LordLatch

I got my chips to move the motor- gaze upon the magnificence here: Thanks! Next up for sacrifice to my vanity is this lovely Dell printer/scanner: See how I rip at its flesh to get to the juicy succulent innards! I failed to mention the scanner that is forming the base of my 3d printer yielded a nice cold cathode tube and voltage inverter I intend to us as accent lighting. It runs on 12 volts and i have already tested it. No picture yet.. 

I discovered I have a bunch of 74ls08's laying around and those are AND gates- bonus! That make's it simpler- see my new diagram(just imagine those inverters are not going to be NAND gates hahaha) Here's what it looks like blinking in sequence as it should(too bad I didn't get the other chip in the picture- whoops): Maybe tomorrow I'll wire the motor to it.

I was able to make the motor move by sweeping the wire across 4 leads manually. I wired up a decade counter to do it automatically and added a 16 output multiplexor to change the two binary outputs to four lines going to two NTE1825 motor drivers(these are meant to be used as H-bridges so don't tell anyone of my perverted use for them) Stupid me- I forgot the 74ls154 outputs an inverted value so I have to invert every output which I did tying the 2 inputs of NAND gates(I have a buttload of these 74ls00 chips) together to make an inverter. Sadly my multiplexor is not working right so I need to make a multiplexor from NAND gates. Here's what that would look like: Yeah, I'm not doing that. From my swiggles one can see I will need 12 gates to get it done. That's 3 chips all wired up for a proof of concept experiment that is unneeded because I've already proven I can move the motor using the sequence I did. Bah, be gone with it! Note to self: https...

I had not grounded pin 1 on the 555 is why it wasn't working. The following gif is a simulation of what it looks like working: I took a picture of it on and one of it off and since I had to touch the camera the image moved. I edited the rest of the image out with an opaque mask but didn't align the two images positionally. That's why the gif looks like universe warps around the lit led. The real circuit is flashing about twice as fast as it is simulated here. The rate can be changed by fiddling with the resisters and/or capacitor. The is a formula one can use to maintain tight control but I don't need it for what I'm doing. I wish I owned an oscilloscope- then I could be one of the cool kids. I'm powering this stuff with an atx power supply. Red wires have 5v+. Ground out the green one and the power supply gets turned on- oo la la! This is the circuit I'm using minus the led connected to vcc. Notes to self: A+ = Black Acom = Red A- ...

I am going to build 3d printer for a cheap as I can. The posting is meant to document my progress and keep me focused and motivated. In holiday season, I'm always slow because people don't get their crap repaired when they're busy buying new crap. Consequently, I'm broke right now so some forward movement will require waiting on me to get out of this financial hole. I was wanting to buy a 3d printer outright all built, but for a few reasons(besides brokenness) I'm going to build one. I read a few books and watched a documentary on the subject and his dude's instructable convinced me I could adapt current open source firmware and supporting software to any Cartesian printer as the g code language never changes. The printers are surprisingly simple in what they do.. To begin I dug around in the garage and found a scanner I have knowing the travel will be pretty long. Too bad I've thrown away a zillion printers and scanners in the last year- doof. Here i...