Potatoes and Printers

First the potatoes. I have been noticing that one of my potato plants hasn't being doing so well recently and since it has been cold for a couple of days I thought that I would harvest the potatoes and see what there were like. Sadly I did not get many potatoes, only 6 and only really 1 that I would call new potato sized. All the others are just babies.

While I was harvesting I noticed that only the top later of dirt was wet from when I watered it this morning. That makes me think that the reason it was not doing well is because I wasn't watering it enough so the roots weren't getting much water. I will try to make sure I water the other potato more.

On to the printer. I am currently working at connecting everything and calibrating it. Things are going really well and I have calibrated all the axis motors and now I am working on the extruder motor. One thing I noticed is that the extruder motor apparently needs to be wires in the reverse order to all the other ones. That, or more likely, the motor is flipped from the original design expected because I am doing iteration 2 parts with iteration 1 hardware.

So I have finished putting everything for the printer together. Except I don't have the Alan key to secure the set screw to the extuder gear. I thought I it in far enough because all my tests had it running fine but when I tried to print something the motor started spinning in the gear. I am hoping to go to Home Depot and get a 1.5mm Alan key tomorrow morning. Wish me luck.

~(' ')~