Thursday, March 15, 2012
Around the RepRap Community 03/15/12
Wait 3 months for an update, then 3 days? Sorry Some times things are so cool, and not published about I have to update you guys. I LOVE RepRap.
All I can say is I hope he had eye protection. Any person that has ever used a high power laser must have jumped behind their desk chair when they saw a UV laser pointed at a shiny plate like that. But beyond that, WOW that is awesome! Alan Mckierman has more of his stuff over on his blog. I have not seen any videos/posts since his post in January, hope he is not in the burn unit!
Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen, the founders of Unfold based in Antwerp, Belgium have posted a video of their modification of the Moineau Paste Extruder on YouTube. I have never seen a paste extruder that gives that consistent of a bead. I can't wait till they post more details about their modifications.
MendleParts.com Bot Farm
Lulzbot.com Bot Farm
RepRap Bot Farm/Gardens Around the World
One of the best things about RepRaps is you can run as many RepRap as you want off one Laptop, and if you have an LCD and SD card reader on a machine you can run them with no computer at all. Adrian Bowyer has in the past compared RepRap to Chickens, but honestly no chicken coop is as fun to watch as a "flock?" of RepRap.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Around the RepRap Community 03/12/12
Marlin has finally reached ver1.0! The list of improvements is is too long to mention. Marlin is the firmware out there that gives you the most control over every aspect of your RepRap. Marlin can leave you a bit overwelmed because it gives you so much control of every aspect of your bot, but his can be mediated by using Daid's great web app for setting up Marlin. From what I have seen Marlin works great on almost any machine you throw at it. Marlins specialty is dealing with Bowden cable extrusion.
*Sorry I goofed the name at first Daid! Would figure the name of the website would be enough of a hint!
*Sorry I goofed the name at first Daid! Would figure the name of the website would be enough of a hint!
Credit RichRap who writes a great blog and is selling his RepRap on Ebay!
Marlin might be the firmware for RepRap with every knob exposed, Sprinter is one of our most stable/easiest to work with firmwares out there. Kliment, the maintainer of Sprinter has accepted a pull request that puts look ahead into Sprint Firmware under the experimental branch. All the beauty of look ahead firmware with the eaes of use of Sprinter. Fun!
Printrbot, and it's earlier released cousin Wallace have really made a spash, and finally Brook and his team at Printrbot have opened their store. On offer they have a $550 RepRap kit, which puts them at the lowest cost RepRap kit in the world to my knowledge. Congrats guys and good luck!
A small note, The Wallace/Printrbot design does reduce the cost of a RepRap by around $50 dollars by reducing the frame reinforcements. While at low speeds this is not a concern, at higher speeds, and especially at higher speeds and higher Z axis positions this can significantly reduce build quality. But on the other side of things if you purchase the Printrbot kit, and wish to upgrade the machine it should be no more complected than purchasing more fasteners/rods/belts and transferring the motors/hot end/electronics and some of the RP parts to a full sized Prusa or MendelMax.
Second note I have seen no independent reviews of the electronics or Hot end yet, so unless you like living on the edge I would hold off on a purchase until the Hot end/Electronics have had time to be kicked around by the community.
RepRap Build Parties Around the World! (Above is a time lapse of the Party in Berlin this month)
RepRap build parties are getting more and more popular, with them happening all over Europe and the US. These are hugely popular because it's a win for all involved. For a person getting involved with RepRap they get a RepRap for just a bit more than the normal price to self source one ($400-$650), ease of assembly, plus support from start to finish. I have yet to see the build party that didn't have the vast majority of particepents leave with a fully calibrated and assembled machine. For the people putting them on they usually make enough to compensate all involed and have a 3 day robot party.
The development pace for Slic3r has been amazing. If you sit in the Slic3r IRC you are likely to get an auto update for 3 or more major updates PER DAY. The Changes to this software since my last update 3 months ago are amazing to behold. Added at this point are Support Material, Dual Extrusion, Cooling logic, 3 upgrades to the slicing engine (It's now as or more tolerant than Skeinforge), AMF support, Makerbot/Mach3 support, Multithreaded (that's right it's EVEN faster), thinwalls, etc etc the list just goes on and on. If you have not tried slic3r PLEASE try it today. His software is of course free like speech, but he takes donations :)
Wiki Front Page Update
How do you be fair on the front page? What is a real RepRap? Should you allow commercial RepRap on the front page? If anyone can sell RP parts online, is there really a such thing as a non commerical RepRap? How different does a design half to be for it to count as a fully seperate branch of ReRap? At what point should a RepRap design be called deadish? Is it better to only have 3-4 RepRap on the front page at a time for 3-4 hundred? Who decides what order? .............
When I took on trying to update the front page of our Wiki to add MendelMax (Because I thought it was a shame that Prusa was very popular for many months before we got it on the front page), and I wanted to add Wallace/Printrbot also (even though I HATE the sacrifice of print quality to save 50ish dollars), I didn't realize it would be so contentious. Sad thing is I find myself agreeing with both sides of all the above issues and have no clue of a fair way to handel the front page. I draw the line that the front page MUST, have RepRap Pro Huxley, Prusa, MendelMax and Wallace/Printrbot. The issue is that Printrbot, MendelMax, and RepRap Pro Huxley are all "commercial" designs that are pretty close to non commercial designs... how do we say yes to them and Not also have Longboat Prusa, Luzlbot Prusa, Ifeelbeta Prua, Clonedel Prusa, etc etc also up there, and then by all things reasonable how do we put them in a fair order? I don't know, would love to know if the community has a simple fair way around this problem.
Nophead has been teasing the community for weeks with his Mendel90 design. It's finally been released for your printing pleasure. It's printed mass is a little higher than Prusa and a little lower than Mendelmax. Will be interesting to see how popular this design becomes! Thanks Nophead!
Note Nophead has released the source! (Thanks jamesmoe from the IRC).
There are a few paste extruders out there for RepRap, but non that I have seen to date have integrated heating for the substrate, which is pretty epic. I am holding off on printing this one till I get my MendelMax with quick release extruder finished, but honestly I am excited
Rick Pollack, the man behind the MakerGear Prusa and Makergear Mosaic has came up with a new design for a Printer. At 1st glance I really though it was a knockoff of a Wallace/Printrbot, but he was actually working on it before either came forward (And when you look closer, while it might have the same general shape, it's approach at ever corner is drastically different). He is trying to determine if the community would be interested in this as a commercial product, or even as just a RepRap. Why not go over to his IRC and let him know what you think?
Saturday, February 25, 2012
RepRap Community Masterclass in Bath, UK
I wouldn't normally use this blog to trail my company's activities, but this seems an appropriate exception:
RepRapPro Ltd is running a RepRap Community Masterclass at Bath University - the home of RepRap - between 13-15 April 2012. As this is for the RepRap Community we have tried to keep expenses as low as possible. The cost is £688 including a RepRap kit for each attendant together with full tuition, accommodation and all meals.
Details and booking are here.
Labels: Masterclass, Training
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Print any colour you like...
...with added stripes.
Some time ago I started to build a mixer nozzle for RepRap that would take four coloured filaments and combine them out of a single nozzle.
This is his adapted Mendel. It has two RepRapPro extruder drives at the top leading by the Bowden tubes to the nozzle:
At the moment the drives are being controlled by the same stepper electronics, so they are both running at the same speed. But we will add an extra electronics so they can be driven in any proportions soon. He has blocked off two of the four inputs so we are just mixing black and white.
Here is the very first print:
As you can see, it is stripy rather than grey. We need to increase the mixing in the nozzle. Of course, molten polymer has a very high viscosity, so the Reynold's number of the flow in the nozzle is very low (and hence highly reversible). This means poor mixing, hence stripes. So the next step is to add a labyrinth in the nozzle to force more mixing.
In some ways, more interesting than mixing colours is to mix polymers with different characteristics, such as a hard and an elastic PLA. Then you could make parts that are rigid in some places and flexible in others with any gradation you like in between.
UAV with warping wings, anyone?
... several hours pass...
Here's the second print. The horizontal stripes are a bit of serendipity: as I said above, both black and white filaments are being driven synchronously for the moment while we sort out extra stepper drivers so we can rotate them independently; but Myles left the grip-screws on the white filament drive lose, so white was being driven intermittently. Thus we have various ratios of mix here.
As the filament comes out of the nozzle in two stripes - one black and one white - because of the poor mixing, one side of the object tends to end up blackish, and the other side whiteish. We might be able to do something clever with this effect. See Janus particles, for example.
Some time ago I started to build a mixer nozzle for RepRap that would take four coloured filaments and combine them out of a single nozzle.
This is what I made. Four 1.75mm filaments are led in by four Bowden tubes. The filaments can be driven at any relative speeds to achieve any proportions of mixing.
Now Myles Corbett has taken that idea and made it work:
This is his adapted Mendel. It has two RepRapPro extruder drives at the top leading by the Bowden tubes to the nozzle:
At the moment the drives are being controlled by the same stepper electronics, so they are both running at the same speed. But we will add an extra electronics so they can be driven in any proportions soon. He has blocked off two of the four inputs so we are just mixing black and white.
Here is the very first print:
As you can see, it is stripy rather than grey. We need to increase the mixing in the nozzle. Of course, molten polymer has a very high viscosity, so the Reynold's number of the flow in the nozzle is very low (and hence highly reversible). This means poor mixing, hence stripes. So the next step is to add a labyrinth in the nozzle to force more mixing.
In some ways, more interesting than mixing colours is to mix polymers with different characteristics, such as a hard and an elastic PLA. Then you could make parts that are rigid in some places and flexible in others with any gradation you like in between.
UAV with warping wings, anyone?
... several hours pass...
Here's the second print. The horizontal stripes are a bit of serendipity: as I said above, both black and white filaments are being driven synchronously for the moment while we sort out extra stepper drivers so we can rotate them independently; but Myles left the grip-screws on the white filament drive lose, so white was being driven intermittently. Thus we have various ratios of mix here.
As the filament comes out of the nozzle in two stripes - one black and one white - because of the poor mixing, one side of the object tends to end up blackish, and the other side whiteish. We might be able to do something clever with this effect. See Janus particles, for example.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Make More RepRaps...
Interestingly, Cubify has belatedly added a free download section. I haven't checked the licence conditions, but - unless they are silly - I think that it would be a good idea to upload as many RepRap designs as possible for printing on 3D Systems printers...
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
ImplicitCAD 0.0.1
For the last few months, I've been working on a new CAD program, ImplicitCAD. I'm now pleased to announce the release of ImplicitCAD 0.0.1.
One really awesome feature ImplicitCAD provides is rounded... well, everything. For example, look at the following extopenscad code (we provide a parser for an extended version of openscad, in addition to a Haskell API). The r=x is the rounding!
ImplicitCAD also provides higher order modules, as this variable twist extrusion code demonstrates (note how twist is a function):
We also provide proper programmatic functionality, like variable assignment in loops, that was missing in OpenSCAD.
Check out ImplicitCAD on GitHub and the release notes for 0.0.1.
Important Aside: The third Toronto RepRap User Group meetup is happening on Feb. 27th at hacklab! If you're in Toronto/the GTA/Southern Ontario, please join us!
One really awesome feature ImplicitCAD provides is rounded... well, everything. For example, look at the following extopenscad code (we provide a parser for an extended version of openscad, in addition to a Haskell API). The r=x is the rounding!
linear_extrude (40, r=8)
union (r=5) {
translate ([-10,-10]) square (30, r=3);
translate ([ 10, 10]) square (30, r=3);
}
ImplicitCAD also provides higher order modules, as this variable twist extrusion code demonstrates (note how twist is a function):linear_extrude (height = 40, center=true, twist(h) = 35*cos(h*2*pi/60)) {
union ( r = 8) {
circle (10);
translate ([22,0]) circle (10);
translate ([0,22]) circle (10);
translate ([-22,0]) circle (10);
translate ([0,-22]) circle (10);
}
}We also provide proper programmatic functionality, like variable assignment in loops, that was missing in OpenSCAD.
Check out ImplicitCAD on GitHub and the release notes for 0.0.1.
Important Aside: The third Toronto RepRap User Group meetup is happening on Feb. 27th at hacklab! If you're in Toronto/the GTA/Southern Ontario, please join us!
Labels: cad, Haskell, ImplicitCAD
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
0.01 Layer Height on a Prusa Mendel
After a very long time sticking with Sprinter Firmware and Sfact for my Gcode generator I decided to upgrade a little bit. I moved to Marlin Firmware (Which has became all the rage in the RepRap IRC Channel), and Slic3r for Gcode generation (Does same job as Skeinforge).
Marlin is a litle more confusing to set up than Sprinter (Configuration.h is modified by commenting in and out things instead of setting variables). Only real change I have found with Marlin is acceleration has a different sound to it, and my rounded parts are a bit more round.
Slic3r is amazing. STL that would take 30-40 minutes to convert to Gcode it can process in 2-4 minutes (The .01 layer height woman only took around 8 minutes to slice and would have been over an hour with sfact/skeinforge). Also, setup is dead simple. Just enter your nozzle size, filament diameter, and extrusion multiplier if you e/steps are a bit off and your good for a 1st print. Only downside of Slic3r is it does not support single wall prints, or support material yet (But if you like to play with code I am sure Sound would like the help on hit Github, or the slic3r IRC).
For ultrafine printing with Slic3r the only parameter you change is the layer height, So both the failed Yoda at .04 and Pink Panther at .01 only required a change from .25 layer height to .04/.01 respectfully. The Yoda failed because at such fine layer heights I discovered that bridging is completely broken, so any small break in the outer skin of a part will never get fixed by the bridging of the next layer and just get worse over time.
After the failure of the Yoda I needed to find a model that looked nice in fine printing, and had no bridging, of course my mind went straight from Yoda to the naked female form.... don't ask.
Printing at this layer height really shows off that I need to upgrade from standard Prusa Z couplings to a Nophead or aluminum Z coupling, but beyond that the print turned out wonderful. at .01 layer height as you can imagine the 1st 2 layers where a bit sketchy, took me 1 hour to get the bed THAT level (1/25 your normal layer height really shows you how not level your bed is).
From talking to some friends in the RepRap IRC I think that with 3mm filament .01 layer height will not be possible, just because the feed rate would actually be too low, and the retractions would cause you to repeatedly go over the same piece of plastic, causing the plastic to shred. But if your running 1.7 plastic and Slic3r repeating this stunt should not be that hard. Hope you have a lot of time, it took 9 hours to get of to the upper chest on this print before I ran out of Z. :)
Equipment/Software used:
Makergear Prusa Hybrid
1.7 Red ABS Plastic from Ultimachine
Marlin Firmware v1
Latest experimental branch Pronterface in Linux
Slic3r GCode Generator v5.7 (Fully stock settings besides layer height at .01)
3 perimiters, 0 infill
