It’s been just over a year since I decided to seriously pursue building my own 3D printer, and while it has been taking a back seat to a lot of other projects I’ve been doing, it’s looking like it will finally come together in the next few weeks!

The CNC Controller in the last two posts was my first big move towards realizing the idea; Being  a stubborn sort, I’ve wanted to build the entire thing entirely myself – Historically this has been both a good and a bad decision; I like owning the entire stack in a project, but it comes at a price – Actually building and completing the project takes a lot longer. The upside is I get a lot of experience from such projects, and learn a lot about a wide variety of things – this is ultimately the reason I do it so much.

I did finally concede to use an existing 3D Printer hardware design, and near the end of last year built a Prusa Mendel from a kit of printed parts & hardware (pic below)

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However I am still quite determined to own the electronics. Around the very end of 2011 I finally decided to put the effort into making this project happen, and started to bring up the CNC board I had designed.

(More in part 2)