Electronic Design of the laprap will mostly use salvaged and commodity parts.

Currently, active subsystems of the printer are:

• The parasitic controller.  It will manage y-axis movement of the print arm, z-axis control of the printing and supply resevoirs, and drive the smoother-bar between printing layers.  The controller will also be responsible to starting and stopping the printer through control of the paper-detection switches and any paper-feed button, if present.
• Sensor subunits.  These will include a quadrature encoding system to monitoring the position and speed of the paper-feed motor in most printer designs, limit swtiches for the smoother bar, and various other failure-mode detectors.

The parasitic controller will use an Arduino Diecimila board and the Adafruit Industries Motor/Stepper/Servo shield.  By preference all parts should be ordered from www.adafruit.com.  The page for the Arduino is www.adafruit.com/index.php and the page for the Motor Shield is www.adafruit.com/index.php.  The Motor Shield is disassembled, so there will be some solder work for the local group.