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I was an electrical engineering intern in Markforged for 11 months starting at the summer of 2019. During the internship I rewrote part of the firmware codebase to run on ARM microcontroller architecture. I also designed, assembled, and tested a PCB for 3D-printer's printhead (image on the left).
I was an electrical engineering intern in Markforged for 11 months starting at the summer of 2019. During the internship I rewrote part of the firmware codebase to run on ARM microcontroller architecture. I also designed, assembled, and tested a PCB for 3D-printer's printhead (image on the left).
The most interesting part of my internship was developing a toolchain for very accurate printhead movement capture and dynamics analysis. It was a critical input for the printhead route planner software to improve print accuracy.
Image on the right shows a zoomed in capture of a test measurement where the orange line shows the planned ideal route of the print nozzle and the gray line describes the actual route that was printed on the paper. It can be seen how the actual route deviates from ideal route on the top section of a circle. Such inaccuracies mainly stemmed from the large mass of the printhead and mechanical slack in the 3D printer gantry.
The printhead movement was captured with optical linear encoders generating digital quadrature signals which were quantized with digital analyzer. I wrote Python script that
sent move commands to the printhead
captured the movement data from encoders
aligned the planned route with the actual route and calculated the error
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