This is somewhat belated, but only recently have I actually gotten them all set up in the desired configuration. Welcome to the newest members of the mjbots factory line, another 2 Prusa MK3Ss! That makes 4 total, now all neatly lined up in a row:

The first two have had a greater than 60% duty cycle over the 3 years I’ve had them, and situations kept coming up where I was blocked on 3d printer bandwidth. For now at least that need is sated.

I’ve muddled along for a long time soldering with a little Weller WES50. I’ve done a lot of work with it, but given how many SMD boards I’m doing with big ground planes and tiny components, I needed something a bit more capable. Enter the Pace ADS200 from tequipment:

Made in the USA, with 120W of power and a wide range of tip selection it has been an incredible upgrade. All those soldering jobs which were painful before are so much easier, and I don’t even have all the tips I wanted for different jobs yet. I also have the MiniTweez, but don’t yet have the tips that will let me show that off. I’ll try to post some soldering videos in the not too distant future.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been 3d printing a lot!

Moving up to the gearbox motors for my quadruped has only made that problem worse, as all the parts are a bit bigger and heavier.  My first Prusa MK3S has been printing almost non-stop since I got it, so I figured it was time to increase my bandwidth more permanently.  Thus, a second MK3S!

With my efforts to build a gearbox transmission and subsequent plans for a quadruped, there are a lot of parts which just can’t be made effectively from 3d printed plastic.  To date, I’ve sent out a few parts of the gearbox to CNC shops, which while effective, has a relatively slow turn around.  The best you can get without paying an arm and a leg is something like a week turnaround.  One thing I’ve learned from having a 3d printer on site is how transformative it is to be able to have single day turnaround for parts.  Thus, I thought I would experiment with CNC machining on a small scale locally and recently acquired a PocketNC V2-50.

While designing the improved actuators for SMMB I’ve given Shapeways a lot of business.  I can definitely recommend it, their selective laser sintering (SLS) parts are easy to order, their website gives plenty of control, and you can expedite things to your hearts content.

That said, with the amount of 3d printing I am doing, I could have already paid for a fused deposition modeling printer several times over.  Thus, I recently acquired a Prusa i3 MK3S.  It certainly can’t print everything that you can do with an SLS process, but with slightly tweaks to the models it can do a lot of it.  The biggest upsides of course are the lower per-part costs… something like 20-100x cheaper, and the faster turnaround time.  Nearly anything I care about I can have a draft of overnight.