As some are aware this year one of the Govhack sponsors gave away a 3D printer to a community space/group in each region that had hosted a bunch of the civic hackers. The one for Canberra was gifted to us. Brenda went and picked it up last night and brought it to the space.
It’s a Printrbot Simple Makers Edition (1405) which I assembled last night.
All axii are moving freely. I had to set the bed size in the eeprom (which you can do as an M code from the host software). It was a bit scary seeing it drive to the limit and miss steps. That setting iss saved now so it shouldn’t cause any more problems.
I put some ABS in the extruder but, without a heated bed, it just won’t stick down. We’ve got a small sample of PLA that came with it for now, but $100 for a heated bed would be a good investment given that afaik, all of our plastic is ABS. The main board already supports heated beds and I think printbot have a heated bed option.
I tried to get the z height as close as possible, but the M212 code to set the probe offset doesn’t appear to be working in the firmware for some reason. I started trying to do it mechanically, but with an ice cold bed and ABS filament I just wasn’t getting any stick so its eyeballed for now.
The people who make it tell you to use the repeiter host software, but Cura has a profile for the Printrbot Simple which I suspect will work just fine (remember that you may need to set the print area to 100x100x100) with the right plastic and what have you. More testing to come, maybe even on Saturday morning, we’ll see. 
