On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 2:28 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
pick-and-place, cnc, etc it's all the same principle.
OK, forgive me for going slightly off-topic here, but this whole time, I've been sitting here wondering if you're batshit crazy, or if your 3D printer design will work as well as you say it will work. That's mainly because I do think it's crazy to be designing a machine in 2017 when there are so many existing designs out there that work. I remember your arguments from before as to why, so my purpose of writing this isn't to bring the motivation back up. Originally I didn't really have a leg in the fight, but as I've been looking at the CAD screenshots and build pictures from your recent work, it is actually starting to take the shape of something that I had started to design about a year or so back, for the purposes of SMT pick and place. Looking at the pics at http://forums.reprap.org/file.php?177,file=96492 and http://forums.reprap.org/file.php?177,file=96491 it looks alarmingly similar to what I had originally intended to design. The only differences are what gets mounted on the head, and I probably would have went with Hiwin rails instead of pulleys. There's enough room on that head for cameras, a Juki nozzle or two, and a height touch-off probe.
Differences in 3D printing philosophy aside, I think that this design could possibly be useful for an SMT pick and place frame.
At this point I'm just going to sit here and patiently wait with popcorn in hand and wait until the whole thing plays out. I'm not in any real rush so it wouldn't even be in 2017 before I would start building one.
Anyway, good luck with the whole thing. I still think you're batshit crazy, but in some evil genius way, if you can pull it off.