Have been lurking around the active 3D printer community in the SF Bay Area for several years. Not enough priority (or enough time
to jump in. Week or so ago, my grandson visited from southern California and we spent several days 3D printing on a friends Makerbot Replicator 2 and Mini. Now he's got the bug and I do, too He's a budding scientist/engineer, so buying a printer (or even just building a kit) won't do, so in the Steve Jobs fashion "The journey is its own reward.", we want to design, analyze, and build a printer (definitely one faster than the Makerbots!) from scratch. More on that in another thread...Re my background: For my day job, I design, prototype, build and program wearable wireless sensors, as well as iOS apps to communicate with them. So that involves a bunch of technologies and skills that are applicable here: embedded system design, MEMS sensors, Bluetooth Low Energy, firmware, mechanical design and fabrication, PCB layout and assembly, etc. Have a small metal workshop (lathe and mill) and plastic/woodworking shop. a 3D CNC router (for wood, plastic and maybe aluminum, that I'm restoring) and access to higher-end facilities (e.g., CNC mill). Re MCUs, have mainly worked with TI MSP430s and various ARM processors. Re board-level systems, mainly Raspberry Pi (got one for my grandson, too). Just now getting into Atmel MCUs and Arduinos, motivated by this project.
As a hobby project, I've been working on designing a series of electronic controllers for BLDC motors for mechatronics and robotics. Target is educational projects (helping out my friends at LearningTech.org, who teach kids programming, robotics, etc.) so low-cost and practicality are requirements. Recently found that I may have been scooped -- at least partially. The Mechaduino(https://hackaday.io/project/11224-mechaduino) Hackaday project has done pretty much what I want to do, but for steppers, not BLDC. (Invite you to look at it; very interesting.) The "secret sauce" in this design is a high-speed, high-accuracy, low-cost rotary magnetic sensor that encodes the motor rotation to sub-degree accuracy to close the feedback loop. Attended a trade show, Sensor Expo, in San Jose last week and at least three vendors were featuring these devices.
More later in other topic-related threads,
Mike
PS: BTW, for those of you in the Bay Area, specifically the peninsula between SJ and Palo Alto, I belong to two great clubs, a woodworking group http://www.southbaywoodworkers.org and a smaller, metalworking (lots of mechatronics) group, https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/SBMetal/info Check them out.
