Wire and Thread Embedded Extrusion, Introducing a new research project!

Hey Sebastien,

I'm part of a team of three engineering physics students, and we're doing a project course. Our project is to add a new print head to the Reprap, capable of laying wire/thread materials directly from a spool into a printed part. The applications of this would be to print copper wires for cable routing, coils for motors/antennas/electromagnetic components, and connectors; or to print steel reinforcement wires, or (maybe) sewing thread 'living hinges' for flexing parts. We're about 90% done construction of our Darwin base model, and soon to begin on the print head. We should be finished the whole project by mid March.

A big part of our project is, of course, the documentation. We're keen to release it open-source for the Reprap community to benefit. But I have a very vague idea of how we'd actually release it back to the community. My guess was that we'd have to start a blog, like Nophead's HydraRaptor or the other guys, and pipe it in. But that seems like it will only exacerbate the problem of decentralized documentation.

So, where should documentation for our project properly go to be most useful?

Jacob

Jacob, thank you a thousand times for asking! I've create a new forum:
[dev.forums.reprap.org]

This will be a good entry point for other people and kibbitzers, and provide a community hub 10 years from now when you three are floating around in a space station, having handed over the project to someone else.

I'd also create a dedicated mailing list welded onto the forum, but I can't for the next week or two. Use the most comfortable comms system you like, it can be tedious to try to interface a mail client with the forum so I don't expect you guys to have to.

You should probably start your own blog somewhere, that way you've got good fodder for your c.v./resume, and that makes your project more mediagenic. I'd offer you a blog like "SpoolHead.RepRap.org" but we don't have that functionality yet.

Here's a wiki page mockup, with the working title "SpoolHead" which you can move to a better name.
[objects.reprap.org]

Until we have a better system, you may want to store parts like "Foo" in
[objects.reprap.org].

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The other devs and I have got an email in my folders somewhere from an Israeli who figured it out a decade or two ago and wanted to donate ?his/her? ?kevlar?/epoxy thread/binder system.

We completely dropped the ball on that, and he probably figures we blew him off. Let me know if you want me to dig up that email.

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I've quoted your email in its entirety, as it didn't seem to be sensitive/private. I hope that's ok; let me know if it isn't.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/16/2010 10:19PM by SebastienBailard.

Thanks for the introduction, Sebastien!

I'm Jacob Bayless, and my team members are Mo Chen and Bing Dai. We're 4th year Engineering Physics undergraduate students at the University of British Columbia, and this is what we have chosen for our project course this year.

One of our goals is to participate in an open development environment, which drew us to the Reprap project in the first place. This means that when we're finished we'll release all of the documentation related to our project back to the Reprap community under an appropriate license. We should be finished this March (the 26th), according to our development schedule, with documentation released by April.

Of course, we'll try to keep the community up-to-date in the meantime as development progresses. But we're facing tight university deadlines for this project, so maintaining regular progress reports here will probably not be our first priority (until we're done.)

But feel free to ask any questions about the project, and we'll answer whenever we can!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2010 02:52AM by jbayless.

Any updates on this ? I know its been a long time, if you are done with the project, could you share the documentation ?

Quote
warankarp
Any updates on this ? I know its been a long time, if you are done with the project, could you share the documentation?

The final report for this project is available on its RepRap Wiki page here: Spool Head