During the past couple of weeks, Sara and I have been working on learning Blender and building our Cupcake 3D printer, pretty much simultaneously.  Recently we pulled together some of the chips that attach to our motherboard on the Cupcake, including an exciting field trip to find a vice in the Art department, and a thorough overturn of our box-o-parts to root out missing motherboard parts.  Which we didn’t find!  It was exciting.  The good news is that they’re tiny little bits that Professor Jadud probably has, so that isn’t really anything more than a hiccup.

We worked on the motherboard (or, more precisely, itemized the parts we were missing), the extruder control boards (three of them), and their corresponding stepper motors.  We also popped in the parts on the six opto endstops; they’re tiny little boards that still need to be soldered.

As far as Blender goes, we’ve essentially split the learning of it up into two approaches:  Sara’s tackling input scripting in Python and I’m working on going through all the settings and buttons and views and layers and lightings and angles and… well, you get the point.  Together we should be able to beat Blender into the dust.  Figuratively.  With.. you know, code.

Anyway, here are some pictures!  Complete with “Hippy Ribbon”, which is the endearing name in the Makerbot Cupcake’s tutorial for the rainbow wires.  The pictures are of an Extruder control, the Motherboard, and one of the Opto Endstops, respectively.