After a long hiatus

Well, well, well. I bet you thought we'd all given up. Not true! It's been a busy couple of months at work, and we've had to cancel several sessions, but we are making progress. The electronics are fully assembled, and are currently undergoing debugging. As of the end of last week's session, the x-axis was assembled enough to get an idea of the shape of the assembly. Progress!

For much of this project, procuring the mechanical parts has been the major bottleneck. We have one milling machine, which means that there is really a fundamental limit to the number of parts we can make in a three hour session. Last week I had an epiphany: I got on ebay looking for part sets. (In my defense, I did this at the beginning of the project, but no one was selling reprap parts then.) Turns out, the street price for a set of printed parts is about $150. Now, we've been hard at work for a while now, and don't need all the parts, so I contacted a couple of sellers and asked if they would be willing to print just the parts we needed. Sure enough, Several of them were. Now, I've ordered some parts, and we'll see what shows up in the mail in the next couple of days!

Progress! Exciting!