by Boildown » Thu Jan 22, 2015 3:36 pm
Well I've ordered a Lulzbot Mini, some filaments, and the parts to make the throttle. I ordered some ColorFabb BronzeFill because it looks awesome when sanded/polished and it says that it weighs 3x more than standard filaments, which would make it great for the base material. I just hope its strong enough.
The biggest gotcha so far is that there's no way on McMaster's site to estimate or know the shipping costs before you order. So my $50 order ended up costing an additional $18 to ship to me for two 1lb boxes via UPS ground, which was their cheapest shipping option.
It would be nice to source those McMaster parts elsewhere, Amazon would be especially nice for those of us with Prime (although I have to pay sales tax now on Amazon). Other parts are probably available on Amazon as well, such as the USB cable sourced from SparkFun. Although I ordered it anyways, I plan to see if I can use an old IDE hard drive cable instead of the 10 wire ribbon cable. The good news is that all the other sources had very reasonable shipping, usually using first class mail they were only $2-3 dollars.
I ordered the Pro Micro 3.3V/8Mhz board you had listed, but is there a reason not to use the 5V/16Mhz version? The cost is the same (they are both $20 in individual quantities, not $16 as listed). I played it safe because maybe the potentiometer can only use 3.3V, but in general higher CPU speeds are better, so the 5V version that runs twice as fast seems like a no-cost upgrade if the pots work with it.