Let me introduce myself I am Australian with plenty of experience in Electronics, Computing and consider myself fairly handy with Steel and Timber. Have been considering CNC for my bench mill or a CNC router for quite a while but the other weekend saw a video on 3D printing and decided thats what I would do. Been studying maddly ever since. Spent nearly all night studying Hoss2006's build of a prussa over on CNCzone. I have followed HOSS's blogs for quite a while and I am quite impressed by the work he turns out. I asked him what I should consider building and he sugested one of these after I spent the weekend investigating the Prusa.
It was not untill I was well into the costing exercise that I found out the ORB BOT was not a Printed machine. I have to learn not to assume so much.
Hardware.
Well I have bitten the bullet and orderd the following;
1. Mechanical kit form ATI. Makerslide wanted nearly as much for the freight as for the slide components and ATI wanted less freight for the entire set.
2. RAMPS 1.4 ultimate kit from repraddiscount on EBAY. Seems a reasonable price especially with freight for the following
a. Ramps 1.4 with 5 drivers
b. Arduino Mega2650 with SD i/f and 4GB card and LCD controller.
c. 3 Mechanical Endstops
d. MK2 Heat Bed with thermistor
e. Wiring kit.
3. The QU-BD dual extruder.
(On Back order hope it wont be too far away).
I will be using power supplies I have laying around but still need to get some fillament. Which is better to learn with ABS or PLA?
Software;
1. Arduino to install the firmware to the Ramps boards. Seems to be conflicting reports as to weather I can use version 1 or not.
2. Firmware to convert the G Code to movement via the Ramps board. This looks like a good link on these
http://reprap.org/wiki/List_of_Firmware#Marlin. Sprinter, Marlin and Repetier seem to be the contyenders here.
3. CAM Software to convert the CAD drawing to G Code. I have used Mach3 before but there seems to be so much free stuff out there I will look at Slic3r, Pronterface and Repetier Host. Not sure about this last one yet.
4. CAD software. My son uses Autocad and inventor but that is too expensive. Need to find something perhaps even Google Sketchup ( I like it for my wood working projects) for a while at least.
Support.
Seems to be spread all over the place at the moment as 3D printing is really still its infancy (IMHO). Have been a member of CNC one for the last 6 years. Currently contains a little info on the ORD BOT. This site at buildlog.net which seems to be associated with (Run by?) the author of the ORD Bot. Thingiverse.com for a great range of pojects. Reprap.org which has loads of stuff on 3D printing and 3ders.org which seems very new and not much info yet.
As a newbie to this field of industry I will appreciate helpfull comments and direction. Especially I think when I get into squeezing out some hot stuff.