RepRap – MakerBlock

Mendel to the power of 101 [12/21/2010]

[Nophead has been clearly deeply dedicated to producing RepRap parts. It’s pretty incredible he could run his printers around the clock for 9 months to produce more than 100 RepRap part sets. This comes out to about 3 days for each set. The RepRap website has a wealth of information on all the different kinds of RepRaps that can be built – but it doesn’t look like there’s any longer one “official” recommended build. The strength of the movement – diverse ideas, highly configurable and customizable designs, can make it very daunt for someone just getting started. I’m honestly not sure where I would get started if I wanted to scratch-build a RepRap these days. After noodling around with a few of the models, I’m guessing it might be possible to build a set of modern RepRap parts in as little as 12 hours.]

Nophead of the HydraRaptor blog is probably the most prolific producer of plastic RepRap parts. He recently posted that he’s run his 3D printers¹ just about constantly for the last year, printing 101 sets of Mendel parts.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

A Mendel and his own HydraRaptor [↩]

Design choices in RepRap, Goals of RepRap [08/14/2010]

[The early 2010’s were a wild time for 3D printing. It felt like there were two separate tracks of printers. There were the RepRap enthusiasts, the true innovators, building and inventing things to push hobbyist 3D printing to new heights. Then there were the companies making 3D printer kits and robots like MakerBot and Ultimaker (and a few others). At this time I was basically wondering… what will future RepRaps look like? Will they look more like a pile of aluminum extrusion and 3D printed parts? Lasercut panels? In the 16 years since this post, the answer is… there doesn’t seem to be one single RepRap that’s leading the field and there are a pile of different RepRaps that have all kinds of different shapes. Perhaps this is for the best. There are so many functional 3D printers available that range from very DIY to point and click that there isn’t nearly as much innovation in the open source RepRap movement. I suppose, this is a kind of success for the RepRap dream. Some excellent fully featured printers are available today for as less than $500 that would have left crowds stunned in 2010. And all of these machines can easily produce the parts necessary to build the various RepRap models out there. Gone are the days of resin cast copies of 3D printed parts. If companies stopped producing 3D printers (perhaps because of some new bullshit misguided legislation…), people could turn to building RepRaps again.]

After looking at the Ultimaker, I have to wonder if the ideal of RepRap for a purely printed machine is non-optimal.

Actually, come to think of it – I wonder if it might not start to push RepRap in a slightly new direction.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Mendel Parts – Printed, Cast, CNC’d, Lasercut or Injection Molded? [Draft 04/12/2010]

[This draft post is over 16 years old. Back in 2010 RepRap was exploding. People were cranking out 3D printed RepRap Mendel parts, then people started selling parts cast from 3D printed parts, then selling the actual molds?! I think I was going to discuss the quality of 3D printed parts, their molded counterparts, and other options. Back in mid-2009 the MakerBot was launched with zero 3D printed parts, everything made from lasercut pieces of thin plywood.]

quality of molded parts

comparison of cnc, molded, etc parts

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

RepRap and MakerBot alternatives [Draft 04/05/2010]

[Holy cow. Can you imagine a time when a person could singlehandedly have made a comprehensive list of all open source 3D printers in an afternoon?]

Here’s a list of all of the RepRap, RepStrap, and MakerBot open source 3d plastic FDM 3d printers I can find. When possible I’ve tried to link to the official site, helpful derivative sites, instructions, and parts. I’ve also included some notes.

RepRap – The ultimate in DIY personal fabrication technology. Source everything yourself and put it together!
1. Mendel –
  1. parts on ebay
  2. bearings – http://www.vxb.com/page/bearings/PROD/kit9060
Darwin –
1. Ponoko Darwin Acrylic lasercut parts – http://www.ponoko.com/showroom/reprap/free-acrylic-reprap-v1-1–2083
Mini-Mendel
Isaac Mendel http://isaac-mendel.blogspot.com/
Fab@Home
MakerBot –
McWire – http://reprap.org/wiki/McWire_Cartesian_Bot_1_2#This_project_is_no_longer_actively_developed.___For_newer_mcwire_info.2C_please_see_http:.2F.2Fobjects.reprap.org.2Fwiki.2FDevelopment:McWire
ShaperCube –
1. http://wiki.shapercube.com/wagn/Shapercube_Assembly
Profound Devices –
1. http://www.profounddevices.com/
RepMan –
1. http://www.bitsfrombytes.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&product_id=168&category_id=5&flypage=flypage-ask.tpl&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=100005
Tommilese –

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Magic [Draft 02/03/2010]

[Reflecting back on this post is a little bittersweet. 2010 was an incredible time to be someone with a 3D printer at home. I remember Forrest Higgs’ detailed website about how he built his mostly wooden 3D printer. By my recollection, it was slow but accurate enough to make useable parts. Back then it was possible to read literally every single word published on the topic of 3D printers in about 30 minutes once a week – and I did. I read, and re-read, so many of Forrest’s posts leading up to and well after the purchase of my Cupcake. While Forrest’s site is no more, it lives on at Archive.org.]

Since I know basically nothing about how the actual electrical components of my MakerBot work, the entire thing is essentially magic to me. (OOooooh! Shiny lights!)

One of the things that kept me from buying a MakerBot in the beginning was the thought of trying to solder surface mount components. Admittedly, I wasn’t exactly a pro at soldering through hole components either, but the idea of soldering super tiny parts using a hot plate was certainly off-putting. I know the MakerBot guys said it is pretty easy, but I certainly had my doubts.

One of my favorite projects to monitor is Forrest Higgs progress on his Tommelise. His goal, as I understand from his blog, is to design/build a machine that could be built cheaply by a reasonably clever and motivated 12 year old. While the suggested cost of building a RepRap Darwin/Mendel is somewhere in the $500-$750 range, Forrest suggests a Tommelise could be built for as little as $150.

The trade off is that the Tommelise uses a lot of wood in its construction (cheap, but not RepRappable “vitamin” part), uses linear stepper motors, uses through-hole components so it doesn’t benefit from the nifty wizbang bits you can get in surface mount components, and prints slower than a RepRap. But, I keep thinking back to the breadboard prototypes Forrest puts up on site.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

RepRap Wally: Turtles all the way down

RepRap Morgan was recently awarded the Gada prize, which was the first time I had seen a “SCARA arm”¹ robot.² Reading Hackaday lead me to read about RepRap Wally, another SCARA based robot.³ Anyhow, My favorite part about this robot is that it boasts it can print parts for larger versions of itself.

While building more 3D printers is, perhaps, a noble goal – democratizing production and all that – actually working to churn out parts is a dull business. On the other hand, the idea of a robot capable of building increasingly larger iterations of itself is incredibly amusing. As is the idea that a robot could build smaller and smaller versions of itself.⁴

Of course, this then makes me think of a chain of robots – one set making ever larger and another set making ever smaller robots… robots all the way down.

Yes, I know that’s redundant [↩]
Photo courtesy of Haceme un 14 [↩]
Watching this orange plastic robot in action, it’s easy to imagine they gave it the name “Wally” for looking somewhat similar to Disney’s Wall-E. [↩]
Of course, smaller versions would really only be more useful if they printed with greater precision [↩]

Have you turned your MakerBot or RepRap into a robo-cutter?

I’m curious – has anyone out there retrofitted their MakerBot Cupcake CNC, MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, or RepRap¹ with a cutting device? I recall seeing an example of someone creating a laser cutter, but I was particularly interested in whether someone had made a cutting device using a blade.

If so, what kinds of blades did you use? Did you create your own? Did you use off-the-shelf replacement parts for a commercial robo-cutter?

Or other DIY 3D printer, for that matter [↩]

I had a dream last night…

And, it isn’t the first time. I was going into excruciating detail about calculating and calibrating a good Skeinforge profile. Well, we can use a thread thickness of such-and-such, a layer height of such and such, oh, and what plastic are you using?

Admittedly, just before bed I had chatted with several MakerBot/RepRap guys and was tinkering with ProfileMaker v3.0, so math and SCIENCE must have been dominating my thoughts.

New affordable 3D printer – the Ultimaker

Update 3/28/2011: The Ultimaker is available for pre-order!

Erik de Bruijn along with a newly formed Dutch RepRap group have put together this new design for a low cost RepRap alternative. The stated goal of their blog is “designing/developing an easy to build low cost 3D printer with a small form factor but large build envelope.” Erik has invited everyone to comment on this beta design. It’s interesting to see their progression of prototypes in their second blog post.

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.

Nice find RepRap Log Phase!

Fused deposition modeling – basically creating a layer and then fusing a new layer on top of that layer in succession to build up an object. [↩]

Closed!

Thanks to MakerBot for retweeting my MakerBot poll. The number of responses basically doubled in a single day. It’s been a busy day so I’ll go into more detail this upcoming weekend. For now, I’m going to close the poll and show the questions:

Why are you interested in MakerBot
Have you heard or read about RepRap or RepRap.org?
Have you tried to design anything in 3D?
Have you tried to upload anything to Thingiverse?
If you had a MakerBot, what would you want to download from Thingiverse and print?
If you had a MakerBot, what would you want to design and print?
If you had a MakerBot, what would you use it for? (Help starving children, make toys, make tools, etc)
Why haven’t you purchased a MakerBot yet?
- It’s not worth $1,000.00 to own an awesome robot.
- It’s not worth $1,000.00 to make my own stuff with an awesome robot.
- I don’t have $1,000.00 to spend on awesome robots.
- I’m interested in MakerBots, but not interested enough to buy an awesome robot.
- I don’t think I have what it takes to build awesome robots.
- I fear awesome robots.
- My parents were killed by awesome robots.
- My friend has an awesome robot, so I just use theirs.
- I don’t think awesome robots are that awesome.
- Other (please specify)