printer – MakerBlock

Escape of the Nylon Filament

While fiddling around with my 3D printer¹ I noticed there was this… filament sticking out of the electronics box. I bought this i3 MK3S printer pre-assembled, so I never got elbows deep in the build process. I had an inkling this plastic rod was likely a part of the electronics bundle going to the extruder, but I wasn’t sure until I looked at the official build guide and searched around the Prusa3D forums a bit. My understanding is that this 3mm nylon rod is designed to prevent too much flexing and fatigue on the wires running from the electronics box to the extruder.

I’m not sure what the best way to re-insert this rod into the fabric wire bundle. From a cursory inspection, I suspect it would be to cut a bunch of little zip ties, possibly loosen the electronics case and/or where the wire bundle meets the extruder, unwrap everything, insert the nylon rod, then secure everything back.

I opted to just wedge the nylon rod through the small zip ties near the extruder and lash the nylon rod to the wire bundle with velcro straps every few inches. Yeah, it’s not as clean and professional as when the machine arrived but (a) that system apparently came loose and (2) this is was way less work and (c) doesn’t involve me potentially borking the printer.

Hopefully the nylon filament won’t migrate, so it won’t be a problem. I do plan, one day, to dig into the robot and install the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W so I can print wirelessly. If I were printing daily or had a print farm or a product I was manufacturing, this would be way more urgent. In any case, I’ll probably take the time to rewrap the nylon filament into the electronics wire bundle when I get around to that.

Prusa i3 MK3S [↩]

Was This Made on a MakerBot?!

Doctor Who Christmas Special 2010: A Christmas Carol

Netflix has nearly all of the “new series” Doctor Who episodes available for online streaming. As a guy who grew up watching the show, having it on tap is just plain awesome. Unfortunately, Netflix does not carry one my favorite episodes ever – the Doctor Who Christmas Special from 2010 entitled, “A Christmas Carol.” You can’t get the DVD from Netflix and you can’t watch it online.

Thankfully, Empire State Building. The screenshot appears above.

So, what do you think? Does that Empires State Building look as if it was printed on a 3D printer?

The biggest inkjet printer ever

The other day I wondered what people have done with their InkShields. ¹ ² Then I got to wondering what people were doing to mount their InkShield printer heads and move them around. Then I thought… hey! It would be pretty awesome to attach an InkShield printer head to a Polargraph / DrawBot gondola.

I could see how an InkShield might improve a Polargraph. You could theoretically have a small sensor to test the ink levels and pump more ink in from a larger reservoir – and never worry about a pen running out of ink again.

I could see how a Polargraph might improve an InkShield. With a DrawBot string setup, you wouldn’t need a huge or expensive XY gantry – just a lot of string, two motors, and some other bits and bobs.

Default Series Title

An InkShield is an Arduino shield that allows the Arduino to control an inkjet cartridge. [↩]
Photo courtesy of iLEZ iLEZ [↩]

A bargain

The cheapest commercially available 3d printer on the market is the Dimension uPrint Personal 3D Printer, clocking in at $14,900. The media cartridges run $250 – and consist of coiled ABS in a plastic box. I can’t tell from their website how much plastic is in each cartridge, so I don’t know how cost effective it is. I’m not positive exactly how their cartridges operate – but I would not be surprised if they were tamper resistant, not able to be refilled, and contained special chips which authenticated them as being untampered and coming direct from the manufacturer.

Am I jaded by inkjets? Probably. I’m tired of buying printers with 1/3 full cartridges and expensive refills. The warranties are so much worse:

“Expensive manufacturer refills only! Only use paper made from unicorn tears and the hopes and dreams of orphans! Only power your machine with live baby seals. Using reasonably priced alternative supplies, making disparaging remarks, failure to properly maintain your machine, or printing will destroy your machine and void your warranty.”

My MakerBot came with more plastic than I can print in two years runs just barely over $1,000 with shipping. If something were to happen to MakerBot Industries, I can always find new filament elsewhere, adapt my ‘bot to a new source, or even a new material entirely. Or, I could just toss in a Dremel and have a mini-CNC/drill press.

Seems like only yesterday

While searching up a link to the eD’s first sketch for the Mendel I realized that post is about a year and a half old. That made me wonder how long I’ve been interested in the RepRap projected. I first read about it in a SlashDot article back in April 2008. I remember thinking that a DIY level 3d printer was just a fantasy.

Now, I’ve got one sitting in the next room and objected printed with it all throughout my home. (Several window latches, a sugar packet holder, various little toys, etc).

What’s even funnier is realizing that I’ve been boring my friends and family with RepRap talk for more than a year and a half as I enthusiastically gushed about the possibilities of printing ANYTHING on a homemade printer than can make copies of itself.

Victims of Success?

Devlin posted a comment in response to my last post which really deserves it’s own space:

Thank you! I share your sentiments. However, one would argue that we already have our MakerBots and have some kind of bias. I got mine about a month after I ordered and I was pretty excited the whole time I was waiting but I knew it was worth the wait.
MakerBot is starting to get hurt by its own popularity. It seems the userbase is getting more mainstream and there will be people that will be expecting this $750 machine to print the same stuff as a $30,000 printer, will want it to print things right out of the box with one click of the mouse and not contribute to making the machine better.
People that buy a MakerBot must understand that it is still in its infancy. To compare it to a previous revolution: the MakerBot 3D printer is at the same stage as personal computers when they were only available as a kit, programs had to be keyed in on 16 key pad and were displayed on seven-segment displays. If people can not deal with the problems this might entail, then they should wait the PC’s ten years for their own IBM PC/Apple/Atari/Commodore to come out or for someone to build the parts needed to make a RepRap for them (something I need to work on myself).
MakerBots are not a product that you go out to BestBuy and get because you saw it in some magazine or blog. It is a product that you buy to build and modify to make stuff. It is closer to a fruiting potted plant than a printer you buy at BestBuy. It requires tending, understanding and maybe even love.

There’s a lot to think about here. Let’s take Devlin’s points in turn:

I may be biased since I’ve already got my MakerBot. I ordered my MakerBot on November 23, 2009, it was expected to ship about December 3, 2009, shipment was delayed until December 11, 2009, and I didn’t receive it until December 15, 2009. Now, I chose to pre-order a MakerBot. Had I pulled the trigger a few weeks earlier I could have picked up one of the last kits from Batch 8. Like me you probably waited to buy a MakerBot. I was so excited about getting my MakerBot that I started this website, started designing things to print, and started stocking up on the materials I needed to build it.
MakerBot is getting hurt by their popularity. More mainstream people probably are interested in picking up a MakerBot. However, I don’t think anyone’s hopes are too high. They may want a MakerBot, but there’s no escaping that the only way to get one is to get a kit and put it together yourself.
MakerBots are not commercial yet. Not, not yet. Then again, this MakerBot Industries’ end game – distributed manufacturing and a 3D printer on every kitchen table. We’re not yet to the plug-n-play – USB port recognizing, “New device connected – 3D fabricator!” In fact, the software is probably still some of the most frustrating part of using a MakerBot. Skeinforge is a harsh mistress. However, since everything is open source every one of us is just one alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine intoxicated hacker away from this reality.

The RepRap Prize

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. [↩]

MakerBot Cupcake CNC print resolution

Some people have asked me about the MakerBot’s print resolution. Although this information can be found on the MakerBot wiki, there’s no harm in disseminating this data. ¹ Before I get into some of the technical stuff, let me just say this – the print resolution is pretty freaking good for a $750 DIY robot and it will give a $15,000 commercial printer a run for it’s money.

As a printer that can create objects in three dimensions the normal two-dimensional printer resolution jargon of “DPI” or “dots per inch” doesn’t mean much. The printing resolution for the X/Y axes is 0.085mm and the resolution for the Z axis is 3.125 microns. Most of the time you’re going to have a Z axis resolution of about 1/3 of a millimeter. If you print with layers much smaller than that it will take forever to print without a huge increase in quality.

Or, to put it another way… if you were to hand me two objects one printed on a MakerBot and one printed on a commercial printer, I’m going to ask you why the heck one of them costs $14,000 more than the other. I’ve printed some pretty intricate and detailed stuff on my MakerBot. As I tune it I hope to improve it even more.

If you haven’t poked around the website, I highly recommend it. There’s a lot of information about the Cupcake CNC, RepRap, fused deposition modeling, robots, and all sorts of stuff. [↩]

Looking forward

This website for documenting my attempt to build a MakerBot Industries CupCake CNC 3D printer. I’ve got just about no experience working with electronics and no experience building robots. So, its going to be a wild ride.

It is named “Bender.”

Here’s what I’d like to see happen:

Documenting everything inside the CupCake Deluxe CNC kit
- Right now I’ve only documented the unboxing
- I’d like to document all the bits inside the various boxes/kits as well
Documenting each step (and misstep!) of taking a box of parts to a fully functional 3D printer
- As I’m a total and complete novice, this should be educational for everyone involved
- Since the guys at MakerBot suggest two people could assemble a CupCake CNC in leisurely weekend, I suspect it would probably take me about a week or two
Printing crazy plastic things for myself and others

Why did I name the website MakerBlock? Well, if when I get this robot operational, I’d really like to design and print custom blocks that are compatible with various toy construction sets.

Frivolous? Undoubtedly. But, a man’s got to dream.