Resurrecting a Cupcake

[Tim Coble]

Hello all,

I have a Batch XIII Cupcake CNC with Gen 3 electronics and a MK4 plastruder.  I have powered it up and everything looks OK.  I can move the axis and the extruder heats up and pushes filament.  Considering it was sitting first in a warehouse and then in my garage through several Arizona summers I'm pretty excited about that.

I've looked at most of the old posts on upgrades and have some questions. It ended up on the scrap heap at work because we spent so much time tweaking it rather than printing that it became a liability.  I would like to skip all the silliness and just get some decent prints.

It looks like Replicator G 40 with Sailfish firmware is/was the preferred operator.  Is that still the case?  If so, am I correct in assuming to use that combination I have to upgrade my extruder with a stepper motor?  Or can I stick with the DC motor?

I'll probably have more questions later, just want to start out slow.

Thanks.

[Ethan Dicks]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 2:57 PM, 'Tim Coble' via Vintage Makerbot
<vintage-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>

> I have a Batch XIII Cupcake CNC with Gen 3 electronics and a MK4 plastruder...

Neat. I have a Batch VIII CupCake in a similar state.

> It looks like Replicator G 40 with Sailfish firmware is/was the preferred
> operator. Is that still the case?

I would love to hear the answer to that too.

> If so, am I correct in assuming to use
> that combination I have to upgrade my extruder with a stepper motor? Or can
> I stick with the DC motor?

AFAIK, pretty much *any* firmware you are going to move to will
require a stepper extruder.

-ethan

[James McCracken]

I have a cupcake of batch XV.  Running sailfish and repg.  Might be repg-52, if have to check.  40 was the first one that supported cupcake.  I do have a Mk7 stepper extruder, works great.  I made my own heated bed with nichrome wire on an unetched PCB, with kapton sheet and glue stick - prints like a champ.  The other major upgrades I did were enclosing the side, front, and back in lexan (polycarbonate sheets) by drilling holes and using the spare hardware.  My front window is held on by a hinge made of blue tape on the top.  I also added one of the spring loaded z holders on my worst axis, acme rods for the z. And finally I moved the extruder electronics and extra stepper driver to the back lexan window.

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[Dan Newman]

Sailfish requires a stepper-motor based extruder and, for installing firmware
and tweaking firmware settings, RepG 40rNN - Sailfish. If you stick with
a DC motor, you will want to stick with RepG 29r2 or earlier using Skeinforge 35
or earlier.

Dan

[James McCracken]

I would trust Dan over myself re: repg versions, its been a while since I had to change anything...

[Dan Newman]

On 17/12/2015 1:41 PM, James McCracken wrote:
> I would trust Dan over myself re: repg versions, its been a while since I
> had to change anything...

The issue with later versions of RepG, RepG 30 and later, is that MBI
shifted their focus to the Replicator 1 and stopped testing on ToMs.
(They had already stopped testing on Cupcakes.) With their shift of
focus, they started introducing more and more bugs for single-extruder
printers and printers running the Gen 3/Gen 4 firmware branch. Particularly
in the RepG's Control Panel but also in the machine drivers. Moreover,
Skeinforge 37 and later shifted to Volumetric 5D slicing and away from
the RPM-based slicing used for printers with DC-motor controlled extruders.

Net, net, if you stick to a DC-motor based controller, then stick to RepG 29r2,

https://code.google.com/p/replicatorg/downloads/list?can=2&q=0029&colspec=Filename+Summary+Uploaded+ReleaseDate+Size+DownloadCount

Doing so will save you some grief.

Dan

[Tim Coble]

Thanks for the feedback.  I've got everything downloaded, now I just to get it going.  I'm having a problem with the USB port on my laptop.  I keep getting a message that the port is in use and the machine can't connect.  I've been able to get it to connect once. I have an old XP net book that I may try next.

[Dan Laskowski]

Not enough information [Windows, Mac, version, etc.] but on Windows 7, I tried to do some 3d scanning with my son's Xbox Kinect and found it would only work on USB 2.0 ports.  I had a bunch of ports that were USB 3.0 ready and it would not work on them at all.  I carefully looked around on my machine and found a port that was USB 2.0 only and it worked fine.  This is probably not your problem because you got it to work once, but who knows...

[Paul Höfler]

I was able to fix my connection problems (which suddenly arose, I don't know when) with ReplictorG by launching it with adminstrator rights. On Windows by making a right click on ReplicatorG and selecting "Run as Administrator" and on Linux by typing "sudo ./replicatorg" in the according directory.

Best regards, Paul