Hey Guys!
So I am finishing up my AA in robotics and I am currently enrolled in a class where I work side by side with material science students to design a project, the project chosen was that we need to build a 3d printer, it doesn't matter how, but the requirement is it to be able to print a 1" X 1" X " 1 as a minimum requirement.
Me and my team don't really know how to approach this and I was looking at videos on youtube and it seems like I could use RAMPS 1.4, My question is, we are thinking of making the heating bed to be fixed so that it doesn't move, we also want it to be relevantly small, I tried researching about RAMPS but i don't understand how we would make it only move the extruder and not the bed, how does RAMPS know the coordinates of what it is printing?
Have a look on the RepRap Website and Forum - everything you need to know, and more will be there.
Most 3D printers are controlled using GCode to represent the pattern to be printed. A RAMPS shield is just a convenient way to attach the stepper motor drivers and the mosfets for the heaters to an Arduino Mega.
If you write your own software for the Mega then you can make it do what you want.
If you want to use some of the off-the-shelf software such as Marlin or Repetier then you will need to study how to configure it to match your machine - but configuring that software is not a subject for this Forum.
...R