Where do I start, it has been a while so naturally I finally have a lot to say :D. So first of; my Mendel90 finally got his well deserved paint job, and some needed wiring cleanup. Also while I was doing that I slapped in some new electronics (well new for me as it’s the old but well tested RAMPS 1.4 Arduino combination).

Mendel90 Paintjob

Since we are still on the subject of electronics and one of my colleagues pointed me to Pcbway (a cheap fab house) which sells you 10 prints for 5 bucks I decided to attempt to make my own PCB. So I fired up KiCad and started designing a PCB that fits snugly into the tiny space reserved for a connector board on my Mendel90 hotend carriage. 10 days later I was a proud owner of my very own PCB and by some miracle I even fits the housing, unfortunately I read the ramps schematics wrong and I had to bodge wire the entire thing, but hey what would you expect from a software dude making a pcb :P. Anyhow the rev1 is up on my Github for anyone who happens to have the same Mendel90 as me :D or ambitions to have the same one (which ever is more likely).

Mendel90 Hotend PCB

Continuing with colleagues… I started my own company together with two of my former colleagues, it’s called EVAbits and we do….surprise surprise engineering :D so if you need some of that done head over to our website.

EVAbits

Lastly I received a LCD display from my other job from an old discontinued product which I hooked up to a Raspberry Pi and IT WORKED! I had to use almost all GPIO pins though so I have to figure something out for connecting other peripherals. Ooh yea the reason I did this was for my car multimedia setup which I am building (very slowly but you know… some day it will be done). The LCD also had a touchscreen controller which I had to replace by an Arduino because I could not get it to work on my Raspberry Pi, anyway more details on the LCD in a different post.

Pi LCD Hookup

So thats it for now, thanks for reading…if you made it this far that is :D