Hot End Board

I went ahead and made a project for the hot end board that will be a key part of this printer. There's not much there yet, but I'm waiting on parts to be delivered, and to see if anyone is actually interested in the project. So far I have zero interactions, including views. I'm not sure what I did with my first project to get my first few viewers, but maybe linking it here will help. I can't really tell if the project is interesting if literally nobody has even seen it!

https://hackaday.io/project/184838-hot-end-board

Space Savings

One of the things I've wanted from the beginning was three point bed leveling. As soon as I first saw it on the HevORT, I knew it was "the" solution in my mind. But putting the stepper motors in the bottom directly attached to the lead screws means that you're eating into your X and Y dimensions by the size of your motor. And if you leave yourself just enough room for the motor you chose, you are limited in ever making that motor bigger. That has never sat right with me, and it's been a sticking point in me wanting to move forward with that part of the design.

Somehow I wound up accidentally reading the build guide for a Voron 0 rather than a 0.1, and they had an ingenious solution to this problem back then -- attach the lead screw to the motor via a belt rather than directly. Yes, there are downsides to that, but I like decoupling the physical size of the motor from where it is mounted. I'm going to sit on it for a bit, but at first blush, I might steal that old design element from the Voron team. I assume they abandoned that for a reason, but our design goals aren't exactly the same, so maybe it won't matter to me as much. Or maybe I'll find out the hard way.

I could probably find public statements about why the change was made if I put some effort into it...

Print Bed

One of the things I did recently was join a local maker space. I have to get trained on some of the machines before I am allowed to use them (fair enough) but they have a lot of cool machines. Such as a forge to do metal working. I am strongly considering CNCing my own build plate, and possibly even casting my own. Depends on how quickly I get trained on the machines, how slowly I do everything else, and if that cool factor still seems cool when the rubber meets the road.