Polar Printer firmware for design similar to Crane WASP
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Hello David,
My name is Peter, and I am currently a university student from the US doing research on how native earth-based composites can be used for the purpose of constructing buildings via a polar extrusion machine. My team and I are currently in India and have drafted a design for the extrusion machine in the hopes that we will be able to be able use earth-based composites (clay, adobe, etc.) to make construction here more safe, environmentally friendly, inexpensive, and thermally favorable. We have designed a printer similar to the polar machine by the Italian company WASP called the WASP Crane (https://www.3dwasp.com/en/3d-printer-house-crane-wasp/). We wanted to know if firmware exists for this board that can work for this design or if we can modify existing firmware so that we can take a G-code file from a traditional slicer software and have the printer run without issue.
Thank you for your help!
Peter
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From the photo, it looks like a straightforward polar printer; in which case, it is already supported by RepRapFirmware running on Duet. See https://duet3d.dozuki.com/Wiki/Gcode?revisionid=HEAD#Section_Parameters_for_Polar_kinematics for the configuration parameters. You should be able to use it with GCode generated by a standard slicer, configured such that X=0 Y=0 is the position of the central axis.
The only complication I can see is that if the slicer generates G1 travel moves from one side of the axis to the opposite side, those moves may not be possible without violating the minimum radius. A fix would be to use a slicer that generates G0 commands for travel moves, or to pre-process the GCode file to turn non-extruding G1 moves into G0 moves.
