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Monday, July 20, 2009

RepStrapping Open Source Ecology

Back in March I had a visit from Marcin Jakubowski, the founder of Open Source Ecology. He was over here in Manchester presenting at a conference and asked if he could come and see HydraRaptor, as he wants to use RepRap machines on Factor e Farm. Like RepRap, his project also aims to change the world.

He asked lots of questions and made a couple of videos of my answers for his blog, which you can see here.

I volunteered to print a set of Darwin parts to help get Factor e Farm up and running with 3D printing. I was confident that I would have my Darwin running in time to churn out the parts. However, because I spent a lot of time experimenting with extruder designs in an attempt to get something more reliable, I ran out of time and had to print the parts on HydraRaptor.

Here they are, all 109 of them: -



More details here: hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2009/07/hydraraptors-second-child.
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5 comments:

  1. marcin_oseJuly 21, 2009 2:40 AM

    Beautiful. Thanks, Chris. I can't wait to get it up and running at Factor e Farm. Hopefully we'll be in a position to repstrap soon in the USA. How many RepRaps are there in the USA already?

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  2. Erik de BruijnJuly 21, 2009 7:47 AM

    Looks great. I've got about 30 parts printed now, including a couple of 90% solid corner brackets. It's still a bit labour intensive, but that should become better as the machine gets more reliable. Backlash was a major show stopper a while ago, but now I solved that in software (see builders wiki 3D-to-5D.

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  3. nopheadJuly 21, 2009 9:12 AM

    Marcin,
    You can get an idea of the distribution of RepRaps from this map.

    I expect there are many more not listed and / or under construction. Certainly hundreds of kits have been sold. The kits are of course moulded parts or laser cut verions making them a lot more expensive. You may end up with the first or second printed machine in the US.

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  4. Forrest HiggsJuly 21, 2009 11:50 PM

    wow! looks like replication is taking off. :-)

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  5. Adrian BowyerJuly 25, 2009 7:27 PM

    Brilliant Nop!

    I think I've mentioned before: Ed and I plan to dedicate four Mendel machines when we have them to sit in the corner of our lab doing nothing but churning out Mendel parts.

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