Equipment/Stratasys FDM 1650

Background

http://groups.google.com/group/london-hack-space/browse_thread/thread/a4088a8560511d67

TODO

• Move to somewhere accessible, probably the main workshop. Cover with plastic to avoid excessive dust.

• One or more driver boards thought to be faulty, possibly requiring transistors or capacitors to be replaced.
  • There is a report below that the self-test passes. Does this not include driver boards ? Does it now fail ?
  • Document state of boards
  • Contact Ally to find out details of common faults
  • Repair if possible

• Open her up, document the position of the switches on the back of the automove unit.
• Determine serial parameters from the dip switches, see page 9 of the automove operation manual.
  • (Is this Equipment:Stratasys_FDM_1650#Initial_conditions ?)

• Possibly document connections from the automove unit -- at some point, we're going to need to figure out how to drive the heaters/extruder from the automove. Might as well do as much as possible now, while it's open anyway.
  • Is anything connected to the 38v coil drivers, the DE-9?
  • What is connected to the digital I/O connector, the 36-pin female "printer" port?

• Using the acl docs, find the current values of the personality parameters, document them here. This will hopefully keep us from loosing them by accident later, and tell us a bit about how the machine is set up. You'll want the OP command, page 3-50, and the list of personality parameters, page 14-1.

  Firmware Version is 9.01

• Calibrate

• If we wanted to use the stratasys with skeinforge, we'd need to get skeinforge to output appropriate movement commands or, perhaps more maintainably, translate the G-code output into ACL. This might not be too difficult : skeinforge seems to use a very limited section of G and M codes, notably

G1 linear move
G2 cw arc
G3 ccw arc
G21 set units to mm
G28 home
G90 set absolute distance mode
G91 set incremental distance mode

M101 extruder on
M103 extruder off
M104-108 extruder temperature control 
M110 filament height ?
M113 duty cycle ?

• Write translator to perform the above conversion

• ???
• Profit

DONE

• Power up normally. Are there any bad-looking lights on the front panel? If so, something is stuck.

  DONE! - It's fine.

• Power up with left and right buttons pressed, should start self-test run. It will loop, power-off or hit reset to stop it.

  DONE! - It works as expected. Ran through all the self-tests, and they came out ok. 
  They're all in the service manual. Have a look.

• Connect the serial port up. Document how to reach it on this wiki page.

  DONE!  Equipment:Stratasys_FDM_1650#COM1_Settings

Current Status - 6/10/11

(Billy posted this to the mailing list)

Ally, one of Dean's friends, has said that she's happy to help us repair it. She's worked on older versions of the Stratasys printers, and she's already had a look at the electronics. She's happy to to show people what needs doing, and how to do it, though she'll need her expenses covering for travel. I think it's inside the M25.

I'll pass along the contact details.

As for the state of the Stratasys. The transport mechanisms work fine. Both extruders seem to work. The temperature control mechanisms seem to work, though the machine has the tendency to run for a while, then shut down instantly.

From what Ally said, this is usually due to either leaking capacitors, or two-legged transistors. Usually simple enough to replace, but this project went waaaaaaaay past my skill levels in electronics a long time ago... :))

The server sitting next to the Stratasys is set up with the OS and software needed. We can communicate with the control boards happily.

Current status - 2011-07-01

The rackmount machine on the floor is now running XP again; somebody, likely Billy, reinstalled the system without updating this page.

I've installed speedfan, and disconnected some of the non-software-controllable fans. This makes it somewhat less horribly loud.

I've also started documenting the initial parameters below.

The correct serial settings are 9600 7E1 (that is, even parity, 7 data bits, 1 stop bit). Other settings work, but ESC.E gives errors.

Current status - 2011-06-23

The rackmount machine on the floor under the terminal to the right of the stratasys is named capak (the man who coined the term "robot"). The user is hackspace/hackspace. Please use sudo for root. (The root password is also hackspace.)

If you know why the monitor is nigh-unreadable, please fix it.

It should be possible to ssh to it from within the space. (Use capak.local.)

Current Status - 10/06/11

It's kind of functional.

There's an computer connected to it and we can get a serial port connection on COM1.

At the moment it's only returning error messages.

The automated tools can connect happily.

IT STILL NEEDS CALIBRATION BEFORE USE!!!

Please do this first, and let us know what happened.

There are two printed manuals, a printed service manual, and the rest of the docs are on the desktop in the Stratasys folder.

I'm in the middle of setting up the software. It's NOT usable yet!

I'll be back later tonight to finish setting it up...

Information

UK reseller is http://www.laserlines.co.uk/. This one may have come direct from Stratasys, though.

• Extensive blog on the 1650 and 2000
  • Manuals for an FDM 2000 (includes description of Quickslice 5.0 - 1997):
    • Applications
    • Utilities
    • Manual
    • Procedures
  • Page referencing these and C:\QuickSliceV64-qsni
  • Calibration file
  • Webcams
• Another 1650 owner
• Repairing an FDM 2000

• Insight User guide (2005)

• Stratasys product page (1999)
• Philadelphia hackspace with an FDM 2000

Training

• A course on this machine
  • homepage
  • operating directions
  • tips for Quickslice
  • environment variables for Quickslice 6.4
  • nice presentation on the machine

Modification

• Lengthy description of the print process (for automation)
• Modification for makerbot-style self-supporting objects
• Using makerbot parts

Software

Quickslice known versions are 5.0, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.4 Insight known version are 3.4.1, 4.2, 6.0, 7.0. Only 4.2 and below works with the 1650[1].

Answers from Stratasys to emails:

We stop supporting this system a couple years ago, so getting the software for this system is not possible because it cannot be purchased and is only available through a maintenance contract. We are not aware of any third party or open source application that would work on this system.

Quickslice might be archived somewhere, however, we have to adhere to company policy.

Reverse engineering

• Description of SML as ACL (Asymtek)
• Description of ACL
• Blog post about reverse engineering a tiny bit of the SML file
• 3d4u's notes
• Some guys at UTexas managed to cope with it
• Some guys at UChicago did too

Initial conditions

OF: Calibration factors: 1.0027,1.0028 OI: AUTOMOVE REV 3.60/3.60 OL: travel limits: 0,0, 12000, 12000 ON: digital inputs state: 0 OP: Personality parameters:

1: Arrow Single Step Delay: 3000 (factory)
2: Arrow slow step delay: 100 (factory)
3: Arrow Fast Step Delay: 3 (factory)
4: X Arrow Direction Swap: 0 (factory)
5: 0
6: 0
7: 250
8: 2
9: 2
10: 100
11: 100
12: 100
13: 100
14: 32767
15: 32767
16: 32767
17: -15
18: -15
19: 1.0027
20: 1.0028
21: 8
22: 8
23: 0
24: 0
25: 12000
26: 12000
27: 16504
28: 16504
29: 1
30: 0
31: 1
32: 40
33: 10000
34: 40
35: 10000
36: 0
37: 0
38: 255
39: -1
40: 200
41: 25
42: 1
43: 0
44: 

(Bored now. More later.)

COM1 Settings

Bits per second : 9600
Data Bits : 7
Parity : None
Stop Bits : 1
Flow Control : Xon/Xoff

These settings are stored in a Hyperterminal session called FDM1650.