A Tipping Point of Print Quality (Open Source for the win)

On the left is the Venetian Lion by Tony Buser printed by Prusajr on a $550 to assemble RepRap Prusa, on the right is the same model printed on a Stratasys uPrint+.

Its official, RepRap has now surpassed the commercial Fused deposition modeling 3d printers in machine affordability, price for filiment, and NOW build quality.

To be specific the machine that Prusajr used to do this was a RepRap Prusa, with a Makergear Plastruder, Felt bearings on the Y axis (yes normal clothing felt), Brass on the X axis, and LM8UU on the Z axis for the hardware.  On the electronics/firmware end he was using Sprinter Firmware, on Ramps Electronics, sliced by Skeinforge and hosted by Pronterface Host software, and printed onto a PCB build plate.  So basically nothing more than a standard run of the mill RepRap.

Of course we have always had some people who had epic build quality for years now (See Nophead), the big change is that the barriers to entry have dropped significantly:




Thanks the the new Volumetric Skeinforge (Skeinforge 41), and the fork of Skeinforge called SFact by Action68 (Ahmet Cem TURAN ) even makes the slicing of the models straight forward.  As an example:



I did these on my Makergear Prusa after only changing 1 LINE in the Sfact setup, and that was just to tell Sfact the diameter of the filament I was using, everything else was handled by the Skeinforge back end and Sfact front end in Sfact.

Again, as an Administrator with RepRap I want to thank all the developers out there around the world, for helping use reach this milestone.  We will continue to get cheaper, easier, faster, higher in quality, and more common through your hard work, thanks for all you do.