Framing Improvements

After putting the lift onto the actuator and moving it down into the vat, I realized my living situation does not have a place for the printer where the vat will be on a level surface. I added a vat mount plate on the bottom and will have to level the whole printer.

Vat support plate

I wired up the electronics and tried to get the servo moving. While the servo was on, I could not get the Big Easy Driver to recognize step inputs. I must have caused an ESD and fried the chip while handling the Big Easy Driver at the hardware store, trying to find screws.

I ordered another Big Easy Driver from Amazon, along with some screw terminals and jumper wires to make the wiring easier to the Raspberry Pi 2, but the capacitor on the board was broken off. One week delayed on hardware. I returned it and bought another from SparkFun hoping they would package the board better. They did! And the board is updated to version 1.6, with more ESD protection. However, the board also came broken. I wired it up and the servo would not move. I noticed the LED on the Big Easy Driver was not as bright as it should be. Measuring the voltage from the Vcc pin revealed only 1.9 volts, when it should have been 3.3 volts. The voltage regulator had a problem. Since the Big Easy Driver is open source, I was able to use the schematic and board layout to start searching. I found the sense resistor for the voltage regulator was cracked. The older, broken Big Easy Driver had the same resistor, so I desoldered the resistor and soldered it onto the new one. Voila, problem solved.

The new Big Easy Driver came with a cracked voltage regulator resistor

After talking with my cousin, I moved the electronics mounts to the inside of the frame to reduce the risk of bumping the nuts and bolts holding the electronics. The chassis is normally grounded, so I'm not so worried about ESD.

The power supply chassis grounds the frame