RepRap: Blog

0.01 Layer Height on a Prusa Mendel

2011-12-27T18:04:00.004Z

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

Solving a nagging question about print adhension

2011-12-17T02:03:00.002Z

In which a long term question about print adhesion to an acrylic print table is answered via thermal imaging.

Do you want to read more?

Quality - Open Source for the Win (Part Deux)

2011-11-29T12:15:00.001Z

A short while ago Neil posted here about the way RepRap 3D print quality is starting to knock spots off the proprietary competition.

Well. This blog is not the place for RepRap spinoff company Ra Ra, so I have left it until our sales campaign here is just about over before making this post. (And no - I couldn't manage to resist abusing my position and including the link.)

Jean-Marc just printed Misguided's Screw Cup from Thingiverse (above) on one of our RepRapPro Huxleys in ABS. We used a non-standard 0.3mm nozzle (standard is 0.5mm) and a layer height of 0.1mm. It took a while under those conditions, of course - 5 hours.

But check out this surface finish under the microscope:

The line is a 60-micron human hair (selflessly donated by Christine Bowyer under only mild protest; as those aware of my appearance will know, I am incapable of providing such a sample myself).

We think that the quality we're getting is rather good...

Around the RepRap Community 11/28/2011

2011-11-28T07:05:00.012Z

Credit Photo Tomcee
Hall-O effect Endstops

Hall-0 effect sensors have an advantage over both mechanical endstops and optos because it senses distance instead of waiting for contact, so it should never wear out like a mechanical endstop, and not be affected by lighting changes in the room like an opto. Of course this is the open source board upload by Jos to the RepRap Wiki. Being open hardware you can get the eagle files off the wiki or buy them from Ruben-Ikmaak for 9 euro with cables and magnets included at his website.

(Credit Red of Hackerspace Charlotte (NC_USA))

MendelMax
MendelMax is a new Open Source RepRap 3d printer designed by Maxbots and based on the Prusa Mendel. It is a true reprap, using printed brackets, but instead of using threaded rod for the structural elements it uses inexpensive aluminum extrusions. This gives a huge increase in rigidity for a minimal extra cost (Self sourcing will cost about $80 more than a standard Prusa when purchased from the recommended suppliers). The required extrusions are available world wide from a variety of suppliers.

MendelMax costs a bit more, weighs a good bit more, but the frame is much physically tougher, and looks 500 times sexier. I have yet to see any parts for MendelMax go on Ebay/Emakershop, but Lulzbot is selling the parts. They also took a pretty cool pic showing how strong the frame is.

credit Lulzbot/Alphobjects

One other must share image, what happens when you mix Makerslide, & MendelMax

Credit Nick Wilson
WINNING!

Credit Neil Underwood at Fablocker Hackerspace in Winston-Salem NC
Printrbot

Printrbot is a a smaller scale Reprap design, very similar in size to the Emaker Huxley, but the standard "Mendel" design has been dropped in favor of a very simplified base frame and a floating y stage (The Y axis is supported only in the middle). The core team of Printrbot where nice enough to let me have the files pre-release (I think release will be in late December) to help out in the Openscad conversion.

As you can see, I did not get the chance to finish the bot over the weekend, so I hate to review it. Plan is to have review of the bot after I get a 1st print (should be later this week (I hope)). But I can tell you they are for real, and the parts will go together into a functional machine. How well it prints in the real world, and whether the Axis's are as robust as Prusa, I will fill you in on that later.

Slic3r

For the last 3 weeks now my go to Gcode generation program has been Slic3r (Found very few things it does not slice, but if it does not I just use Sfact). This slicing engine is a complete ground up rethink of Gcode generation, and honestly I have never had anything that is this easy to set up. Only things you need to give it are nozzle & filament diameter, packing density (if your E step/mm is dead on this should be 1), your requested extrusion width/height, and your set up. Generating Gcode is about 10 times faster on big things and 2-3 times faster on small things. It's definitely worth checking out.

Reprap Prusa Iteration 2 Build Event in Cologne Germany in December

2011-11-27T03:37:00.000Z

(Posted at request of Kliment Yanev, if you are having a RepRap Build Party, RepRap.org would love to support you by announcing your event on the main blog.)

A reprap build workshop is going to take place in Cologne, Germany on the first weekend of December (3-4.12). Ten groups will have the opportunity to build their very own 3d printer, get it working, and take it home with them.

Under the guidance of Josef Prusa, Kliment Yanev and Ruben Lubbes, we'll build ten printers of the latest Prusa Iteration 2 variety. More info on Prusa iteration 2 at Prusa Iteration 2

After building the printers, we'll look at control and design software, basic troubleshooting, and where to get designs, ideas, and help. At the end of the workshop, every participant or group will go home with a working printer.

Here is a video of an earlier workshop organized by the same team:

Workshop data:
Time: 3rd and 4th of December 2011, from 10.00h to 19.00h on both days. Impatient builders may continue past 19h on Saturday if they wish to, but that should not be necessary.

Location: Coworking Space Gasmotorenfabrik, 3rd floor, Deutz-Mülheimer Str. 129, 51063 Cologne, Germany

Price: 850€ per printer. The number of participants per printer is not limited (though 2-3 is ideal).

Signup by email, kliment.yanev @ gmail.com

Included in the course price are all the parts as well as some plastic print material. The electronics, hotend, and cable terminations (the boring bits that eat a lot of time) will be done for you in advance.

Required tools:

-Set of hexagonal keys (allen keys) including small sizes
-Screwdriver set
-Wrenches in sizes 13 (ideally two pieces), 7 and 5.5
-Electronics pliers set (at least needle nose and side cutters)
-Tweezers
-8mm round file

Note that we have all these tools available onsite, but not enough for everyone. Please bring your own set of tools if at all possible.

Photos of past build events are available at http://ikmaak.nl

Playing Fast & Loose

2011-11-16T06:03:00.004Z

Above is an Orca-style RepRap frame using 10.8mm round extruded aluminium tube simply whacked into printed sockets with a large mallet. The result is slightly under tension on the back bracing which holds the whole thing very securely together with no fasteners.

This is much lighter and simpler than traditional prototyping-style construction with adjustable threaded rods all over. It has the benefit that the smooth rods can be used as axis guides as well as support structure. The Orca-style dihedral distributes load and prevents swaying from side to side.

It's crowned with a one-piece extruder that includes all the guides, clamps and sliders in a single printed piece. It could still be easier to assemble though.

This is really an initial space model - I've not put much work into the brackets and Z lift mechanism yet. Didn't want to have to rework everything if it wasn't stable! I'll cause controversy with the Z axis next :)

Vik :v)

Prusa Iteration 2

2011-11-11T22:38:00.002Z

When I have RepRap presentation I always say that I update my printer almost every week. If you watch my GitHub Repository, you must be puzzled now. It's a long time since my last commit there. But when you look closer you would find out that the printer lived in Felt branch last few months. It evolved into something much slicker, smoother and sexier. While keeping it's workhorse spirit.

It was already build on many workshops and it speeds up the build by many hours! Forget glueing the bushings, that was soo 2010.

Iteration 2 is the younger, cooler brother of Prusa. It has 111111 changes and it's 63 times better :-)

Print NOW!

I quickly pick some important changes of Iteration 2

1) Push fit
Where it is possible parts are just pushed in without any fastener needed :-)

2) Bushings
You have possibility to use Igus professional bushings, brass tube, felt, pla printed bushing or even printer lm8uu alternatives.
All bushings are simply snap in mounted, you can easily maintain your printer!
When you need your printer quick you can always find one of those at home :-)

3) No SAE version.
Are you sad?? You shouldn't be, parts will work with both metric and imperial fasteners.
Get M3 for small fasteners (you need them for NEMA 17s anyway) or #4 imperial ones if you really need to.
5/16 rods will work in place of M8 without any change!

4) LM8UU
You asked for it, so you got it! :-)

5) Less tools needed
All M3 nuts have nut traps. I've done workshop where everyone had only one Philips screw driver and two wrenches fro M8 nuts!
No jigs or measurement during print! Rods are exactly length you need from end to end.

6) One plate bed
That's kinda hack. PCB heatbed actually works as second plate.
But it needs no leveling at all and frees lots of space under Y axis for electronics or PSU to make tidy, cute printer!

7) Better belts
I use T2.5 belts instead of T5 for a long time, and it affects the quality more significantly then any lm8uu would ever do. Now it's official suggestion, get GT2 ot T2.5 belts and machined pulleys! Be professional!

8) Better documentation (future)
I get best team to help me manufacture the new documentation!
Kliment and Garry Hodgson (you many know him form Prusa Mendel Visual instructions).
Expect to see it pretty soon! And fully done in ThingDOC!

Watch out my GitHub, Flickr and Twitter to get latest updates!

Say goodbye to unsightly STL triangle misery! Forever!

2011-10-19T14:04:00.008+01:00

I downloaded Rupert Rawnsley's OpenSCAD Horizontal Spool Holder from Thingiverse and printed it on one of my Prusa Mendels. Nothing unusual about that.

Except that at no point in the making-chain from Thingiverse to the finished printed object was an STL file used to do the calculations. The spool holder was printed directly from OpenSCAD's CSG representation.

Printing directly from CSG is much more robust than using the flakey (literally) STL file format. A CSG file can be wrong - we can all make mistakes - but, unlike STL, it always represents an unambiguous solid.

It should also be faster. I'll do some timings and post them later. Finally, it should allow us easily to do fancy things like filling solids with scalar and vector fields representing build parameters, so you can have an object that is flexible (and/or green) at one end and rigid (and/or blue) at the other.

I built a simple CSG modeller into the RepRap Java Host Software. I added a parser that directly reads the CSG generated by OpenSCAD into it. (The software still uses the STL too, but just as a bunch of triangles for display on the screen; STL takes no part in the build process.) At the moment the supported OpenSCAD primitives are cubes, cylinders (including frustums and cones), and spheres. I will add extruded polygons, extruded imported DXFs, polyhedra, and imported STL files later (in that order, which is also the order of difficulty of doing them...). Note that the final one of those will implicitly (there's a mathematical joke there somewhere) allow any STL file to be converted to CSG.

Just like the CSG processor at the heart of OpenSCAD, the software is essentially a re-implementation of my old friend John Woodwark's DORA CSG modeller (Divided Object Ray-tracing Algorithm) from the early 1980s (see here).

For instructions on how to use all this, follow this link...

Stop Press:

Marius has just upgraded OpenSCAD to make things even easier. The OpenSCAD Github master now has:

$ openscad examples/example001.scad -o out.csg

..or Design->Export as CSG

RepRap Meeting in Bath

2011-10-14T10:47:00.001+01:00

If you're in the Bath/Bristol area of the UK at the start of November and would like to see RepRap and hear a talk on it, why not come along to this:

http://digitalmanufacturinglab.com/index.php/get-involved/upcoming-events

It's free :-)

3D Systems Print Quality Mixup

2011-10-06T21:15:00.001+01:00

Above is an enlarged image from 3D Systems Botmill Branches Flickr account. Do you notice anything strange about the build quality of that part? It was NOT printed using the wades extruder above it. This was a fun catch by Prusajr while visiting the United States for Maker Faire and the Open Hardware Conference.

3D Systems makes some wonderful machines, the printed part on this RepRap did not come off a extruder based 3d printer.

I thought maybe someone not related to 3D Systems had just set it there, but when I went back and looked though their official website, there it was on their Flicker Page.

Note: I contacted Cathie Lewis, the VP of Marketing for 3DS and she said confirmed that part did come off one of their Personal 3d Printer and was an unintentional mix up by one of their employees that was corrected by the 2nd day of the Maker Faire. I only posted this so that any of the people at the Maker Faire who saw the part would not be confused. We are not quite there on the print quality, but we are getting closer every day. :)

Still Extruding: Catching up

2011-10-05T20:25:00.002+01:00

Many apologies to the people that find the series helpful, I had a family emergency, and a a work change that threw my tutorial stuff out of wack. I have about 10-12 video to upload, so as not to overload folks I will be uploading them 2 at a time here. Please if you find issues in the video comment in the video, but if you have questions go to the RepRap IRC.

While doing tech support I find a lot of peopel are intimidated by the idea of altering firmware. That's understandable, when I started I REFUSED to change it for fear of destroying something. The 3 big firmwares for RepRap right now Sprinter, Marlin, and SJFW all use basically the same configuration.h file based off Sprinter. I hope this makes firmware alteration a little less scary.

Powering a RepRap from an ATX is really not that hard, but for a lot of folks it can be quite confusing. I should have edited this video down, but I find that a lot of times it's the little things that seem to throw people off on this one. The Yellow wires are the 12+ line and for the most part the only one we use. If your going to power something like a HBP you need to power it off 2 legs at once, the easiest way to get 2 legs is to find the square 4 pin plug with 2 yellow and 2 Black, each of those yellow should be on separate legs and make it (hopefully) strong enough to survive a Heated Build Plate. Strip both yellow and black wires, twist them about themselves and attach them to the 11 amp connector on your electronics. Everything but the HBP can be ran off 1 leg, best way to find 1 leg is just grab the 4 pin Molex connector and connect to the 1 yellow (12 volt) and the 1 black (ground).

Again if there is an issue with the video, comment on the video so I know I need to reshoot it, but if it's a technical question, go to the RepRap IRC for our free 24/7 Tech Support/Bazaar/Robot Support Group.

Hear Adrian Bowyer on BBC Radio

2011-10-01T12:49:00.002+01:00

Adrian is interviewed by Shaun Ley about RepRap on Sunday 2 October on the BBC Radio 4 news programme The World This Weekend. The interview will be transmitted sometime between 13:00 and 13:30 UK time. You can listen on air or on line. The programme link is here:

The World This Weekend

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

2011-09-09T18:51:00.004+01:00

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.

Michael S. Hart, e-book inventor and Project Gutenberg founder, dies at 64

2011-09-08T15:27:00.001+01:00

Michael was also a long-term core team member and supporter at Reprap.

He will be missed.

Being in a 3D world, with a 3D printer? what do I need? A 3D scanner!

2011-09-08T09:51:00.001+01:00

It turns out that I've well and truly been beaten to the punch when it comes to reprapping 3D scanners and such, so this post isn't about hardware, but more the software / workflow I've been playing with. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here, none of the tools are mine, I'm just trying to build a workflow for a 3D "photocopier"! one_object->scan->[stuff]->print->two_objects = awesome!

In my case this is:

SpinScan - laser scanner hardware and point cloud generation
- by tbuser, awesome
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:9972

On my mac, I installed the following to make this work ( it's Processing based, so should work anywhere very similarly ) :
Processing 1.5.1 http://processing.org/download/
OpenCV Framwork http://ubaa.net/shared/processing/opencv/download/opencv-framework.1.1.dmg

and then downloaded these extra libraries:
OpenCV Processing library: http://ubaa.net/shared/processing/opencv/
ControlP5 library: http://www.sojamo.de/libraries/controlP5/

( unzip the libraries, and copy the zip contents as-is to /Applications/Processing.app/Contents/Resources/Java/modes/java/libraries/ )

I then opened the spinscan.pde from GIT ( github.com/tbuser/spinscan ) with the Processing.app, and it loads, and runs ( press play etc ).
Once it's setup and working right , the SpinScan software generates a .ply file.
for more, read here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLY_%28file_format%29

meshlab for point cloud -> stl / triangulation , ( by many many people smarter than me) :
( use the latest meshlab ) .

once you have a .ply file, convert it to .stl with meshlab using these hints...
or here's one possible method:

summary:
subsampling , normal reconstruction, surface reconstruction / triangulation, cleaning up and assessing.

1. open meshlab ( starts with an empty project )
2. File -> import mesh -> [browse to and locate the .ply file you generated in spinscan or similar ]
3. Open Layer view (7th icon from the left , looks like a pile of papers)
3. SUBSAMPLING: Filters > Sampling > Poisson-disk Sampling: Enter the Number of Samples as the resulting vertex number / number of points you want. Good to start with about the same number as your vertex to maintain resolution, or if you have a very large file, choose something like 10000 or so to reduce your point cloud to something easier to work with ) - you MUST tick the "Base Mesh Subsampling" tickbox or you'll get an error here.
4. COMPUTE NORMALS: Filters > Normals/Curvatures and Orientation > compute Normals for Point Sets [set neighbours = 10 or 20]

5. TRIANGULATION : ( try any of these, and see which works best for you ) :

a. Filters > Point set -> Surface Reconstruction: Poisson, set octree to 11 (ish) [you should now see a new layer in the Layer Dialog to the right] but really strange border! ( increase this to 12 or 13 if you loose too much resolution on your object at 11. )
b. Filters > Point set -> Marching cubes RIMLS. Set Grid resolution to 1000 for a detailed mesh, or approx 200 for less details.
c. Filters -> "Remeshing , Simplification and reconstruction" -> Alpha Complex / Shape ( might work, not sure )

6. Fill holes by Filters -> "Remeshing , Simplification and reconstruction" -> Close Holes , picks out number automatically

7. SAVE MESH !
save often as program crashes a lot!

here's a way that someone else did it:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Using-Meshlab-to-Clean-and-Assemble-Laser-Scan-Dat/

Still Extruding: RepRap Price Points

2011-08-24T04:38:00.001+01:00

In this video I covered what a very basic RepRap would look like (The Pink one), a "normal" RepRap would look like (Black one), and what a full out obsessive build would look like (The White MakerGear Prusa).

Thanks to the constant work of developers like yourself throughout the community, the base price point, and what it takes to make a truly beautiful machine continues to drop. But just because the lowest bar has dropped does not mean that all RepRap are created equal.

$350ish Very Basic Prusa Mendel

A very basic machine means you will be getting the plastic parts from someone who already has a machine. If you’re getting it free that very likely means you know this person, or are willing to trade for it with a local person who has a 3d printer or a Hackerspace. Also you’re going to use lots of used parts. You can get used linear rod and steppers off the internet or at your local electronics recycler (think Goodwill in the US) or Ebay. The electronics I suggest Sanguinololu and Stepstick drivers off Ebay. No Heated Build Plate. Raw threaded Rod, hand polished smooth bar from the hardware store, a used ATX from your old computer (you only need 60W). As you can see at this point you are talking about a LOT of foot work, but it's been done.

This machine can print PLA 80% as well as the next step up, but because you don't have a heated build plate very large PLA prints, and even medium sized ABS prints are going to be very challenging. Your likely going to have a harder time trouble shooting because almost all your parts second hand or hand made. But a changing 3d printer is better than no 3d printer at all!

$550ish realistically Cheap Prusa Mendel

$550 is about average for a self sourced Prusa at this point. This has you buying your motors new from one of the venders suggested in the wiki or IRC, your hot end from someone who has a good reputation, a Heated Build plate (If you don't have Milled Aluminum & Power resistors sitting around, get a PCB heater), and all Zinc/Black oxide Hardware. and a new power supply (switching or ATX)

This machine is basically the one that most RepRap classes build and the most common RepRap in the world. It can print ABS and PLA across it's full build area, and is a solid machine.

$850ish Full out RepRap

At $850 this is when you have decided to make a VERY nice machine. There are really 2 options here, self source or Kit.

The two $850ish kits that I can suggest are Mendel Parts.com and MakerGear.com. I have bought products several times from Camiel at Mendel Parts and he is a really good guy, and man does he know how to shoot a nice video of his RepRap farm. On the other side you have Makergear, who I have bought every hot end I own from, and is a personal friend of mine. I can only speak to the quality of MakerGear's kit, because it's the only RepRap kit I have ever put together, and it is wonderful.

The other way is to self source. At $850 you can afford to get really nice motors like the ones sold by MenelParts and Ultimachine with the connectors already on, nice stainless hardware, plastic parts for your favorite flavor of Prusa, like a Felt, lm8uu, brass, or self centering brass, a geared stepper extruder, heated build plate.

This machine will print equivalently to the $550ish RepRap, but sourcing is easier, and if you get the kit from a vender, they do owe you some tech support.

The best way to get guidance on what kits to buy, or where to get supplies is in the RepRap IRC

Still Extruding: Installing Pronterface and SFact in Windows

2011-08-20T18:34:00.001+01:00

With all the repeat tech support issues we run into in the #reprap IRC I have decided to start a biweekly webcast covering the most common questions asked in there. I should be publishing twice a week Mondays and Thursdays. If you have any requests for a video please just comment on the video, if you have further questions please post it in the #reprap IRC that way you get instant feedback.

Does the community have an issue if I post these videos here on RepRap blog or should I move it to my Hackerspace's blog? I would rather post it here because the issues covered will always be 100% RepRap related.

Monday will be the difference between a $350 RepRap (about as cheap as you can put one together), and a $850ish RepRap, which would be with all the latest bells and whistles.

Around the RepRap Community 08/06/2011

2011-08-07T01:40:00.005+01:00

RepRap Cousins in Zero G!

Made in Space, a space startup founded to leverage 3d printing as a manufacturing tool in space, has operated 2 RepRap Cousin Projects in Zero G. They took what looks like a Makerbot Cupcake with what looks to be a stock DC gearmotor extruder in this image, a Makerbot Thing o Matic, and a Bits from Bytes 3000 on a ride doing Parabolic dives in a Zero G airplane. Can't wait to see the results, but I wish they had added a RepRap kit like Makergear Prusa, Emaker Huxley, or MendelParts Orca instead of 2 Makerbots and a closed source 3D Systems printer, but who cares, FDM in Zero G is awesome.

Sfact by Action68

Sfact might look like Skein forge, but it's a long way from it. What Action68 has done is cut down skein forge to just the pluggins that are still in use, and normalized all the defaults so that 90%+ of people will find that once you have set 5-6 parameters within skein forge you should be getting good prints. This is huge for Reprap because one of the biggest challenges is getting over the monstrous Skein forge learning curve. I really hope Enrique rolls some of these changes back into the master of skein forge. Instructions can be found at the RepRap wiki, and tech support can be found in the RepRap IRC.

Pronterface, UPGRADE!

Pronterface, Kliment's Host program for RepRap, is evolving like no program I have ever seen. The comment log will show you why you really need to download the program at least once a week. The Additions since the last post are just entirely to long to add in this post (go check out the commit log), but just a brief overview

-Executable versions of both Pronterface and Sfact can now be found here. No install needed and Sfact is preintegrated with Pronterface

-Garyhogdson has added a truly amazing quick setup menu for Sfact integrated into Pronterface, you can change all the most tweaked settings from 1 screen... Amazing

-Integrated Gcode editing

-SD card support

-Custom Gcode buttons addable in GUI

-LOTS more

Finally I can stop missing ReplicatorG, Pronterface to me is now MUCH easier than RepG because of the Gcode simulation view and Gary's quick Skeinforge settings.

Hostless (computerless) RepRap printing with RAMPS, SDRAMPS, SJFW, an LCD and keypad by ScribbleJ

ScribbleJ, a long time designer on Thingiverse has developed an awesome piece of firmware that allows a basic keypad and LCD to be attached to a RAMPS electronics with SDRAMPS. This gives you the ability to warm up, center, and execute a print all without ever having to turn on your laptop. This is hugely important for the long term development of RepRap, and part of the Gada Prize requirements, so when you win your $20,000 be sure to send ScribbleJ a case of beer. Instructions can be found at the RepRap wiki, and tech support can be found in the RepRap IRC.

Hall-O Hall Effect Sensor by Ruben-Ikmaak

For some people a limit switch that is only accurate to .1mm is just not going to be nearly accurate or cool enough. For those people RepRap has the Hall-O Hall Effect Sensor.

A Hall sensor is much more accurate than a mechanical, has no physical contact, and can act as a linear encoder within it's sensing range.

Ruben-Ikmaak and Kliment are selling it in the RepRap IRC

Mendel's Birthday

2011-07-20T11:24:00.002+01:00

This is Gregor Mendel's 185th birthday:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel

Surface-Oriented CAD, Math, & Telescopes

2011-07-16T16:25:00.004+01:00

One of the many projects eating away at my time has been an alternative approach to programatic CAD that I'm calling "surface-oriented CAD" (as apposed to CSG based CAD, like openscad). Loosely based of the code I had for generating models of mathematical objects, the sorts of things that surfcad makes easy to make are very different from in something like openscad. For example, this is easy:

You can read more at my original post. Some people may be most interested in the final section, in which I discuss my attempts to 3D print a telescope (designed with surfcad, of course) and the problems I'm running into.

Around the RepRap Community 07/15/2011

2011-07-16T02:40:00.006+01:00

Ramps 1.3

E0 & E1? Wait does that mean that RepRap now has Hardware side support for multiple extruders? Ohh no, what evil things could this community do with 2 independently controlled extruders? I am sure I will be posting about that in the next month. :) Ramps 1.3 by JohnnyR (His webstore is at Ultimachine.com) has many upgrades over the 1.2 version of Ramps.

-Independent power inputs for the cartesian bot (5A), and the heated build plate (11A). This allows you to plug both sides of the heated build plate into the electronics instead of having 1 line to the D8 and the other to the PS.

-Dual Extruder support, need I say more?

-Unfortunately this is the 1st Ramps that is not made to be etched, but with that loss you get a much easier to work with board. The spacing on plugging in stepper motors on Ramps 1.2 was VERY tight, on 1.3 it's not so tight, not dead easy like a Sanguinololu, but much better, especially considering there is a lot more on the board.

-Marked Servo ports. Ramps does not kill your access all those extra ports on an Arduino, but Ramps 1.3 is the 1st to mark those on the shield to remind you that Ramps really needs 5-6 servos and 2-3 accessories added. Maybe a sd card reader?

Greg's Hinged AccessableWades

The Wades Extruder has been the gold standard of strength and efficiency in the RepRap community for over a year now. I would say 80%+ of all the RepRap in the world run it, mostly because it works GREAT, doesn't slip unless you did a poor job on the hobbed bolt, and is quick to print.

Greg Frost has took this design and brought it into 2011 with a complete ground up redesign. It takes a lot of tricks that we have figured out over the last year and applies it to the Wades.

- You can very securely hold a stepper motor by 3 screws instead of 4, less printed mass, easier to print.

-1 spring on a lever is plenty to tension the extruder, less materials needed

-If your bolt is hobbed correctly there is no need to support the top of the plastic being fed, so it gives you easy access to the pinch point

-It just looks cool

Support Material Manual

RepRap wiki dev Madscifi has done an amazing guide on how to use clay as a support material. The write is up top notch, lots of photos and step by step instructions. I love the original use of skeinforge's new perimeter function!

SD Card Reader for RAMPS and Sanguinololu

Kliment, of Pronterface, Sprinter, & Prusa Mendel fame, has done something really awesome. He has designed and is selling a fully functioning SD card reader for the 2 most popular electronics in RepRap, RAMPS, and Sanguinololu. Many people in the RepRap IRC are using it and I have not heard a single complaint yet.

Printing from SD gives you

-Ability to print independent of your computer (You use a computer that has never been used for 3d printing before, download pronterface and kick start your printer, this can be a life saver)

-Much less pause do to communication, this is not nearly the issue it once was, but people have found that their build quality is even better using SD than with Sprinter alone.

If you want one just message Kliment in the RepRap IRC, or order it though Ultimachine.

StepStick, In The Wild!

Anyone who has been in the community for a while remembers the great stepper driver drought of early 2011. I am not kidding, RepRap production all but shut down for a few months because demand for the Pololu 4988-4983 completely outstripped Pololu's ability to produce them. In responce to this Joem, the guy that designed the Sanguinololu also made an open source alternative to the 4988. I have mentioned them before, but the reason I bring it up again is they are now available on ebay for $14, $1 more than the Pololu with free shipping (from China). Considering their shipping is free and Pololu is $5 minimum, that would mean that it's actually $1 cheaper to get the stepper off ebay than Pololu for a simple 4 axis RepRap. Win for open source!

There may be life in the Darwin after all...

2011-07-05T20:37:00.001+01:00

Let's see. We have a $19.95 six wire NEMA 23 rated at 0.5 amp/phase wired in series and driven by a low capacity Allegro driver chip with a max rating of 0.75 amps. The whole thing is driven with a $19.95 24 volt power supply.

What you get is 65 mm/sec transition speed on the y-axis with a stepper motor and driver that wouldn't melt the ice in your whiskey. No heat sinks or fans required. The Allegro chip is cool to the touch.

Go figure.

Do you want to read more?

A new approach to printing metals

2011-06-24T11:51:00.031+01:00

There have been numerous attempts to print conductors. Fab@home, Ed Sells and myself have all tried it previously with very limited success. Whilst I've been able to print a basic circuit from solder, we were unable to achieve the resolution to produce anything but the most simplistic circuit board. Forrest Higgs and others have tried to identify a useful non-metallic conductive material but conductivity has always been fairly poor. Months ago I blogged about using Nickel Carbonyl powder for exactly this purpose. What I didn't blog about was an experiment I did mixing the nickel with a low melting point alloy. When molten resulting semi-solid material had significant viscosity and effects of surface tension seemed minimal. Just by stirring the mixture with spoon it was obvious to Adrian and myself that there was so much control that this like a suitable material to print conductors with.

I did actually make filament using this composite material using the old technique of casting into silicone tubing. I was betting on the mixture not separating due to the ridiculously small particle size of the nickel carbonyl (about 2 microns). Alas I was wrong, the mixture separated and the powder blocked the nozzle but the fundamental concept of using a semisolid to gain more control over the extrudate seemed like a good one. Logically this is perfectly sound, it could potentially alloy us to deposit material on top of this semi-solid material without it going completely fluid and losing its shape.

Fortunately non-eutectic alloys also offer this ability to have solid elements suspended within a molten liquid. Further they have the benefit that as the temperature increases the entire alloy completely melts thus we can further control the viscosity with temperature as well as the alloy composition.

After some thought I proposed that our ideal material would have a similar melting point to PLA/ABS such that when deposited on top a minimal amount of damage. I thought at the time (and this later proved to be wrong) that the alloy should be as viscous as I could achieve at the initial point the alloy melts; Then the material would have a gradual transition as the temperature is increased. I did have a hunt around but I was unable to find a material that I thought sufficiently these attributes. But we are now a community of at least 4000 machines, so I don't think its too impractical for us to do what any of the big commercial additive manufacturing companies would do and have our own alloy.

I decided to go for an alloy of tin, indium and bismuth few a few reasons. Firstly tin is comparatively cheap, so I was hoping to get the properties we need with very little amounts of indium and bismuth. Secondly indium tends to lower the surface tension of molten alloys,thirdly and most importantly there is a lot of data on the melting point of alloys containing these elements so it'd be fairly easy to tune it to be comparable that of PLA/ABS. This would let us to print onto the plastic whilst causing minimal damage.

Above is the phase diagram for the system. My first alloy was 69.9% tin 29.2% bismuth and 0.9% indium (wt. %). Per kilogram the cost of the material was about £90 and I converted it to filament using the same casting trick. However this was a one off order so I anticipate it being substantially cheaper in quantity. The phase diagram predicted that this alloy should be about 80% solid when it begins to melt at about 130 deg C, and be fully molten by just under 200 deg.

The above was printed directly onto glass. I decided at the start of all this that if we are to produce useful circuits,we need to have sufficient control to build the track free form directly on top of PLA. Previously we needed channels to get any sort of the consistent track so this was already a big step forward. The rounding at the corner is due to the layer height being slightly off, which seems particularly critical when compared to plastics.

After the initial success, this is where the onslaught of problems began. Something I did not anticipate was that the alloy began to dissolve the brass nozzle due to solubility effects after very little use. In practice this meant that my extrusion parameters were constantly varying until the nozzle completely disappeared (this happened within about 15 meters of 3mm filament) . I also attempted an aluminium nozzle with the same result.

At this point we were a bit stumped. Adrian suggested trying to make an all PTFE extruder (at least as far as the alloy was concerned). After several iterations the best solution was machining a PTFE liner with a built in nozzle. This was then surrounded by the usual brass heater etc like our hybrid extruders. Whilst I accepted this was not a long term solution, I thought that if we could get it to work in steady state conditions we could learn more about the process.

As it turns out with extended use the alloy was so viscous the alloy physically ripped the PTFE liner that serves perfectly well in our plastic extruders. Further it was apparent a black oxide was forming at the entrance to the nozzle. After a few hours use this ended up in a complete extruder failure.

After this failure it was fairly apparent that my initial alloy was far too aggressive. I therefore scaled it back to something that would operate at lower temperature (reducing oxidation times) whilst also having a lower viscosity to put less stress on the PTFE liner.

I guessed that a 50% liquid/solid ratio when the alloy begins to melt would be sufficient, and this turned out to be a composition of 57.5%Sn, 41.3%Bi, 1.2% In, again beginning to melt at 130deg but finishing by about 170. This proved much more reliable and with much less oxidation. It allowed me to produce the results below printed directly onto glass (it was flat before I peeled it off). The second image is particularly interesting as its three layers of track on top of one another, which would be required for tracks connected in parallel. I've also gotten similar results printing directly onto a PLA substrate, in this case it stuck fairly well but could be removed with a bit of force.

Whilst I've achieved fairly decent results with this setup, the transient performance was unsurprisingly poor given the insulating nature of the PTFE and the large melt zone I needed to get it to work. I therefore went back to solving the underlying problem of the alloy dissolving the nozzle. I've had ago at anodising an aluminium nozzle which is fairly easy, it just requires about 200 Vdc and the appropriate electrolyte. At the moment the nozzle design is still varying a bit, but I've taken pictures under a microscope both after anodising (first pic) and after extruding about 10m of 2mm filament. As far as I can tell there hasn't been any substantial wear.

After about 10 different extruder iterations (most I haven't mentioned here) It appears that the dissolving issue has therefore been solved. I haven't quite finished calibrating this extruder, but the latest results are below. Naturally its our logo, the track size is about 0.7mm in diameter. Given this was fairly successful I also tried doing it with infill, unfortunately it overheated as the filament didn't have chance to cool but I still think its quite successful. I need to try repeating this with cooling from a fan. I would have continued this build further but I can only make lengths of filament about 30cm long and changing them mid print is quite tricky,

Reprap at the NextGen Science Fair 2011 in San Francisco

2011-06-21T17:07:00.000+01:00

After many misgivings about the direction of the event {it was the Cable TV channel TasteTV's first such event}, the NextGen Science Fair 2011 came off very well. The number of exhibitors was quite small, and the entry fee was substantial at $25. I expected a few hundred people at most. In fact, I think we got many times that. We had a thick crowd around the Reprap table virtually all day long.

I brought my Rapman and my nearly complete Sampo and Brook Drumm, who set up the RepRap/MakerBot Builders in Northern California, showed up with his Makerbot Cupcake and his nearly complete Mendel. He's used his cupcake to make Mendel parts sets for everybody in his group since January of this year. Brook has become an accomplished Reprapper in a very short amount of time..

Here you can see Brook Drumm {left} of the RepRap/MakerBot Builders in Northern California talking about his Průša Mendel.

You can see from left to right, a Makerbot Cupcake {to the left of Brook}, a Průša Mendel just below his hands, the nascent Sampo printer and a Rapman 3.0 at the far right.

Brook and his daughter/assistant Sydney with their Makerbot Cupcake in printing Mendel parts.

Brook Drumm's Průša Mendel made from parts printed by a his Makerbot Cupcake.

A Darwin-derivative Rapman 3.0 monitored by Adriaan Higgs printing a y-axis drive belt gripper for the next generation Darwin-derivative Sampo printer just to the right.

Adriaan demonstrating the technology differences between the Rapman and the Sampo Darwin-derivative printers.

Showing the familiar Reprap banner at NextGen Science Fair 2011.

A "string wars" approach to the y-axis

2011-06-15T05:43:00.002+01:00

In which your narrator applies a cabling approach to controlling the y-axis of the Darwin-derivative Sampo printer.

Do you want to read more?

Getting Rid of Mendel's Nuts

2011-06-12T11:10:00.004+01:00

I’ve been working on something for a bit, and the results are starting to surface. I made a rash promise in the #reprap IRC on freenode.net to put up a teaser on Sunday, so here it is. It’s a RepRap variant with no fasteners in the frame, using sockets to accept the (in my case) 9.4mm aluminium tubing struts. You can assemble it with my favourite tool - the mallet! So far the only screws are those needed to hold the motors, belts and extruder guts in place (though as the extruder isn’t built yet so that ain’t saying much). Holes are provided for adding glue to the structure, and for the particularly fastidious they can be drilled and tapped as well. I’ve even made the glue cavity the shape of an M3 nut so you can in theory make strategic joints releasable to aid portability if you really do like your nuts..

Um, ignore the basket of fresh clothes. Suz thinks the workshop is some kind of laundry. Even keeps the washing machine there.

The shedding of M8 rod has other advantages besides removing the need for many fasteners and making the whole thing lighter. A good one is that the frame struts can now be smooth enough to run the axis skids on - running a skid on M8 thread is a teensy bit like sliding down a grater. This removes the need for some lengths, lightening the structure still more. Make it from hunting arrow tubing and you’d be going featherweight. Use bamboo and go eco. Many options.

The design of the new Z axis hinges on the use of a Sarrus Linkage, ahha, ahha. I’m hoping something cunning can be achieved with a DC servo and string, but until then a NEMA17 and a piece of M3 threaded rod will do. No there is not a lot of Z travel in my quick bodge (unless you count the slack when it wobbles up and down at present), but there is enough to get on with. The Sarrus is actually a great fit mechanically for the Mendel-style frame, because the Sarrus gets narrower as it gets taller - just like the Mendel’s triangular profile.

The X axis is right at the top, and a one-piece extruder/carriage slides back and forth across the top two runners. I’m still coding the brackets and idler for that. Yes, coding. The whole thing is parametric. The Y axis is more firmly in reality. This is a cunning sled that pulls itself together with a couple of rubber bands. This causes the sloping faces of the runners to move up the side of the rod as they travel, until they hit the top. This kills wobble automagically and is remarkably tolerant of mis-aligned Y bars. It’ll even work upside-down! The proper Y motor bracket is still being designed, so for mechanical testing I used fancy stuff called string...

The vertexes are going to change a bit from the picture. They’ll have to be a bit wider to accommodate the X carriage, higher so the Z axis does not scrape it’s butt on the ground, and braced for extra stability. None of it needs support for printing.

That’s enough for now. I’ll get back to it. More news & photos as I sort releasable stuff out. Just remember that I’m going to be releasing this as soon as it is vaguely usable, and as yet it isn’t!

Around the RepRap Community

2011-06-12T02:02:00.002+01:00

So much has happened in the RepRap community since my last update. Hackerspaces and building RepRap can really suck the time out of you. Because there is so many awesome things going on in the community that are not documented in the RepRap wiki, this post is going to include lots of non wiki related material.

Makergear Mosaic

Anyone who knows me knows I have a soft spot for RP parts 3d printers, but the Mosaic is something special. This is the 1st RepStrap kit avialable with linear motion rails on the X and Y axis and a multistart teflon coated ACME leadscrew with 2 linear rods on the Z. It only takes a cursory glance to tell the design is inspired by the Up! by PP3DP but with all the things to not like about an Up! fixed:

UP! closed source / Mosaic will be open source after 1st shipment
Up! $2900 plus $150+ Shipping / Mosaic $999 + less than $50 shipping
Up! Proprietary Electronics / Mosaic Ramps Electronics (No electrical part costs more than $30 to replace)

As you can tell, I am a bit stoked on the Mosaic, can't wait to see more pictures of the stuff that comes off the machine.

Pronterface

Kliment, another one of our devs who seems to not sleep has released a really nice new printer interface for RepRap. This interface is designed from the start to work with SD card on both Ramps and Sanguinololu. The great thing is it defaults to 115200 connection speed so your not having to change the connection speed every time you turn on your machine.

Sprinter Firmware

Sprinter is a new generation of firmware for reprap. This is the 1st firmware that has native support for SD card, and extreme acceleration. This firmware can run a printer at up to 300mm/s, which really changes the quality of a print. Sprinter has been tested and works on Gen6, Ramps, and Sanguinololu.

Mendelparts Orca

Mendel Parts is transitioning over to the Orca from their Sells Mendel design. Orca is Mendelpart's 1st inhouse designed RepRap, and maintains the 200x200 traditional build area for a RepRap. At $816 it's a really good deal on a kit.

EMaker Huxley

I love cheap, I love RP parts, and I am fascinated by the bowden extruder with 1.75 filament. So here is something special. This is a $475 full kit for a RepRap with 140x140x110mm build area, SD card support, and everything included for less that $500

Less than $500 for a full RepRap, That's right folks it took less than 1 year (Oct 2010 to now) for the cheapest RepRap kit to go from $1000 to sub $500. No one knows how long term this price is considering it's from a reputable dealer though a kickstarter style offering, but he got the money for the project and he is saying around August is the delivery time.

Huza for a $500 RepRap kit!

Assembled MakerBot

For as long as I have been around this community I have seen people wanting a preassembled RepRap/RepStrap. Well at long last it is here. Makerbot is now offering to preassemble their $1300 Makerbot kit for an additional $1200 fee.

No news yet on how they are going to handle people who don't know how to fix their machines, but this should make for fun times in the Makerbot and RepRap IRC when people don't know how to take apart their hot end to clean out a jam.

I know I missed a lot of stuff in the post, the RepRap devs have been busy these past few months, I will attempt to get back to posting on a regular schedule again.. Thank you all for your work and have fun!

Founder's Forum

2011-06-11T11:53:00.002+01:00

My daughter, Sally, and I took one of our RepRaps to The Founder's Forum 2011, where I also gave a talk. The event is organized by Brent Hoberman, and so many thanks to him for the invitation. I wouldn't normally name drop, but you can get some idea of the event by the celeb end of the guest list (Stephen Fry, The Duke of York, Davina McCall...) and that fact that there literally were more helicopters parked outside than Ferraris.

We shuffled our Ford Fiesta (complete with bat droppings on the bonnet from the roost in our garage) between a couple of Tesla Roadsters, lugged the RepRap machine to centre stage, and set it running.

Given the above, you won't be surprised that there were some top-end journos present too, so we got some good publicity out of the whole thing. Follow the links:

Rory Cellan-Jones and Robert Peston of the BBC (Of RepRap, Peston tweeted, "Real life better than Dr Who."), and

Ben Rooney of the Wall Street Journal.

Prusa Felt branch and ThingDOC

2011-06-08T15:44:00.003+01:00

So, if you are wondering whats new in Prusa printer development, I'll answer some of your questions today. And maybe even bust some myths ;-) First I want to show you results!

(Darker blue is print from Dimmension uPrint, Lighter blue is print from Prusa with felt bushings)

For more pictures and info follow the link on the end of this post.

New bushing look

In the same printed object you can use:
- felt (100 bushings for $5 if you use best felt)
- brass tube (80 bushings for $9)
- pla bushings (one prints in about 30seconds :-D)
- igus bushings (as Shapercube use, it's pretty expensive because of matching rods)
- sku bushings (steel with teflon inside, expensive because of rods $50 per full set incl. rods)

All of this stuff remains snap in! So you can remove your carriage without disassembling half of printer.

During the big demand I will incorporate the possibility to use linear bearings too, but it will be few days after this release. And it's not going to be the main stuff. Simply because it's not better and sourcing is harder and pricier.

ETA to merging it to master branch is about two weeks. Catching last bugs out. And also, from this point, every commit will have its own ThingDOC documentation, which is under huge development during moving documentation to the files!

ThingDOC is now Ready for its prime time!

For more informations, images and links, visit original post.

Jo Prusa

Unreasonable Rocket's 3d Printed Rocket Engine Takes Flight!

2011-06-05T18:52:00.002+01:00

My two passions are Rocketry and 3d Printing. Paul Breed has combined the 2 in his test flight of a 3d printed stainless steel rocket engine.

To my knowledge this is the 1st successfully flown liquid fueled 3d printed rocket engine.

Paul Breed has a wonderful blog over at http://unreasonablerocket.blogspot.com/, you should really check it out, a lot of his issues with his 3d printed Rocket engine dovetail with issues we will run into as we use our parts for higher temp/pressure applications.

The end of the String Wars

2011-06-01T04:40:00.000+01:00

It appears that the cabling approach to z-axis positioning that Ed Sells tried and abandoned on ARNIE, the precursor to Darwin, in 2006 can be made to work. Ed was trying to move the cable with something like a friction wheel, if I recall correctly and couldn't get sufficient friction between the wheel and the cable for reliable movement. I solved that by using a lead screw and thrust collar attached to the turnbuckle in the cabling loop.

Hopefully the use of a single lead screw will go some ways towards curing the slight periodic unevenness in print layering caused by wobbling in the four leadscrews used in the Darwin and Darwin-derivative Rapman printers. Kaizen is a very powerful approach to technological advancement.

Stepping into firmware

2011-05-29T19:58:00.000+01:00

In which your narrator begins to build the PIC32 firmware for the Darwin/Rapman-derivative Sampo 3D printer.

Do you want to read more?

Moving RepRap from Subversion to Git

2011-05-29T17:39:00.000+01:00

Kliment, Nils and Sam have got a daily copying from the RepRap
Subversion repository to Git at https://github.com/reprap running.
This is a temporary arrangement to make the migration of RepRap from
Subversion to Git easy for people - they can still use Subversion, or
switch, and both repositories will be (roughly) synchronised. For the
moment Git is the read-only slave, and Subversion is still the master
where updates get logged.

This will continue until Wednesday the 6th of July. On that date we
will freeze the RepRap Subversion repository and the RepRap Git
repository will become the master distribution. That will then be
directly updated (and, doubtless, expanded). The frozen Subversion
repository will be maintained for the foreseeable future for
reference.

Now would be a good time to update RepRap Wiki pages (and others) that
point to parts of Subversion to make them point to the equivalent
parts of Git...

Selectively making parts of object stronger

2011-05-25T00:59:00.002+01:00

I've published small hack how to make some parts of object stronger then the rest :-)

Selectively making parts of object stronger on RepRap with Skeinforge

Enjoy

- Jo Prusa

Winding up the String Wars

2011-05-24T19:45:00.000+01:00

In which your narrator completes the cable positioning system for the z-axis.

Do you want to read more?

Balitmore RepRap Master Class

2011-05-22T00:12:00.003+01:00

If you’re thinking of getting into 3D printing and don’t know where to start, then we have just the ticket for you. FabLab@Baltimore is holding a RepRap Master Class. The format is simple. For a fee of $850, participants will be provided with all of the hardware and software, along with expert guidance, over the course of the weekend, to build and commission their RepRap 3D printer. There are other ways to get a one of these machines functioning, but these involve substituting cost with lots of time spent researching, sourcing and learning to get the best out of a RepRap 3D printing machine.

The Master class will be at the CCBC Campus, with the long time RepRap developers Jmil (Jordan Miller), Telsa893 (Steve Kelly), and digiFab (Andy Ta) among others.

For more information and to sign up, go to the DigifabIndustries Website, or email Andy Ta We look forward to seeing you there this June.

Refighting the String Wars

2011-05-16T05:51:00.000+01:00

In which your narrator applies the cabling approach to raising and lowering the print table of his redesigned Darwin pioneered by eD at Bath University in the ARNIE Reprap printer in 2006.

Do you want to read more?

Never Mind the Width, Feel the Quality

2011-05-10T22:14:00.003+01:00

The new universal extruder together with the Java Host Software and my Mendels are now producing whole trays of really high quality parts day in day out in the Bowyer RepRap Playroom, so I thought it was time to do another release.

The picture is as the parts come straight off the machine with no subsequent fettling at all.

Solid prints

2011-05-10T02:53:00.001+01:00

In which your narrator attempt to print a large, complicated part in solid ABS without support or warping.

Do you want to read more?

Thermal goodness

2011-05-08T20:43:00.002+01:00

I managed to get some thermal images of my Prusa printing Buddha. I put them on my web and commented them. http://josefprusa.cz/thermal-goodness

3D/DC

2011-05-02T20:24:00.010+01:00

I had a great time down at the 3D DC event last week. It was organized by Michael Weinberg of Public Knowledge; the purpose was to educate the US government about 3d printing and personal fabrication, in an effort to try and avoid repeating the legal mess that has embroiled the music and video industries. Lots of interesting folks there, some superstar hackers, and even free beer at the end! I put up a few photos here:

http://gallery.me.com/wbortz/100179

and what follows is a more detailed account of how it went down. Enjoy!

Wade

I was a bit concerned when I first met Andy.

He had mentioned via email that his RepRap could use a little tuning up before the 3D DC event, so we arranged to have a little meet up in the garage of my dad's old college room mate Dick, at whose house I was staying in while in DC.

Andy, a young guy who works at the Baltimore FabLab, turned up with a box (a very nice box with a huge RepRap logo engraved on the front) of assorted electronics and RepRap parts, and a three day old Prusa Mendel with no electronics, X carriage, or build surface, in a state that looked to me like it would take several days of work to get it anywhere near it's first print. The event was the next morning, so we got to work, assembling testing, tweaking, hacksawing, and wiring.

For someone like me, used to the original Mendel (and Darwin before that), it went together surprisingly quickly. We were doing test prints by 11 pm, when I had to beg off and get some sleep, being quite jetlagged. Figuring that we were close enough at that point, and besides, we had my Mendel ready to go – the Prusa was really a backup, a 'nice to have' extra, so we (well, I did at least) figured sleep was more important than a perfectly running pair of RepRaps.

Arriving at the Capitol the next morning our large, wooden, wheeled crates raised a lot of eyebrows from security and congressmen/women alike. As we set up in the foyer of the Rayburn House, directly South of the Capitol building, we immediately hit a few snags – Andy's computer's screen went dark. It would only flash briefly at boot, but then stay completely dark, despite much swearing, prodding and pounding. Bad timing, but no problem; we still had my Mendel.

Unfortunately, despite almost year of reliable service, my extruder (a Wade's Extruder of course, something I'm fairly proud of) chose that moment to jam up. Hmm. After a quick on-site disassembly and cleaning, and not so quick reassembly during which I had ample time to reflect on the poor design choices I made in the mounting arrangement of my extruder, I got it running again, only to have the extruder heater short out repeatedly at 70 deg C. Oops. Should have finished that resistor based extruder. At this point another exhibitor mentioned something about an unusually high gremlin population here at the Capitol...

By this time it was time for the panel meeting, so we adjourned upstairs to listen to a fairly interesting panel talk. The point of this entire event, organized by Michael Weinberg of Public Knowledge, was to try and expose the US government to 3d printing and personal fabrication. Existing copyright law and how it relates to things like the Internet and file sharing could be considered one giant legal mess; the Public Knowledge guys were trying to get a head start on how digital fabrication is going to be received by the American legal system, in the hope that some of the pitfalls that are looming may be avoided.

Lots of interesting points were brought up about IP, trademarking, lawsuits, copyright etc, but not much in the way of solutions just yet. It was entertaining to see Bre up there in his black t shirt among all the suit and tie folks. Everyone agreed that something should be done, but what exactly that something was, no one was quite sure. Except for Bre – he was quite sure what needed to be done – get more printers out there ASAP, and make more stuff. His enthusiasm was, as always, contagious, and really put a positive spin on the event. Good times! I snuck in a blurry cellphone photo of the panel members, but since I could see 6 expensive looking CCTV cameras looking at me, and a lot of large security guys looking around purposefully, I didn't think taking a proper photo was appropriate.

Back downstairs, Andy, after a few quick google searches, ruled out memory problems on his laptop, and figured out that the backlight had failed. We tried downloading his host software onto my laptop via my Canadian cell phone, in order to run his Prusa off my laptop, but AT&T didn't seem to like the 13 MB file and wouldn't give us more than a kb/s or two, unlike the 100's of kb I usually get back home, despite having signed up for a temporary US data account.

Thinking quickly, Andy used my flashlight to see small portions of his computer screen, just enough to get his host software running and started up a print – awesome! People starting filing in at this point for the hands-on demonstration, so Andy took the helm, showing off his 3 day old machine, proudly printing away, while I smiled, answered questions, and madly re-wired my extruder's hot end. Luckily, I got it running fairly quickly, and we had two RepRaps running smoothly to show off. We were both very happy campers, and had a chance to mingle with the rest of the attendees, and answered many questions. I passed out a few gears I customized with my email address in lieu of a business card, and everyone loved the set of Heart Gears I'd printed out from Thingiverse.

I was amazed at how many people understood immediately the concept of how RepRap prints itself, but then I realized this was a pretty smart crowd, and that I actually had a banner in front of me that spelled it out in big, easy to read letters: “RepRap – the 3D printer that prints itself”. Right. That really made things a lot easier, much less explaining to do on my part than last time. A few people even picked up the handouts, and a couple of them looked like they might actually read it. Quite a few people asked me why my partner kept shining a flashlight at his computer screen – they thought he was up to something funky like the guys doing free-form printing via a hacked Kinect at the next table over.

After much printing, looking at printers printing, and fondling cool printed objects, it was time to wrap things up and head out for free beer (really! free as in beer!) down at the Pour House, where I was able to spend a good bit of time talking with Michael Weinberg, along with a lot of other great folks. Michael, who put the whole event together, was extremely pleased with the event. Apparently, in addition to all the 3D printing folks that showed up, almost all of the people from the Patent and Trademark offices and other government types that he was gunning for had shown up as well, so he felt we had really accomplished something. If he was happy, I was happy, so all in all, it was a good event!

I also met all sorts of RepRap luminaries I'd only ever met on IRC before, including DrGone, Dr Mark Ganter, and the newly renamed DigitalWonderBoy (Andy!), as well as Jeff Moss, the founder of DefCon, the yearly hacker convention where everyone plays the game “Spot the Fed”. All in all, it was a very fun, successful event. Although, I must admit, after shlepping a full Mendel across several airports and a few public transit systems, I suddenly have a renewed interest in the Huxley.

A big thank you to Bath University for paying my way down to DC for the event, thanks to Dick and Helen Podolske for providing a roof over my head and a garage to tinker away in late into the night, and Adrian and the rest of the RepRap community for making this all possible. And thanks to Andy Ta for helping out – it was really fun, and I'm really glad you were there with your working RepRap!

UK RepRap Master Class

2011-04-27T23:36:00.002+01:00

If you’re thinking of getting into 3D printing and don’t know where to start, then we have just the ticket for you. eMAKERshop have teamed up with the Bath University RepRap research team to bring you our first UK RepRap Master Class over the weekend of 1/2/3 July 2011.

The format is simple. For a fee of £575, participants will be provided with all of the hardware and software, along with expert guidance, over the course of the weekend, to build and commission their RepRap 3D printer. There are other ways to get a one of these machines functioning, but these involve substituting cost with lots of time spent researching, sourcing and learning to get the best out of a RepRap 3D printing machine.

The Master class will be run in the RepRap project’s home town of Bath, UK, by some of the most experienced reprappers, including Dr Adrian Bowyer – the creator of the RepRap project, Josef Prusa – the originator of the Prusa Mendel design, and other prominent figures within the RepRap community.

For more information and to sign up, please click here. We look forward to seeing you there this July.

Sampo: The return of Darwin...

2011-04-27T15:33:00.000+01:00

In which your narrator decides to go retro and have another look at Darwin.

Do you want to read more?

New Extruder Design

2011-04-22T18:21:00.000+01:00

I have (finally) finished my 1.75mm filament extruder design for RepRap.

I say RepRap - in fact, by simply changing its adapter plate (called base_plate in the design), it should go on virtually any 3D printer. The standard design fits Mendel (both the standard one and Prusa). I will shortly do a plate for Huxley too.

It features:

Very compact high-torque NEMA 11 motor
Active ducted fan cooling for high reliability
Wade-style hobbed bolt filament transport
Wing-nut drive to spread the torque loading on the plastic gears
Push-fit hot-end parts - no thread cutting
Easily replaced PTFE liner for the hot end
A single M3-threaded rod cut to lengths makes all the fixings
Lightweight: 420g (about 60% the weight of this extruder)
Compact design (110 mm x 90 mm x 80 mm)

It's all here on the RepRap Wiki.

And here's a video of it printing itself:

RepRap Universal Mini Extruder from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Rewriting history

2011-04-18T13:23:00.003+01:00

Erik, of course, has done a superb job of estimating the World population of RepRaps together with RepRap-derived machines like MakerBots and 3D-Systems/BfBs.

But I was recently asked for the history of just the RepRap population. I, of course, replied that - like the other 7 billion of you - I didn't have a clue. They then asked for a guess. Well. I can guess as effectively as anyone else, so here's what I said:

The numbers in [brackets] are estimates at the numbers of working RepRaps in the
world. Only the first of these is certain...

Spring 2007 - The first RepRap Darwin was finished. Its RP parts were made in
a Stratasys Dimension.

[1]

During that summer we made four or five sets of parts for the machine in the
Stratasys and sent them to RepRap team members round the world.

30 September 2007 - Vik Olliver in New Zealand finished the second Darwin.

[3]

Around Christmas 2007 - A number of people start to make wooden and lasercut
copies of Darwin. The Bath RepRap Lab also supplied a Stratasys-printed set of
Darwin parts to Ian Adkins of Bits from Bytes, who created silicone moulds from
them and started selling Darwin copies made by PU moulding.

[8]

February 21, 2008 - Zach Smith (now also of MakerBot) gets his Darwin working.

[20]

February 22, 2008 - Ponoko have a lasercut version of Darwin.

Spring 2008 - Lots of the wooden and moulded Darwin-type Repstraps are working,
and people start using them to print RepRaps.

April 2008 - Nophead starts printing Darwin parts on his Repstrap Hydraraptor.

[60]

29 May 2008 - Vik Olliver's Darwin has made a full set of parts for another
Darwin; these are assembled in New Zealand and finally tested when he visits at
Bath University in the UK. This is the first true RepRap replication.

[100]

Summer 2009 - RepRap Mendel introduced.

[400]

Around this time Nophead, I, and many others went into serious production
selling reprapped sets of parts for RepRaps made in RepRap machines on Ebay etc.

Summer 2010

[1500]

Spring 2011

Nophead alone has made over 100 RepRaps for other people. I have made over 50.

[4000]

That's my recollection. But the RepRap crowd is an especially wise one, so all corrections and additions would be most welcome in the comments to this post...

Big RepRap Refereed Journal Article

2011-04-14T14:35:00.001+01:00

We have just published a paper in the journal Robotica about how RepRap started, its development, and how it has got to where it is now.

It is, of course, a scholarly engineering article intended for academics. But it is - we hope - also a good read for everyone.

You can get a copy from the Cambridge University Press website here.

The citation is:

Jones, R., Haufe, P., Sells, E., Iravani, P., Olliver, V., Palmer, C., and Bowyer, A.,: RepRap – the replicating rapid prototyper, Robotica (2011) volume 29, pp. 177–191. Cambridge University Press.

Sourcing a 3d Printer

2011-04-10T18:33:00.009+01:00

It's amazing to see how much the RepRap community has grown in the 6 years since it started, and little over 3 since RepRap 1.0 Darwin was released. We have gone from only being able to get the parts for a Darwin from commercial prototyping services that made the total build cost $3000+ to today where you can put a Mendel together for $400. This blog post is going to try to help a person figure out the easy ways to get into this hobby.

There are 2 main ways to get a RepRap or RepRap alike (Or Repstrap). You can buy a kit or you can self source. I am a very large fan of self sourcing because the difference between the cheapest kit I can personally recommend and the self sourced machine is $425, or TWICE as much.

Self Source Open Source (The Cheap Skate Route)

A RepRap is made up of 4 categories of parts. Motors, electronics, RP (Plastic Parts), and Hardware: These parts are not hard to find, and no matter where you are in the world you can have them shipped to you. Below I will give a bit of a guide on how to find these parts outside of a kit vender.

RP (Plastic Parts)

The availably of plastic parts has seen a real dramatic shift in availably in the last year. 24 months ago there was literally almost NO parts available for less that then commercial Prototyped price ($1300ish), 18 months ago the parts where going for $700ish on Ebay, 6 months ago they settled on an average of $250-$300, and now there is such a glut of parts that they are going for $100 and cast $50. This is part of the magic of the $400ish RepRap. I find these to be the best places to find the RP Parts.

Print them yourself: I know, how do you print the parts for your 1st 3d printer when you don't have a 3d printer? Well believe it or not there are 3d printers all over the world, and most Metropolitan areas of the world now have at least 1 RepRap or RepStrap operator, if not dozens. Before you go buy a kit, or buy parts off the internet search your local area to see if someone has a Makerbot, RepRap, or other 3d printer. You would be amazed at how friendly our community is. The best places I have found to find Local 3d printer operators are:

The RepRap User Groups: Even if you don't find anyone in there, post that your trying to get the parts, there is a very good chance that the 3d printing bug has infested someone else in your area.
The RepRap Map: This will let you know if someone is in your area, most the time people don't put links for people to contact them here, but 90% of the time there is enough info in the link to hunt the person down
The Makerbot Map: Same thing but for Makerbots. There is a LOT of people who have bought Makerbots,
The Makerbot User Groups: Makerbot has compiled a nice list local MB user groups.

Buy the RP parts: This is the most common way for people to build their 1st RepRap. There are plenty of different places on the internet to get the parts. The most quality dependent part of the print is the gears, so when you buy the parts, insist on a good photo of the gears, you are looking for very well defined teeth on the gear. Here is where I suggest you get the parts:

RepRap IRC: Our community's IRC channel is a hopping place. The reason I say go here 1st is because by buying your parts in this channel your also helping out the people who are most likely going to help you get it running.
Emakershop Jeanmarc from the IRC runs this webshop. The great thing about it is that it has a varitey of venders (you can literally self souce JUST out of his shop for $550ish (if everyone is in stock, which they are not now). Lots of us like this vender because he does not charge a transaction fee. Only thing you have to pay is Paypal fees.
Ebay This is likely going to be the most expensive way to get the parts, because with Ebay there is no way to get around the doubt hit of Paypal and Ebay fees. Unless you just have to don't buy parts here.
RepRap Forum Parts go up for sell in the Forum all the time (less than you will find at any of the other choices), but people do sell there. 1 note it is VERY easy for people to "Puppet" in our forums, so you never know if the reviews listed there are real or someone being dishonest. Most the Ebay sellers also sell here, so buying in the forum allows you to skip the Ebay fee.
Metrix Clonedel These are the cheapest parts, and I have personally reviewed their products, they are good enough replacements for the printed parts. They do require processing with a drill press.

Electronics:

The electronics are the heart of your machine, and the part of the machine that most effects your overall experience with the machine. I have experience with RAMPS, Gen6, Gen3, and Gen4. All have worked well for me. The big difference between these electronics is the cost / firmware support you get with them.

RAMPS Is currently my favorite electronics. Mostly because it's both "single board" & modular, has provision for controlling a heated build plate, has the most active development (3 separate teams competing and working together on firmware for it), and it's about the cheapest electronics I can suggest ($140 if you do it yourself $200 if you get it preassembled. It's sold by Ultimachine, or you can etch it yourself.

Gen6 Is my second favorite choice. It does not have provision for a heated build plate, and it has the least active development team as far as new firmware. It's not etch-able, and is only available from 1 vender, Mendel-Parts.com. But is the simplest set of electronics to install, and it does work. It's $200 with optos.

Gen4 is my 3rd favorite electornics. This is the official Makerbot electronics, but you could use it on a RepRap. The up side of Gen4 is that it will out of the box use ReplicatorG, which I think is one of the easiest RepRap control programs, the down side is that Makerbot sells it for $370. That's twice as much as it costs to put together RAMPS, and 4 times as much as a Sanguinololu.

Gen3 and the multiple derivatives thereof. There are many companies out there that sell a version of these electronics, but in the end they are 2 years old, and it shows. Gen3 was problematic, but at the same point LIGHT YEARS ahead of what we had before. Zach and the guys over at Makerbot did a wonderful job on these, but they are just old now. If you can pick up a set of these electronics cheap, great, but just remember even at their best they where fussy, and no one is writting firmware for them anymore. They can be had for as cheap as $165. The Real Gen3 are no longer sold or supported by Makerbot.

The Self Source options. If you have the ability to create your own boards, there are some truely cheap and nice options out there for you like Adrian's Ramps, Gen7, Sanguinololu, or even self etched Arduino_Mega_Pololu_Shield.

Electronics can be as cheap as $100ish all the way up to nearly $400 depending on which set you go with. It's up to you.

Your also going to need a power supply. If you plan to not run a Heated build plate, you only need 60W for all these electronics. The power supplies are usually avialable where you buy your electronics, and are either ATX power supplies (Desk top Computer supplies), or Laptop Supplies (Solid state but smaller).

If your going to run a heated build plate your going to need a high amp power supply, so an ATX or Laptop supply is not going to cut it. You will need something like this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120571991063&ssPageName=ADME:X:RTQ:US:1123#ht_3368wt_1139

Just search "12v 20a universal power supply" in ebay and you will see tons on them, just buy the cheapest one.

Motors:

Motors can be the easiest or the hardest parts to source. All that really matters is that they are NEMA 17 (I know it's "possible" to run a RepRap on Nema 14, but don't even try, it's way more trouble than it's worth) they must be bipolar (4 wire), and have a holding strength of 40 N-cm at an aperage lower than your driver . Remember if you get 3 amp steppers most of our electronics only push max 2amp, so your not going to get the rated strength, but if you get a 1amp motor (that has the right strength), you can run it on a 2amp driver, just remember not to max the pot on your stepper driver! When in doubt buy a stronger stepper than you need, because there is no way to make a stepper have more torque than it's rated for. I use 53.1 N-cm motors just beause the last thing I want to deal with is a skippping extruder steper motor. Here are some links to motors that look about right, or I have used to give you an idea what you want.

http://www.alltronics.com/cgi-bin/item/N1728D63/55/OSM-NEMA17-Dual-Shaft-Stepper-Motor
http://www.alltronics.com/cgi-bin/item/N1728S56/55/OSM-NEMA17-Single-Shaft-Stepper-Motor
http://ultimachine.com/content/kysan-1124030-nema-17-stepper-motor
http://www.mendel-parts.com/product_info.php?cPath=25&products_id=33
http://www.robotshop.com/soyo-reprap-stepper-motor.html

Any of those would work, but you can buy what ever you want, just remember 1-2amp 40ncm (Good converter if they play games with different numbers), Bipolar, 4 wire.

Hardware:

Hardware will depend on which machine you choose to build. I have built a Makerbot, Thingomatic, Huxley, 3 Sells Mendels, and well over 5 Prusa Mendels at this point. You can see videos of all the builds over at my Youtube Channel. The newest and in most active development RepRap is the Prusa_Mendel. The advantage of the Prusa is that the hardware costs are a fraction of the Sells Mendel, and it's much easier to calibrate/assemble. Here is a video showing the two machines side by side.

Assuming you go with the Prusa, you can get most the hardware locally. The Threaded Rod will be at your local hardware store, the screws you need (SAE if your in the US, Metric anywhere else), will be at the hardware store also (you might have to search in google maps for a thing called a "Fastener Supply" in your area to get the right sizes. Also your going to need Smooth Rod. If your self sourcing I am assuming your not rich, so just get "Tool Rod", or "Drill core". This can be also sourced locally from a machine shop, the Fastener supply, or even from old junk printers, that almost always use 8mm or 5/16 smooth rod. The only bearing a Prusa uses is the 608 bearing or "Skate board bearing". Before I started doing support in the RepRap IRC I never knew that every country in the world had Skaters, but they do. They don't need to be fancy, the cheapest 608 you can find will do (I have even used 2nd hand bearings from the skate shop).

Some Hardware is harder to find locally, such as the belt, you will need .2" or t5 (t5 is the spec belt, but .2" will work)

In the US I have found these suppliers to work great and be cheap:

http://shop.polybelt.com/T5-Belt-Metric-Trapezoidal_c79.htm

http://www.mcmaster.com/#7959K24

Your also going to need hardware for your extruder. This is the part that handles to molten plastic (hot end), and the part that pinches the plastic (cold end), so it's very important that it's done right. You can make these yourself, but unless you are a machinest I really suggest you just buy the parts (at least for the hot end). These are a few vender's I know work well.

http://www.makergear.com/products/operators-pack
http://shop.arcol.hu/item/arcol-hu-hot-end-unassembled-035

Hobbed Bolt's are what is used to pinch the plastic. You can use a gear to do this, but the hobbed bolt seems to work much better. They can be found from a variety of vender's on ebay, and only take about 10 minutes to make yourself with stuff you likely already have sitting around your shop. You can search eBay for them here.

The only other hardware you will need is bushings if you chose not to go with PLA sliders (which a lot of people love). I have used both of these:

http://www.mcmaster.com/#6391K163

http://cgi.ebay.com/2pcs-LM8UU-8mm-Linear-Ball-Bearing-Bush-Bushing-New-/220692549334?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item33624d0ed6

This should get you a good way though self sourceing a Mendel, but if you have any questions go to the Prusa Mendel in the Wiki, or go into RepRap IRC off freenode.

The Kits:

I would say that purchasing a kit has always been the most common way to start in this hobby. That's changing now because untill recently is was almost impossible to source the plastic parts, and the RepRaps where much more challenging to get running than the kits. This is not the case any more. But non the less, a kit is an option that is perfectly reasonable if your time is worth more than a few hundred dollars. Again this is not a complete list of Kits, but only the ones that I would recommend to a friend.

Makergear Prusa Mendel Kit $825

There are cheaper kits, but I have seen enough issues with them that I can't suggest them. This kit comes with all the bells and whistles you could ask for on a RepRap. Heated build plate, big power supply, bowden extruder, geared stepper, stainless steel, etc etc. It's around $300 more than self sourcing, but only about $150 more than if you where to try to buy all the components individually (good luck on them being in stock). This kit does have the advantage of being the same as a Self source Mendel, so you can get direct support for it though both Makergear IRC and RepRap IRC. Build area is 200x200.

Makerbot Thing-O-Matic $1300

I love to hate on the Makerbot because they went up $500 on their kits cost in the last year, but the Thingomatic, which is the follow on the the Makerbot Cupcake is a much improved unit. Their Mk6 stepper extruder is much improved over the Mk4 Extruder that I got with my $750 cupcake. Build area is the smallest of the available kits at 110x110.

Rapman 3.1 $1300

The Rapman 3.1 is based off the Darwin platform, but has evolved steadily over the 4 years it's been around into a very solid machine. It's the 1st machine I will mention here that is not fully open source. The Rapman 3.0 designs where released, but 3.1 never was. And the Electronics where never released at all.. It also Uses a closed source Program call Nettfab to drive the machine, but every person I have ever talked to that used it loves it. Nettfab has a free version and a pay version that is $400+ dollars. It does have the 200x200 typical RepRap Build area.

Ultimaker $1725

The Ultimaker by Erik has not been released yet, and to my knowledge no one outisde of people associated with Erik own one. But at the same time Erik has a GREAT name, and the machine looks to print very well in the videos. The Ultimaker uses a bowden caple extruder to get extremely fast x/y motion (300mm/s). 200x200 build area.

Up! 3d printer $2700

I am likely going to catch heck for suggesting it because it is ZERO open source, but so is Rapman 3.1 at this point so who cares? The Up! has wonderful build quality, and is the only sub $5000 printer that you can literally take out of the box, set up in less than an hour and print with. Build area 150x150

Conclusion

I hope this helps. I am sure I missed some very good suppliers that I just don't know about, so if I missed you please comment below. The above is just 1 man's opinion, and not official RepRap policy, because RepRap does not do official. Like always if you have question please go search the Wiki, and ask questions in the IRC.

Be your own souvenir

2011-04-04T10:55:00.000+01:00

Be Your Own Souvenir! from blablabLAB on Vimeo.

In Barcelona people pose in front of three hacked Kinects, are digitised, triangulated, then reprapped. They take away a personal model of themselves...

This week In The Wikii 4/02/11

2011-04-03T17:55:00.001+01:00

It's amazing how fast our community evolves. I have been doing this feature at the RepRap Blog for a month now and not once have I ran out of stuff to post. And in some ways each week seems to be a bit more awesome than the next. :) I know there are a lot of you guys and girls out there plugging away at your projects, if you want to see it here at the reprap blog PLEASE post it at this features's wiki page at:

This Week In The Wiki

If you post your project there with a link to your Wiki page, I will post it the following Weekend into the Blog. We are not picky at the RepRap wiki. If your project is related to a RepRap, or just uses a 3d printer or lasercutter to make it, your welcome to use our wiki to host your instructions! All we care is that it's open source.

Now for what is awesome in the wiki this week!

Mendel 3547

Poller uploaded som pics of the Mendel 3547, it is an interesting concept, somewhere between a Prusa and a Sells. Looks to be a bushing based Sells Mendel. No real documentation yet besides some projections.

RepRap Franklin

Don't have a RepRap yet, but want to test your wicked awesome new firmware ideas? The emulator is easy to set up and run, can be used to test new programs for sending proper commands to a fake RepRap, before you destroy your own. Multiple firmwares are supported, and more can be easily added, allowing you to test on many different versions without flashing firmware between tests. Plus there is a speed boost as commands can be executed at any speed desired.

Portable Skeinforge

One of the 1st things that people who join our community complain about is that Skeinforge is not an .exe in Windows. Well Kliment has fixed this issue, and added a nice extra functionality to Skeinforge. Portable Skeinforge allows you to operate Skeinforge from a thumb drive and take your settings files with you. Also it allows you to run Skeinforge from a machine that you do not have access level to install Python on. Many of us have ran into this situation when doing demos at public schools or trying to goof off Skeinforging objects at work. Considering in Windows repsnapper is a simple .exe file also, you can now run your reprap fully off a thumb drive.

Community portal

I didn't even know we had this page, it was started by TheOtherRob and it's actually quite up to date. There's some cool things I did not even know we had. Cafe Press Shirts and Hats with RepRap on them, and donate buttons for reprap. I mean seriously, why don't all of us have these buttons on out pages? I didn't because I didn't know about them, must correct that. Lots of other cool stuff over there also.

Exquisite_Automated_Build_Platform

Jamesdanielv has been doing some serious work on the Mendel Automated build plate. He has added several videos of it in operation, and a much more flushed out instructions on how to build it. Considering Makerbot seems to be going to TITANIUM to get there's to work properly, I hope that James finds a magic bullet to make these work well. Automated build plates will be wonderful if we can get them to work reliably.

1X2

Mrkim has started the serious documentation of his 1x2 wooden repstrap. It's amazing what you can do with a few blocks of wood! I can't wait to see a few of these in the wild.

1X2_Tallcat

Mrkim As if that wasn't enough MrKim then proceeds to make the tallest 3d printer I think I have ever seen. I don't even think Fortus production machines have that type of Z envelope! :) Instructions for both this and the normal 1x2 are at the wiki page. I swear that printer is sort of scary looking.

Mattroberts' Compact Geared Extruder

It's amazing how quickly our extruders in RepRap are evolving. Mattroberts has made a unique and small geared extruder, which is a hybrid of the Wades and Adrian's extruders. This one is physically smaller than even the wades, uses a m3 hobbed bolt, 624 bearings, and a 9:31 gear ratio. The good thing about the smaller hobbed bolt it it's much less force transfered to the plastic gears.

A5 Powder bed printer

More hardware progress with the A5 Powder bed printer. Sorry, I know I posted this one earlier, but I am a sucker for hardware pictures. :)

ReplicatorG-Skeinforge-RAMPS

Cloudmaker has managed to get RepG to play nice with standard RAMPS. I have not tried it yet, but I will tell you that if you start out with a Makerbot and try to move to RepRap, the most painful part is giving up RepG. Makerbot has put a lot of time and effort into the RepG program that the Makerbot kits uses, and it shows in the interface. I can't wait till RepRap user have as wide of variety of choices of drive programs as we do electronics.

Extending OpenSCAD

2011-03-28T19:54:00.005+01:00

I spent the weekend hacking on openSCAD, and I thought people might be interested in the results. The most visible one is syntax highlighting, but I've also done a few language extensions:

Dot/Cross Product (* and %)
length function for lengths of vectors and strings
accessing characters in a string via []

I've got a more detailed post on my blog (including some future ideas) or you can just grab the code from github. Note that my work is not yet merged into mainstream openSCAD.

Best of the RepRap Wiki 3/25/11

2011-03-26T16:17:00.003Z

Open publication - Free publishing - More howto

Garyhodgson has uploaded a Prusa Mendel completely redrawn in Sketchup, and then used that drawing to create some really nice instructions. I can't describe these instructions in any way but gorgeous, they put all prior RepRap documentation to shame in it's simplicity. As most of you know RepRap has always suffered from poor documentation. These looks like something out of a computer hardware quick install guide. It also really shows off how flat out mechanically simple Prusa Mendel is.

He has uploaded the file to the wiki, and is maintaining a git for it. He has even made the document completely open licence, so you are free to evolve this document in any way you need.

Garyhodgson aka Gary Hodgson, my hat off to you for some amazingly useful work.

StepStick

Many in our community "felt the pain" when Pololu ran out of the A4983, This is the stepper controler most of our electronics uses, and it stayed out of stock for many weeks. Joem the Sanguinololu guy is also working on an equivalent open source version of the A4983. More details in the wiki page.

Pick-n-Place_Feeders:

ErikDeBruijn, of Ultimaker is at it again, he is now working on a pick and place machine. Given that he already has shown is RepStrap doing 300mm/s I am almost scared to see how fast it will do Pick - Place. Good job Erik!

Helium Frog Delta Robot

HeliumFrog has a lot of really amazing projects over at his website. But my favorite has to be his printable Delta Robot. I mean really, even if it didn't even run, who wouldn't want that sexy beast in there shop? The great thing is it DOES RUN:

He has also very recently updated the software to run it, so it's by no stretch a dead project.

Updates without pretty pictures

Both the Generation_7_Electronics and the Sanguinololu electornics pages have had a lot of documentation added, both of these electronics are very quickly becoming real options.

Powder_Printer_Recipes: Sebastien_Bailard uploaded a huge set of recipes for powder printing.

M-codes_for_EEPROM_config: AlexRa did a large update to the EEPROM tables

Print a Vacuum Cleaner!

2011-03-23T04:42:00.004Z

Ever wanted to print a vacuum cleaner? Well, now you can! I've designed a printable hand-held vacuum cleaner that works (to some extent, at least!).

Build instructions are on my blog here with lots of pictures. You can also skip to the youtube video or github.

Update: I've also posted to thingiverse and the RepRap wiki.

Best of the RepRap Wiki 3/18/11

2011-03-18T21:32:00.001Z

A few not so new items this week, but I have not seen some of these project get a very large audience yet.

Sanguinololu

The Sanguino was developed by Zack Hoeken, and rests at the heart of Makerbot's Gen3 Electronics. The Pololu Electronics where developed by Adrian Bowyer, and is what inspired the Ramps electronics by Ultimachine. Joem has combined the idea of these two two electronics into a truly tiny set of electronics. He is on version .7 of the board, and quickly approaching a 1.0.

Ultimaker's_v1.5.3_PCB

Erik De Bruijn, one of the original RepRap Devs is coming along nicely on his version of the Arduino Pololu Electronics. He has been quite busy updating the RepRap Wiki, and his own Ultimaker Wiki. These are the electronics that are at the core of his UltiMaker. If your as much of a Wiki nerd as I am becoming, his wiki is worth checking out, he already has most of the build instructions posted for the Ultimaker.

Delta

There are some really amazing Delta bots in the Wiki, this one has been receiving a lot of edit love here lately. Will need to bring some of the others forward in the coming weeks. This wonderful example is known as Clavel and is already on it's second prototyping.

Kiwi M5 Mendel Battle Tank

This beast of a machine is the work RepRot, and as you can tell from the machine's name, it's another one of those crazy folk from New Zealand. This beast earns the name "Battle Tank".
-Make from bullet resistant plastic (I know I get shot at allot while I print)
-24 Volt steppers (In case you decide to do 3d printing on Saturn)
-Over 700 Watts worth of Power Supplies (563 for the Cartesian, 150 for the HBP)
Good job RepRot, you just made 99% of the RepRap in the world look like wusses. :)

Automatic documentation and project evolution

2011-03-16T10:25:00.004Z

While designing my Mendel, I found out that I really hate to write documentation. Thankfully, I met Kliment who did such an amazing job on documenting the entire Prusa Mendel build! But this is not a long term solution and I started to realize that changing the documentation with every commit to the repository is boring, so I tend to not to do it. :-/

One solution would be to mark one commit as somewhat stable and optimize the documentation to this point. Unfortunately this would slow down the adoption to the new features by community, so I dumped that idea.

Then I finally realized, that I need to generate it automatically. By that time we just included the makefile into the repository, and I found out that OpenSCAD, my software of choice, has ability to output stuff with an echo statement.
Example of catching output:

OpenSCAD -s test.stl test.scad > test.txt 2>&1

I immediately thought, “This is it! I can easily output what these parts use!!” And possibly create bills of materials (BOM), etc. For example: You have module called M8Nut() which will generate an M8Nut object for cutting out nut traps, etc. With every use it would output “m8nut” to the file ‘test.txt’. After some experimenting I found a few problems:

It could be used only for OpenSCAD files. I found this really bad ‘bug’, what if we have AOI or DXF stuff in our project?
It would get really ridiculous, when you would be doing lock nuts, washers etc. There would be simply ‘dumb’ objects doing nothing, just outputting themselves to command line. Confusing, right? :-)
It would be much harder to associate parts with each sub-assembly in full project tree.
Also, you cannot use the OpenSCAD to generate the output, not even do the recursive counting, you still have to use another tool. !!!!!

Then I got stuck for few days. Finally, I remembered the JavaDOC comments, even though I hate Java. :-D Basically, I borrowed the style of syntax and comment blocks and started creating ThingDOC! I was writing the documentation for a few weeks in my Prusa Mendel files the way I found to be most natural, then writing of the ThingDOC itself began much later. Basically, I started after all files were already commented. Basic ThingDOC comments looks like this:

/**
* Slides on the x-axis with extruder.
*
* @name X carriage
* @category Printed
* @using 4 m3x10
* @using 4 m3washer
* @using 4 m3nut
* @using 4 bushing
*/

I don’t want to talk about syntax here, there is already a wiki page about it. Let’s talk more about what it can do now and what I will do in the future.

ThingDOC looks for these comments in files with .scad and .tdoc extension. It doens’t matter where you put them. This allows use for non-OpenSCAD things. Now its in stage where it can make a BOM for full project, recursively. For example, when you need 8 M8 nuts for one frame-vertex and mendel uses 6 vertices, it will add 64 M8 nuts to the final bill of materials.
Even this alone is very useful, since you will at least have all the needed parts for the commit of repository you actually have, and you won’t be missing something.
It also generates nice summary of parts with their descriptions.

What does documentation look like from actual files in Prusa Mendel repository.

A more important thing, which is not as obvious is that it has a full tree of parts. This is more valuable then it looks like, since later on we can generate assembly documentation.

As I mentioned in above, my ultimate goal is to make the full assembly files automatically generated, in the quality you can find now on the wiki. I already have a plan how to do it. Of course it can’t be fully automatic, but you will have at least hyperlocal assembly instructions, which would be structured and more easily recognized.

An example of why this is still beneficial even though it seems as same amount of work as now: Imagine that nophead wants to fork my Mendel, if he doesn’t like one part (for example, the carriage) it would have completely different mounting etc. etc. So he forks the repository and does all the changes he wants to do, including documentation changes in the carriage.scad. He changed only one single file, but he’s still able to generate documentation for full printer, and the documentation will make sense!

Hyperlocal documentation for the win!

Every commit will then have its own documentation. I know it sounds like science fiction but I really love this idea.

Project can be more living thing then rapid jumps every few months when new release is published.

Again I can show small example how this in connection with GIT is huge game changer!
Once Original Mendel (as now community calls Sells) was released it became more or less untouchable thing. Only changes I remember in SVN was repairing STLs. At first because the SVN is bad for forking branching and even if someone wants he cant express his ideas there, its not open for everyone. And second, the release was so huge that everyone excepts its final thing. In opposite, in my repository, things are changing on daily basis and community accept these changes fluently!! When I browse flickr and internet I can see how quickly community is using updated files etc. In repo is now many great changes by Spacexula, soon from GregFrost. I try to encourage guys to change and tweak. Prusa Mendel will never have something like ‘stable release’ or ‘version 0.1’, never!

‘You have and idea? Go FORK yourself!!’ And it works!!

Back to assembly instructions. How I want to do it: Since we already have the tree of parts it’s easy to know where to start, from the roots, generating one subassembly after another, going up and up until full documentation is ready. Let me show it by example:

/**
* Printer
*
* @root
* @name RepRap
* @assembly Make sure you have [frame] ready.
* @assembly Second you make the [x-axis].
*/

/**
* Printer base
*
* @name frame
* @using 6 frame-vertex
* @assembly Do the side triangles.
* @assembly Connect triangles into frame.
*/

/**
* x axis
*
* @name x-axis
* @using 1 x-end-motor
* @using 1 x-end-idler
* @assembly Prepare [x-end-motor]
* @assembly Prepare [x-end-idler]
* @assembly Put both together with rods.
*/

So first it will generate the frame assembly instructions, since there are no other subassemblies, it will write it out. Second is the X axis but it has some things which logically must be assembled sooner then the x-axis itself, so x-end-motor part goes first, since its mentioned sooner, then the x-end-idler and so on with other instructions.

If you want to play with it, you can clone Prusa Mendel repository switch to development branch and run

git submodule init; git config -l; git submodule update

for initialization of submodules (ThingDOC is submodule). Then you need to install Python and LaTeX (sorry we love the output, but switching to mediawiki etc should be easy). Last you run shell scrip generate-documentation.sh and you are done!

I’m looking for other developers willing to help me with this. I find myself having less time for this then I would love to have, but I think it’s an even more important thing than the Prusa Mendel itself. Or even if you don’t want to help with development and have some ideas what this meta data could be useful for other than the BOM and Assembly instructions, leave a comment.

Double Wade sighted in the workshop

2011-03-15T09:22:00.006Z

This is a Double Wade extruder http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6989 being wired up for testing. This assembly saddles across the X axis with one extruder overhanging. With the use of the Prusa-style X carriage http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6805 with PLA bushings running at 6000mm/min I can now span more of the X axis than I could with the standard Sells-style carriage, and Mendels tend to have more room on the Y axis for me to take up with extra extruder.

Note the twin terminal strip blocks for a head disconnect mechanism. They're clamped around some small nails, and loosening the screws on one side will allow you to remove the whole row of spikes at once like a plug. But this one won't shake loose :)

This is using FiveD/Teacup firmware on a single Arduino Diecemila to control "Custard Slice" (yes I name my RepRaps too).

Vik :v)

Best of the RepRap Wiki 3/11/11

2011-03-11T22:54:00.000Z

The RepRap Wiki is a great tool to host your project, but for too long we have allowed some of these great updates to the Wiki to go unsung. From here forward I will be doing a weekly recap of the new content of interest to me in the wiki. Remember these call outs are based around the things I found interesting, if you feel I overlooked your update in error, please speak up in the RepRap user email list, and I will try to add you to the blog next week.

Now for updates of note this week in our Wiki:

The Penn State RepRap Project

They have been doing wonderful updates for each of their machines, and some of the most detailed build logs for the Laser Cut Mendel that I have seen to date. Go over there and check out their 4 Mendels, 1 Huxley, and 1 Fab@Home.

MetalicRap 1.0

Rapatan is an almost feverish updater of the wiki on his MetalicRap project. In the last week he has added a huge amount of content to his already prolific documentation on the wiki, and has started to reach out to the community for help in MetalicRap's development. I even saw Prometious Fusion has joined his team. Awesome work guys!

A5 Powder Bed Printer

Johnrpm has been doing a lot of design work, and real hardware work on his powder bed printer. I am a sucker for pictures of real world hardware, especially when it is this awesome!

Gen 7 Electronics

Traumflug has really been putting some work into his Gen 7 electronics in the last week. He now has 4 different Mendels running off his boards. For those that have not been following this development is a hybrid of RAMPS and Gen2 on a board.

OpenX Carraige

Buback has released the design files for his OpenX Carraige. It's an amazingly elegant approach to simplifying the X carriage wile retaining the bearings from the Sells Mendel, and it just looks awesome! I especially like his approach to the 360 bearings, it’s one of those designs that when you see it you wonder why it wasn't done that way in the 1st place.

Volumetric Dimension settings

With the new Skeinforge 40 you calibrate based off how much plastic, by volume, is entering the top of the extruder per step, and therefore how much plastic is being pushed out the nozzle per step. Several folks have added setups for some of our most common extruders, cutting down a lot on the difficulty of setting skeinforge 40 up.

That’s it for Best of RepRap Wiki this week, please comment below if you think I should continue this project, and if you want to get into next weeks blog post, be sure to update the wiki, post pictures, and keep being awesome.

Aha! RepRap appears do be doing MakerFaire!

2011-03-11T10:59:00.003Z

My spies at google tell me we're going to
Maker Faire UK in Newcastle this weekend!

Maker Faire UK 12-13 March 2011
is part of Newcastle Science Faire 2011

We've got a number of different folk doing up a number of different booths for a number of different Makerfaires. If you are running one of the numerous Official RepRap Booth(s)™, please let the rest of us know so we can show up and help self-replicate and so on! Helpful secret mailing list discussion thread for people organizing / attending booths

(Disclaimer: RepRap doesn't really do "official". As far as we can tell.
There may even be a rule about it.)

* Maker Faire UK
March 12th & 13th, 2011
http://www.makerfaireuk.com/

* Robot Fest/ Mid-Atlantic Mini Maker
April 30, 7am – 12pm
http://www.robotfest.com/

* Toronto Mini Maker Faire
May 6-8
http://makerfairetoronto.ca/makers/

* Montreal, Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM)
May 10-13
http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011/

* Maker Faire Bay Area
May 21st & 22nd, 2011
http://makerfaire.com/bayarea/2011/

* Mini Maker Faire Ann Arbor
June 4th, 2011
http://www.a2makerfaire.com/

* Maker Faire:North Carolina
Saturday, June 18
http://makerfairenc.com/

* Maker Faire: Kansas City
Friday June 24 - Saturday 25, 2011
http://www.makerfairekc.com

* Vancouver Maker Faire
June 25 - June 26
http://vancouver.makerfaire.ca

* Maker Faire Detroit
July 30th & 31st, 2011
http://makerfaire.com/detroit/2011/

* Maker Faire New York
September 17th & 18th, 2011
http://makerfaire.com/newyork/2011/

Development board arrived

2011-03-11T04:04:00.000Z

In which your narrator's quest for a next generation printer continues...

Do you want to read more?>

Impartial reivew of the Clonedel Cast parts by Metrix Create Space

2011-03-08T21:23:00.000Z

Open3DP was nice enough to send me some of the cast parts being sold by Metrix Create Space. I wanted to see the part quality in person, and to give them a impartial look.

I have seen the Techzone Lasercut wooden Mendel, the CNC milled Issac Mendel, and wanted to see if these cast parts where usable. I was very surprised at how strong they where and the their quality.

To use them you will need a drill press, and the parts are a bit weaker than ABS, but I think they seem usable.

Below is a video of a Mendel assembled with these parts printing a cube.

That's one of the issues with disruptive technology like RepRap, every time you think you have a handle on how things are going, it surprises you.

18 Months ago the plastic parts for a Mendel where going for $700+, 12 Months ago the price settled down to $250-$400, 3 Months Ago Prusa Mendel dropped the price for the RP parts to $125-$150. Now the Clonedel cast RP parts are going for $50 (I personally know of 3 shops gearing up to start selling them).

I wrote a blog post over at my personal Blog a few weeks ago describing how to put a Prusa Mendel together if you don't have access to a 3d printer for around $510, I guess I need to update it to $410 now. Amazing times.

3D Printed Adult's Bicycle

2011-03-07T20:55:00.002Z

Lifted from a Eureka Magazine Article. "The 'Airbike' is made of nylon but, according to EADS, is strong enough to replace steel or aluminium and requires no conventional maintenance or assembly. It is 'grown' from powder, allowing complete sections to be built as one piece; the wheels, bearings and axle being incorporated within the 'growing' process and built at the same time. Because it can be built to rider specification, it requires no adjustment."

Vik :v)

High Impact Test

2011-03-05T00:35:00.008Z

I've been printing little green targets from PLA and white(ish) ones from IMPLA. The IMPLA needs an extra 10C heating, layers thinner than 0.4 and inter-layer cooling. In other words it is no fun to print with.

So, frustrated I took the whole lot outside, lined them up against the wall:

and shot them:

You can see in the aftermath, both green PLA targets have chunks missing from them. One white IMPLA target is split but holding together. The 3 BBs embedded in the wood on the left show the level of impact.

Useful stuff, but I'm not sure if it's worth offering for sale as it is so tricky to print with.

Vik :v)

First Dutch Reprap Build-Party

2011-03-04T13:15:00.000Z

Just in case you haven't caught it elsewhere, there's a brilliant video of the first Dutch Reprap Build Party on YouTube:

Thanks to Ruben Lubbes and all at IkMaak.nl for organizing this amazing event.

They plan more...

High-Impact PLA

2011-03-04T00:43:00.007Z

One of the problems with PLA is that it shatters when stressed, rather than bending gracefully. This problem is solved in ABS by adding impact modifiers - basically synthetic rubber blends - to give some flexibility under stress. Luckily, I found an impact modifier that is compatible with PLA and does not significantly alter the melting point. At about 1/3 it makes PLA this flexible without fracturing:

I've got to run a few more printing tests on it, but it's looking promising as a material that offers the durability of ABS with the reduced environmental footprint and ease of extrusion of PLA. Oh, I suppose I'd better figure out what it'll cost me too :)

Update: I flexed some back & forth 100+ times and got bored trying to break it.

Printing with it is much trickier than plain PLA. It wants to coalesce into one lump, and you really need cooling between layers.

Vik :v)

RepRap Universal Mini Extruder

2011-03-03T11:48:00.002Z

I have been designing a new printable extruder. It is primarily intended to be small and light enough to mount directly on Huxley, but it should work on virtually any RepRap or similar 3D printer.

It features:

1.75 mm filament
Adaptable mounting plate to attach it to virtually any 3D printer
Very compact high-torque NEMA 11 motor
Wade-style hobbed bolt filament transport
Wing-nut drive to spread the torque loading on the plastic gears
Push-fit hot-end parts - no thread cutting
Lightweight: 335g (about half the weight of the usual Mendel extruder)
Compact design (74 mm x 83 mm x 100 mm)

Here's a video of it working:

RepRap Universal Mini Extruder from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Documentation and full details being written up here...

Printing People

2011-03-02T11:30:00.000Z

Fabricate Yourself is a project that documented the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference. They used a kinect to capture 3D scans of lots of people then printed them all in miniature.

How cool is that?

Going for 32 bit embedded processors

2011-03-01T18:39:00.000Z

In which your narrator begins to cobble a next-generation Reprap controller board together out of much bigger vitamins than has previously been possible.

Do you want to read more?

Printing small holes in small features

2011-02-14T18:01:00.000Z

In which your narrator discovers an out-of-the-box method of making small holes for pinned hinges in small features.

Do you want to read more?

RepRap Calculator

2011-02-05T23:09:00.004Z

I recently started to do simple tool for RepRap related calculations. Mainly because often someone ask me how to count something on IRC, now I can link them to this tool. It's simple page with calculations via Javascript, so its runs in your browser even if you are offline.

The calculator is here http://josefprusa.cz/RepRapCalculator.html or on Github https://github.com/prusajr/RepRapCalculator.

So far It can count these few things, but if you have idea what more it can do lemme know in comments
-Motor stuff
--Precise calibration
--Steps per mm - leadscrew
--Steps per mm - belt
-Convertors
--mm/s to feedrate
--Feedrate to mm/6
-Extrusion
--Flow rate multiplier for layer height change

Thermocouple vs Thermistor

2011-02-05T11:19:00.006Z

I originally wanted to just calibrate the thermistor table I used in my FW, since I remember that Camiel from Mendel-parts was moaning that his table was horrible and it affected his prints, I now just guess that his table wasn't made for his thermistor. I used one generated exactly for my thermistor by createTemperatureLookup.py from SVN. So I crated fake heater with both Thermocouple and Thermistor and written small sketch in Arduino to generate table, BUT I did want first to simply try how imprecise it is. Then I was shocked, both readings were pretty close, actually biggest deviation was 3°C. You can see the graphs under and also download the Arduino sketch and sample data.

My verdict, is that both technologies are good for heaters and heatbeds, the precision is mainly affected by mounting on heater. Also be careful to use precision resistors for thermistor circuits, thats all :-)

Code and data can be downloaded on RepRap wiki.

Improved Huxley design

2011-01-27T00:20:00.003Z

I am working on an improved Huxley design. This is slower than I'd like, owing to lack of time, but it's coming together.

A few key points:

It's all being done in OpenSCAD - the files are in the RepRap svn repository under huxley.
It uses printed sliding bearings that are screw adjustable, so they always fit exactly. Further, you can compensate for wear.
Other adjustments are done with shims. Or small rectangles of paper...
Rhys has found a very high torque NEMA 11 motor which I hope to use for my microextruder for it.
I'm trying to design it for ease of assembly. In particular, I'm trying to get it so that you can put things together in just about any order, and so that you don't have to take four things off to extract and replace a fifth.

The first version will have a moving Y platform, like Mendel. But MakerBot have taken Ed Sells' idea of building on a conveyor belt and made it work, so I think replacing the Y motion with a belt will follow soon after.

Conductive pastes take 453

2011-01-26T14:28:00.011Z

As ever, I'm constantly on the look out for nice conducting materials. I recently stumbled across a special powdered Nickel. What’s particularly interesting about it is that it is dendritic i.e. the particles are spiky rather than spherical. Essentially this means that when mixed with a polymer, the metal particles are more likely to touch each other so it therefore gives a much lower resistance.

Apparently this stuff is typically used making conductive paints, so its readily available. I managed to get some filamentary powder thats about 2.35um in cross section and 15um long . In small quantities this costs about £95/kg

A colleague and I crudely made a thin film that measures 100x100x1mm out of this powder mixed with liquid latex in a 1:1 ratio in terms of weight. The paste seemed sufficiently viscous that we could extrude it with a paste extruder. We embedded 9 electrodes in the film so that we could get repeatable readings. The total resistance between opposite electrodes came in at 0.8ohms, which is about a 9cm length spanning the film. I guess this is sufficiently low to be useful for a lot of low current applications.

Filling in with the fillings

2011-01-24T21:13:00.003Z

I've recently been experimenting with the loading of various fibres into CAPA and PLA. This started out as simple strengthening for the 3mm PLA that I sell, but the addition of 20 micron x 1mm nickel fibres makes it conductive. Dunno how useful this will be yet but it certainly allows RFI shields to be printed.

Then I hit on a brainwave: short polyacrylonitrile fibres. There are normally used to reinforce synthetic rubber. But they have another use: The feedstock for carbon fibre.

My trick is to mix polyacrylonitrile and similar materials in with PLA or CAPA. This is then turned into filament, which in turn is printed into an object on a RepRap - this tends to align the fibres.

The object is then encased in a ceramic and heated to the vapourisation point of the PLA or CAPA. You then have a ceramic mould stuffed with oriented polyacrylonitrile. Introduce an inert atmosphere and raise the temperature and you have a mould full of carbon fibre. This can be surface-activated in the usual ways, or coated with vapour deposition before being vacuum-encased in epoxy to form a complex, 3D carbon fibre composite object.

Yes, I am looking for sponsorship :)

Vik :v)

Evolving the Prusa Mendel: Part 2

2011-01-24T18:30:00.004Z

Two weeks ago, Rob posted about some of the awesome stuff we've been doing with the Hacklab Reprap, a Prusa fork. I thought it might be worth while to bring everyone up to speed on what has happened since.

Summary:

A ground up redesign of z-motor-mount. It reduces the build time from 1 hour and 20 minutes to 30 minutes. It reduces the part count by two and gets rid of one rod.
New designs of y-end-* reduce part count and build time.
3d printed nuts. You can also watch a video of them.
Pics of y-end-* designed for threaded rod instead of belts, though this feature is in hiatus for now.
There is now a mailing list for hacklab-reprap.

RepRap MicroExtruder

2011-01-13T22:33:00.001Z

I have started to design a MicroExtruder for 1.8mm filament. So far I have just got the non-reprapped parts, shown above.

As you can see, it is about the size of the two end joints of my index finger.

It is a miniaturised version of my standard extruder here, which was based on ideas from Nophead and others, with bits from me.

From the top there is the filament (green - thanks Vik!) then a length of 8mm diameter PTFE. This screws into the brass nozzle with an M6 thread. There is then a PEEK disc with two 2mm holes either side. Those will take two M2-threaded rods. The tension in these will resist the extrude pressure.

The brass nozzle is threaded M4, and screws into a small brass heater block. This takes the normal RepRap thermistor for temperature measurement, and is heated by an 8.2 ohm metal-film resistor rated up to 235 ^oC, which should give 16 watts at 12 volts.

The filament hole down the PTFE and brass is 2mm in diameter.

So far it is untested - watch this space...

The Emerging Economy of Home Manufacturing

2011-01-10T13:33:00.001Z

Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman were asked by the White House to write a report on the emerging phenomenon of home manufacturing. It has recently been published and - as you would expect - it makes interesting reading. You can access it here:

http://www.mae.cornell.edu/lipson/FactoryAtHome.pdf

Evolving the Prusa Mendel: Part 1

2011-01-09T05:49:00.006Z

Chris Olah and I have been developing a fork of the Prusa Mendel at Hacklab.to over the past couple months with 3 major goals:

1) get larger build volumes from a smaller printer footprint [we don't have much room at hacklab]

2) reduce the printed and non-printed part counts

3) increase the configurability of the Prusa Mendel

Today we are able to show the first parts of the Hacklab RepRap - a simpler, smaller and more configurable Prusa Mendel. I'll leave the in-depth discussion to Chris but heres a couple pics to wet your appetite:

Full details in Chris's post..

Belt drivn extruder

2011-01-02T03:41:00.003Z

It occurred to me recently, after building two mendels, and printing way too much (including one of those mendels), that the weakest harware point in my Mendel was the gearing on my extruder/s.

They always seem to have problems.
I have problems with:
*printing the teeth nicely/accurately,
* getting the teeth to mesh,
* keeping them meshed over time,
* teeth wearing out or getting "chewed off"

and the resulting printing issues these cause!

So, I thought "I don't have issues with the XYZ axes anymore, so why not use the same principle/s on the "E" axis.?

Result: A belt driven "adrians" extruder.

I took a random "big" cog for a belt, and a semi-random "small" one ( ie matching), and put them on one of my extruder/s. It's awesome! I haven't "skipped" , or chewed a tooth or anything in ages!. It was a little fiddly sewing the belt together ( with a needle and thread ), but that's just because I'm too cheap to buy one the right size.

From Reprap

and a youtube link to it printing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVeMdm50avY

Pretty outside, ugly inside

2010-12-26T17:51:00.009Z

I think we are now at phase, where easiest improvement of quality can be made by tweaking settings and software. So I did. I've done little hack to Skeinforge 37, so it can now generate perimeter (outside) at better resolution then infill. Dont get it wrong, we were able to print at the better resolution before too, but it took ages to print the object.

For now I tried printing infill at 0.4 and perimeter at 0.2 since I don't have my tweaked mendel here and only not very good printer which name will remain unspoken :-) I cant wait to be on my Mendel with 0.35 nozzle and 0.1 perimeter layers and 0.3 infill, aka printed porn :-)

Some data:

Print time of object at 0.4: 106min (100%)

Print time of object at 0.2perimeter 0.4infill: 144min (135%)

Print time of object at 0.2: 244min (230%)

On the other hand you have same quality object as from full 0.2 in just 59% of time :-)

If you want to try it, heres the hacked Skeinforge http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8967423/37_reprap_python_beanshell.zip Its not easy to set it right now. It's still hacking, don't forget it. But I have few hints: Set carve at 0.2mm layers if infill should be 0.4. Counted line width has to be same as for 0.4 so set Width over thickness variable accordingly to it (just mutliply by two) and set perimeter flow rate to half. That should be good starting point!!

I even uploaded my skeinforge settings here http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8967423/settings.zip so you can look it up. Original setting is Test~~RapMan~~04 and hacked one is ~~RapMan~~04. BTW you can sneak peek my settings for other printers ;-)

Remmember this is not fool-proof, please share ideas under, what to be aware of etc. so Enrique can take it and all implement in official Skeinforge :-)

First tweak: last one 0.4 infill layer replace with 2x 0.2infill layers to smoother finish :-)

A proper conductive polymer mix?

2010-12-24T18:30:00.001Z

In which your narrator begins to test a new conductive polymer mix.

Do you want to read more?

ABS Multicolor Printing

2010-12-16T20:56:00.003Z

Chris Olah, a fellow RepRap hacker from Hacklab.to, has been experimenting with multi-colored prints on our Makerbot by loading differently colored ABS segments into the extruder. So far this has resulted in at least one extruder burn and a couple of really nice parts.

Full details in Chris's blog posts:

Reprappable Inkjet Head

2010-12-14T23:44:00.000Z

This is an inkjet head that is completely makable in a RepRap machine. It was inspired by Johnrpm's Scratchbuilt_Piezo_Printhead.

It has only three reprapped parts. The other parts are standard easily-obtainable items. There is no machining involved in making it - the only tools needed are scissors, a scalpel or razor blade, a hammer, a short piece of 3 mm steel rod to use as a punch, and a glue gun.

It uses a piezoelectric buzzer to drive the ink.

It is experimental, so it's reliability is not yet perfect... But it does work. Here's the video:

Reprappable inkjet head from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

I need to do more development on the driver electronics. Then I'll see if I can add heater elements so we can inkjet waxes and wood's metal...

Details are on the RepRap Wiki here.

ReplicatorG for RepRaps: Beta testers wanted

2010-12-08T08:33:00.004Z

Over the past couple weeks Erik de Bruijn and I have been working on a new and improved RepRap 5D driver for ReplicatorG over on github and I think it's safe to say that it's ready for some serious testing. That is to say download it, burn it to zip disk (or whatever you kids are using these days) and give it to everyone you know.. oh and file bug reports! We need those.

Any 5d firmware should be compatible. So grab a copy at https://github.com/Ultimaker/ReplicatorG and try it out! (make sure to select Mendel with Gen 3 Electronics from the machine => Driver menu or add a configuration for your baud rate, etc. in machines.xml.dist and post your patch)

But wait, why should I use ReplicatorG you ask? Well if you've got a RepRap then ReplicatorG gives you a simple but powerful user interface to your 3d printer. It has manual control for your extruder, each axis, the heater and a heated build platform (if you have one). It also allows you to rotate, scale and auto-align your STLs before you generate GCode which comes in useful when you don't want to mess around with Blender to position each part. Finally it is integrated with skienforge and has some built-in settings for Mendels included to get you started (thanks Paul!).

What we're looking for now are beta testers to find the bugs we haven't found in testing it on our machines.

So heres the link: https://github.com/Ultimaker/ReplicatorG

Just click the download button. Once you have unzipped it on your computer you can use ant run from the command line from the folder you've unzipped it to in linux/windows/mac to automatically compile and run the ReplicatorG RepRap 5D Beta.

If you have any troubles compiling or running it check out the ReplicatorG help page on that: http://replicat.org/building-from-source.

And remember to check for updates as we bug hunt.

update:

To everyone wondering, this is a vastly-improved update of the version in 0022.. I forgot to mention that crucial nugget, sorry for the confusion.

Linux users can use dist-linux.sh to compile an executable.

Ok, on to specific install problems:

Problem: A warning message pops up saying machines.xml not found using machines.xml.dist instead.

The .dist warning is expected and a result of using the ant run method, please ignore it.

Problem: Mendel doesn't show up in the machines list

Solution: To get mendel to show up in the machines list turn on experimental machines in file => preferences to get Mendel. If it still doesn't show up delete the .ReplicaorG folder in your home directory and try enabling experimental machines again. If that doesn't work post a bug which brings me to..

Bug Reports can be posted at https://github.com/Ultimaker/ReplicatorG/issues

Thanks to everyone who commented on these! Next time I'll proof the instructions a bit more before posting so we don't end up with another screen of updates on all the critical things I completely missed ;)

Cheers,

Rob

[D1plo1d]

Random thoughts on hot-end design

2010-11-26T05:25:00.005Z

I spent some time modding the bfb hot-end. Originally the hot end is very sturdy but with extremely soft filament (soft-abs from orbi for example) it is not able to print at low speeds (0.25mm layer 16mm/sec was on the limit, working but not consistent, 0.15mm layer 16mm/sec killed it)...

Do you want to read more?

3D printing and "Intellectual Property"

2010-11-10T17:11:00.000Z

A while ago a few of us wrote a paper:

http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol7-1/bradshaw.asp

on the "IP" implications of home 3D printing. This looked at the matter mainly from the UK and EU perspective.

Inspired by that, Public Knowledge, a Washington DC based public interest group, has now put out a white paper on the same questions from a US perspective. You can access it here:

It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology.

The Gada Prize

2010-11-06T00:18:00.000Z

We are pleased to announce that Humanity+ has taken over the hosting of both the Initial and the Grand Gada Prize for Personal Manufacturing.

These prizes are offered for free and open-source RepRap machines that are significant improvements over the current generation of machines.

To stand a chance of winning you have to register your intention of entering and to publish your developments regularly - we all wanted to make sure that the prizes didn't drive people to develop work in secret, as that would be the exact opposite of what RepRap stands for.

Seventeen teams and individuals have already entered. Entry is free. It is also still open, and will be for quite a while.

So why not have a go!

Story of simpler Mendel: Y and Z axes

2010-10-13T04:08:00.006+01:00

My Mendel redesign is slowly reaching first milestone. I have completed a fully working prototype. I already fixed almost all issues that came with building it. Now, my attention turns to doing the basic documentation, then we’re ready to rock'n'roll! I foresee it’s going to be huge success for the Mendel replication rate. All the parts needed can fit and print them all on one Mendel sheet!!!

Z-axis

I chose to use two steppers wired in parallel to one driver. I know, it’s controversial, some people don’t understand it, or even like it. In testing so far, I can find only positive things to say about it vs the regular timing belt design. My hope this blog will open your mind. If you don't wish to try it, you can use older Z axis, the design is still compatible!

Motors are on top side, recessed in holders so they can't rotate, but they are free to self align in X direction. Theres a possibility to secure them with bolts, but I found the its actually much better to let them be free and "secure" them with only something flexible like tape, this together with freedom in X axis arrest really lots of wobble! You cant achieve this with older design.

Next great thing is nut trap part of X-end parts. Its clever design I've discovered on Darwin and Im surprised that Im the first who brought it to Mendel. Theory is on picture. In practice it smooths out whole Z axis, since it keeps the nut really securely on the stud.

All together enables Z axis to go upto 260mm/min and probably even faster, but my FW cant handle more steps, since I'm using 1/16microstepping.

Y-axis

I was little scared at first about redesigning Y axis, aware of the parts count and assembly time on standard design I wasn't sure if I can do it more simple. At the end it turned out as simplest axis of all. I even get rid of need for the laser-cutted parts.

Process is very simple, after you install Y axis bars, you snap on four bushings, align them at about the size of the board (12x22cm), put some glue on them and place the board from top. There is no need to be extra precise when aligning the rods, bushings can absorb some error :-)

Rest should be obvious form picture. I've already found better solution tho. Again inspired by Vik! Just use two skate bearings as here http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2011 , it eliminates idler part and moves half of the belt on top of the smaller board. Unfortunately I wasn't able to test this yet.

Conclusion

I can print with this machine at 50mm/s without any problem. Objects are as smooth as possible for FDM technology. I will post detailed photos soon, shame I have now only iPhone for taking pics :-(

Most recent files are at my http://github.com/prusajr/PrusaMendel dont forget to watch them. Now I will focus on documentation. Construction is really much simpler, I bet it can be built faster then Makerbot ;-)

BTW Look how awesome these parts look printed on Stratasys from Azdle.

Replicating laser-cut parts

2010-10-11T02:39:00.000+01:00

In which your narrator confects his own idiosyncratic method of replicating laser cut parts.

Do you want to read more?

Story of simpler Mendel: PLA bushings and X-axis

2010-10-04T06:15:00.014+01:00

Hello, I'm new here so I guess I should introduce myself first. My name is Josef Prusa, I'm 20 years old student from Prague, Czech republic and I'm in RepRap world for about a year now. You can follow me on http://twitter.com/prusajr.

2 months ago I started process of simplifying Mendel design, so far I was able to reduce parts count, assembly time, use of vitamins and also price. I introduce my simplifications in few articles here on blog. Here is wiki page http://www.reprap.org/wiki/Prusa_Mendel, its not updated yet to final state, but I'll do it soon. You can always find most recent files on my GitHub http://github.com/prusajr/PrusaMendel.

RepRappable PLA bushings

Great alternative of bearings, if you dont have huge load. VikOlliver inspired me with his set of parts, using PLA "sleds". This is radically improved, tho.

Also, it makes whole x-carriage snap on to axis rods :-) Its great if you are experimenting with extruders a lot!!

They sits really nicely on rods. With regular Igus bushings I had a problem, because I dont have bearing rods, it was all little wobbly.

I printed about half of regular Mendel with these on all three axes and they are still good as new. Quality of prints with them are also comparable with linear bearings which I have on RapMan.

They will not last forever, thats obvious, but price for us RepRappers is near $0 which makes them nice alternative. I also designed all parts to be able to change the bushings when they worn-out.

You can find files and instructions how to use them on http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4177 and I'll soon make a Wiki page for them too.

X-axis

X-axis is where I actually started my redesign, there is originally like gazillion parts and its real mess to assemble it. My version only has three big parts, two belt clamps and few printed bushings. Parts also includes Z axis functionality. Its really easy and simple design.

Parallelnes of two main rods is ensured by the teardrop type of holes for rods plus securing bolts from bottom (there is nut bracket inside the part). By pushing the rods upside, they will self center.

You can see the principle here on cut part. (Note: its older version of x-end-motor, principle is still same tho)

X-carriage

X-end-motor

X-end-idler

I hope you like it! Next time I'll introduce Y and Z axes.

(Note: This is still development!! Not officially released.)

Dem Bones

2010-09-26T18:18:00.003+01:00

In which your narrator creates a way to separate parts from an undifferentiated OBJ file scan of the bones in a human hand.

Do you want to read more?

Dealing with detaching rafts

2010-09-17T03:50:00.001+01:00

In which your narrator seems to have come up with a way to prevent raft peel for ABS on an acrylic print table.

Do you want to read more?