I have a question, I revently found a old 3d printer in my brothers basement, apparently its a “nophead mendel 90” that he built years ago but then lost interest in.
I would love to try and bring it back to life, but I know very little about printing, and have no idea where to start. Is a printer this old compatible with modern slicers? What software would I use to connect to it via usb? I tried to do research on my own, but found very little useful info about how to actually get it working
Even if modern slicers have gained a lot of advanced features, to my knowledge the gcode they output is still very simple. You can put all kind of fancy commands in the start and end gcode, but the actual printing part consists almost exclusively of commands that move the nozzle to a specific XYZ coordinate, and/or make the extruder motor move the filament either backwards or forwards.
Maybe ask your brother about what software he used it with? If the printer has an sdcard reader it might be easier to print off that than try to get it to communicate with a computer. I don’t have any first hand experience with that old printers, but I would guess it uses some kind of serial over USB protocol similar to modern printers. If you’re using Windows I think you might need to track down a driver for the printer’s serial controller, but if you have Linux there’s a chance it has the necessary drivers built in.