The first thing that arrived was an IR thermometer – a Fluke 561. My wife was instantly convinced as to its usefulness when I showed her how to take the kid’s temperature very quickly using it. This should come in very handy when trying to calibrate the prusa, and trying to get the temps on the heated bed and the hot-end correct.

 Temperature gun in its case

One thing I like about this thermometer is that you can plug in a K-type temperature probe. The 561 comes with a velcro-strap thermometer that you can wrap around pipes. One major downside to this thermometer that I didn’t realise when I purchased it is that the K-probes will only work up to 100 degrees C. (For no good reason that I could determine.) The other feature that would be nice would be to be able to turn the laser off. You can do this when you you’ve got a probe plugged in, but not at other times.

The other thing that arrived this yesterday was the electronics kit. I got this from ‘Auzze’ – one of the Australian members on the Reprap forums. He sells a complete kit, including endstops, plugs and an SD card reader.

There’s a few things that I’m unsure of with this kit:

• I can see where the voltage comes in for the shield. Does the Arduino need its own voltage supply?
• What’s the ‘Aux 4’ input / output for? Is it for an LCD screen?
• The ‘X’ ‘Y’ ‘Z’ outputs are pretty straight-forward. I presume the ‘E0’ and ‘E1’ are for the hot-end and heated bed respectively, but I’m not certain.
• I’m not sure which plugs are for the temperature sensors – is it the ‘T0’, ‘T1’ and ‘T2’, or the ‘D8’, ‘D9’ and ‘D10’?

It looks like I’ll have to do a bit of research before I start plugging things in. 

That’s almost everything I need for the Prusa. The only thing left to get now is the hardware kit. I suspect that it will be a while yet – it’s coming by sea-mail. At least I should have a pretty good idea on the electronics by then.