Overnight I was thinking on how to improve on the design of yesterday (my mind seems to wander onto this project a lot!) and thought the second idea was pretty good. I decided that with the duel supports for the head/extruder I wouldn't need to move the bed up and down. So I moved the Z slide control/ball screws onto the Y slide. At the same time I was thinking about the placements of the motors and realised that I have to put the X slide motor on top so the ball screw and motor don't get in the way of objects below. This then meant that the Y slide motor and ball screw could go on the underneath of the Y slide which would be very neat. The Z motor and ball screw in the picture is shown only one one side but I would put it on both sides I just couldn't be bothered drawing it on both. The 'M's in the picture are motors and the 'H' is the head or the the mount for the extruder.
I'm quite happy with design and I think as long as the join there the X slide connects to the Y slide is strong enough it will be a great design that is much more space saving than the other design. I think I will order some stepper motors this coming week so I gauge the weight then I can do some calculations on the strength of the joint after my exams (that really will be after exams as that will take some time to do not just thinking). I'm still going to try and use aluminium for the structure as its lightweight (no one really wants a 10-30KG object on their desk!)
In other news I've got my ATmega chips and programmer (mkII). I'll post some stuff about it soon. I've got it all working under windows on my laptop (I was strangely happy when I got a LED flashing) but haven't managed to get the mkII to come up as a device on OSX and thus can't do much on OSX itself, so I'll keep trying to work that out.
