Good news
We have very good news.
Last week Dr. Noboyuki Futai from Japan sent us a datasheet containing the last information we needed to reveal all the secrets of the PHR-803T. We will publish the document in the following days on the download page with the last version of the DiyouDriver’s schematics. This new version doesn’t use all the information provided by the document. We reviewed it and we think our electronics is enough for our current project, but the document solved all of our doubts, confirmed our researches and also will allow other people to exploit more capabilities of the pickup. From here we would like to express Dr. Futai our deep gratitude for his important contribution to the project.
On the other hand we are waiting for the arrival of some professional PCBs we ordered from a fab. These PCBs are smaller and more compact than those we made by ourselves but they take several weeks to come to our hands. As soon at they arrive we will test one to see if everything works fine and then we will publish the schematics and the document of Dr. Futai.
While waiting for the PCBs we are researching other areas.....
We were taking up our original project of building a UV resin 3D printer. We already developed a FFD toolhead which prints with plastic filament. But the robot is multi-functional and we have a fantastic UV source so we can add another tool to sensitize UV resin very easily. We are receiving emails all the weeks of people around the word interested in or already working on UV laser 3D printers. We even received an offer to buy our ideas and prototypes from a Canadian company. Anyway, people are getting crazy in the 3D printing industry. Probably it will be the first time in the short history of technology where thousands of companies will be selling the same thing at the same time in the entire globe. The market is not ready for so many offering, so they have to move quickly or they will disappear. Just here in Europe there are 3 or 4 FFD printer companies per country. And once the FFD printer market becomes more and more competitive many companies are moving to other technologies like SLS, DLP, etc. So we got crazy too and we will develop the first UV resin 3D printer based on an optical blu-ray pickup. We keep you informed.
In last few days we also did intense "mental exercises" to find a different way to connect and solder PCB vias. This has been traditionally another nightmare in homemade PCB fabrication. We think the robot could also help in this task and even check if the vias have connectivity, but we have not found the perfect method yet.