of ReplicatorG over the Java Host is that it shows messages from the firmware):

Estimating build time...
Estimated build time is: 13 minutes
Running GCode...
Running warmup commands.
Unknown: E: 151
Running build.
Unknown: huh? G669
Unknown:
Unknown: E: 151
Unknown: huh? G669
Unknown:
Unknown: huh? G669

Checked the code to find that E: indicates a temperature error. Recompiled and ran the Gcode_interpreter in testmode to discover that my own adjustments for the extruder and motor settings conflicted with the EXTRUDER_0_TEMPERATURE_PIN. Now the temperature test reads plausible temperatures and the heater goes hot and cools down.

Eagle

And today downloaded the Eagle Lite (freeware) version to explore some of the electronics boards.

ReplicatorG

As an alternative to the Java Host, having this NullPointerException condition, installed ReplicatorG and, together with Skeinforge, managed to perform a testdrive of M3-nut.stl!

Blew the DC Motor drive

Hm, not clear what caused this but the DC Motor board testresult is a fried voltage regulator :-(
Replaced the lightweight with a 7805 to find out it took the driver chip with it.