I’ve made my first major purchase in this project. On order is
- Wade Extruder
- Nema17 Stepper for Wade Extruder
- J-Head HotEnd Nozzle
- 1Kg Spool of ABS Filament
- Arduino Mega 2560 v3
- 5x Pololu A4988 Stepper Motor Drivers
- RAMPS 1.4 Board
The Wade Extruder is a device that takes the filament plastic wire, and feeds it into the hotend nozzle at a controlled speed via the stepper motor.
The J-Head HotEnd Nozzle will melt the plastic via an included thermal resistor and temperature controlled via a thermistor.
The Arduino is a microcontroller that will take the GCODE commands from my computer and covert them into the output required to control the stepper motors
The stepper motor drivers are small circuit boards that will have the current capacity to drive the stepper motors.
The RAMPS 1.4 is a motherboard like device developed by the RepRap community. It allows the Arduino and Motor drivers to be combined into a neat reliable package.