Now, the Software?

Over spring break I built another axis of my 3D printer. That's two dimensions of movement... getting about halfway there. Anyway, soon I shall need software to control it.

The problem there is that it will all have to be custom-written. There is nothing that I know of that will do what I want: control three stepper motors with an Arduino Uno alone. Therefore, I'm coding...

So far, I can control a single motor. However, I'm having to implement threads in order to run multiple motors at different speeds; it should work, though.

A more pressing matter is sending the g-code to the Arduino; that is, the ability for a computer to read a file and communicate building instructions to the 3D printer. I don't think it will be very hard:

Photo by Daniel

This is a g-code interpreter I made in the last few minutes. It reads a “.gcode” file and stores the individual moves the printer has to make, then outputs a point at each vertex of movement. As yet, it can rotate in 3D; I still have to work on a GUI for a printing application. In that application, then, I can communicate with said Arduino! Serial... in Java!

Sounds like fun to me.