I have a question, I revently found a old 3d printer in my brothers basement, apparently its a “nophead mendel 90” that he built years ago but then lost interest in.
I would love to try and bring it back to life, but I know very little about printing, and have no idea where to start. Is a printer this old compatible with modern slicers? What software would I use to connect to it via usb? I tried to do research on my own, but found very little useful info about how to actually get it working
There’s some info about it here https://reprap.org/wiki/Mendel90
This is a very old printer, from the early days of reprap. From a practical standpoint you would get better results from the cheapest new ender i3, and it would be a lot easier.
If you want an interesting project though it should be entirely possible to get it working, and you’ll learn a lot from it. If it’s still using the original Sanguinololu controller board that will be your biggest issue, as I doubt a modern version of the marlin firmware will fit in a ATmega644P. Your best bet would be to replace the controller board with something modern, then you can use it as any modern 3d printer.
“Fewer vitamins”
What does that mean? I’ve been 3d printing a few years never heard that before.
Vitamins is a reprap term for non 3d printed parts, screws, motors, etc.
Lol nice ty.
To add, if it’s using the Melzi board that some used, then you should be able to load g-code onto it using the micro SD card slot. It will depend on the firmware if it can recognise modern gcode though. You may be able to compile a modern version of marlin for it too.
The board says “Melzi Ardentissimo” and does have a sd card slot, so I guess first step would be to find an old, blocky mini-usb cable, haven’t needed one of those in a hot minute, and backup the firmware.
And it looks like it can just print from the SD, but since there is no display or controls of any kind and the sdcard has multiple printfiles, its probably sime kind of magical filename…
From the instructions it looks like it uses pronterface https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nophead/Mendel90/master/dibond/manual/Mendel90_Dibond.pdf