Nophead’s Mendel1 has produced 15 sets of Mendel parts, and is hard at work on it’s 16th!!! My understanding is that it would take about 60 hours to print a full set of Mendel parts. I have to admire anyone who prints up Mendel/Mini-Mendel parts because of the amount of dedication it would take to do so. After spending 90 hours2 printing something, I don’t know that I could part with it.
My point is that we really have guys like Nophead, Spacexula, and Cyrozap3 to thank for cranking out parts and pushing replication forward.
I hereby bestow upon you gentlemen the Duggar medal of continuous replication.
I don’t know if he’s named it yet – so I’ll call it Anna until he corrects me. [↩]
I’m just assuming it would take me 50% longer since I don’t know what I’m doing… [↩]
Dude, I realized yesterday I’ve been misspelling your name. I’ll go back through and fix that – sorry! [↩]
The plans for the Plastruder MK6 look downright wicked
MakerBot just released the photostream and wiki instructions for the Plastruder MK5. 1 This looks like a total overhaul of their original designs. 2
It is based on Charles Pax’sPaxtruder which has such a small form factor that it is possible to squeeze two extruder heads into one Makerbot. The Paxtruder also uses a delrin plunger which is used to push the filament against the extruder pulley, rather than the previous idler wheel design. I like the delrin plunger idea since it would be a lot easier to adjust tension and remove/insert filament. The idler wheel held in by a large bolt and nut works… but is finicky and sometimes prone to fussiness.
Out are the big/small/weird and whimsical dinos in favor of lasercut acrylic “arches.” There may be a benefit to the arches over the dinos, but I’m not sure what it would be.
The entire heater element and extruder head has been redesigned as well. I don’t recall seeing any published designs which reference this new system. We’ve all seen power resistors in use in RepRap/MakerBot projects – but they’ve usually been relegated to heated build platform designs. Now a pair are being used as the full heating element in place of tempermental3 nichrome wire. The problem with the old nichrome wire wrapped around the barrel system is that if you need to rebuild the heater, you’ve got to toss out the old nichrome since the insulation is going to get peeled off as soon as you pull it off the barrel.
The new MK5 system uses a PTFE sleeve to feed the filament down into the heater. Interestingly, the PTFE sleeve is encased in a snug metal tube which should prevent any bulging problems.
My understanding of the instructions is that the MK5 is far less prone to failure than the previous MK4 model Plastruder. I’ll grant the Plastruder is easily the most4 challenging component of the Makerbot to get working.
The instructions also hint at Generation 4 electronics. Right now I’m rockin’ the Gen 3 which have served me quite well. I wonder what the Gen 4 has in store? One thing I have to really like about the electronics is that I know they’ll never really be obsolete. 5 If I wanted to upgrade to Gen 4, I can always print off a Mini-Mendel or Mendel, and swap in the new electronics.
However, if this new system is as resilient as the instructions describe, I’m on board. I’m probably not going to have a good excuse to test out this new Plastruder design for a while since my Plastruder has been behaving itself since the last time I rebuilt my Plastruder and I just scored some spare MK4 parts. 6
A close tie for the photo was “Number 5 is alive!” a la Johnny 5 from Short Circuit. I’m just too much of a Doctor Who fanboy to NOT use an “You will be upgraded” joke. [↩]
The interesting thing about this model is that it combines some of the best parts of Darwin and MakerBot and what appears to be a Bowden extruder.
The very nature of FDM1 means that the robot will only move the Z axis a little bit every once in a while. One of the design drawbacks to the Darwin was that the heavy extruder head (motors, gears, heating elements) were so heavy that the entire robot would rock or vibrate with the lateral XY movements. MakerBot got around the heavy extruder head problem by moving the platform in the XY and moving the extruder head only up and down. This design decision isn’t without it’s tradeoffs, however. One downside is that their build area is much smaller than a Darwin. Another downside of the MakeBot design is that once the object being built reaches a sufficiently large volume or height, moving the object around quickly on the XY platform causes it to vibrate, shake, and become somewhat unstable.
One of the main improvements inherent in the Bowden extruder is that it allows you to take the heaviest parts of the extruder head, separate them from the rest of the extruder head, and move those heavy pieces to a different location. Using a Bowden extruder makes a Darwin style robot much more feasible – the small moveable print head won’t have the mass to cause the robot to become unstable.
It seems that combining either of the X or Y movements with the Z probably won’t matter all that much, since the Z axis will only move about 0.33mm or so per layer and the Z axis typically doesn’t operate at the same time as either the X or Y axis. Combining the as the new RepRap version II, Mendel, design shows us that combining the Z axis along with either the X or Y axis, but not both, can lead to a very stable configuration.
What I like about the Ultimaker design is that it would appear to incorporate some of the best parts of the MakerBot and Darwin designs. It appears to have a bolt/nut/T-slot MakerBot style assembly structure using thin lasercut wood pieces for the body. I found these parts to bolt together very quickly. Contrast this to the Darwin/Mendel structure using lots of nuts and threaded rod and printed plastic parts to hold it together. At the same time, by making use of a Bowden extruder and the Darwin body shape, it appears to be able to use most of the interior volume for printing.
I suspect it probably uses fewer parts than a typical Darwin, but I can’t be sure. I also have to wonder about the cost of lasercut wood versus the cost of nuts and threaded rod.
I saw this video the other day (I think as a result of someone’s Tweet?) and just around to watching it now. The things people built using data that had been opened up from the government was pretty incredible.
Interestingly, I have a totally different website that operates by only using data that is already freely available from the government. If I had more data from the government, my site would be even more useful to my demographic.1
All of this, the video, my own website, got me thinking – if the data from the government can be released as “open data” – in what ways is our government already open source? We know the laws that supposedly govern us and our administrators… I suppose, open source is the ideal upon which our government was founded in the first place.
To my thinking there’s basically two optimal RepRap sizes (in terms of build area):
A small RepRap with a build area just large enough to replicate it’s largest part, one at a time
A large RepRap with a build area large enough to print all of it’s own parts in a single print job
Random tangent: wouldn’t it be cool if all RepRaps came with the designs for their own printed parts already on board? Just fire it up for the first time, calibrate, and start printing replacement parts. (I realize this isn’t quite feasible – in order to be ready-printable the files would need to be in S3G format and the machine would have to run the STL’s through it’s own Skeinforge settings).
When I read the RepRap blog or the RepRap builder’s blog I see people printing incredible things in PLA. And I never hear about their troubles with PLA. Nothing about it jamming or being fussy about temperatures. What am I missing? What are Darwins and Mendels doing that my little MakerBot isn’t?
A commentator suggested that the RepRap Challenge prize is set up to avoid paying out. This seems like a silly and vacuous charge to me. The $20,000 and $80,000 prize payouts have firm award dates of 12/31/2012 and 12/31/2015, respectively. If someone hasn’t achieved the specific milestones by those dates, by the terms of their declarations (and assuming they are good to their word), they’ll have to award those sums to whoever is closest.
In any case, here’s a summary of the list of the requirements for those interested.
Interim Personal Manufacturing prize of $20,000.00 to be awarded on 12/31/2012:
Print at least three different materials, including one that is usefully electrically conductive.
The ability to print electronic circuit boards.
Print beds1 must be of a material which may be reused with minimal refurbishment for at least 20 print cycles.
Maintain a total materials and parts cost under $200 and that 90% of the volume of the printer parts be printed.2
Demonstrate a build volume of the printer above 300x300x100mm in order to insure that items daily utility can be printed.
The capacity to print a full set of parts for a complete replica of itself within 10 days unattended save for clearing no more than one printer head jam.
The ability to print autonomously without a PC attached.
Uses no more than 60 watts of electrical power.
Grand Personal Manufacturing Prize of $80,000.00 to be awarded on 12/31/2015:
That the cost of the material used for printing does not exceed $4/kilogram.
The capacity to print a full set of parts for a complete replica of itself within 7 days, including the time for reloading, and clearing of printer head jams.3
Maintain a total materials and parts cost under $200 and that 90% of the volume of the printer parts be printed.4
Participating teams are expected to regularly publish and make available their technology on an ongoing basis. All technology developed by participating teams becomes open source under a GPL or BSD license. Therefore, the winning team will have to have published at least some of their innovations more than 12 months before the deadline.
Print beds are flat surfaces onto which parts are printed. [↩]
Print beds are not necessarily a permanent part of the printer and are not figured into either the cost or the volume requirements of a printer. [↩]
According to the article it currently takes approximately 21 days with 90% of the time requiring human involvement. [↩]
Plastics such as HDPE and Polypropylene, of which millions of tons exist as waste matter, may be suitable candidates, and recycling of such waste material would be viewed favorably by the judging panel. [↩]
The ideal is obviously using a totally open source environment to develop things with a RepRap/MakerBot. For the most part I use open source software – FireFox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Pigin, PHP, MySQL, WordPress.
However, I’m still tied to certain closed source proprietary software. I still use Windows and haven’t made the leap of faith to Linux/Ubuntu. I really like the ease of use and intuitive nature of Google’s Sketchup. But, I can’t help feel like a little bit of a sham – still clinging to Windows and Sketchup because they’re easy and familiar. All the while cranking out wonderful plastic goodness with my open source hardware ‘bot.
I have a feeling I could get used to Linux/Ubuntu if I gave them a shot, but the alternatives to Sketchup I’ve seen and tried are nearly unintelligible. Does this mean I try to run Wine or break down and spend the time to learn something else?
I’ve been tinkering with this website trying to move it to a different domain – MakerBlock.com rather than MakerBlocks.com. (I like both names, but have a slight preference for MakerBlock). In any case, since I’m rather used to working with WordPress I figured I’d just dive into the MySQL tables and start changing stuff.
