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AbsentMindedWelder posted:These things can work with wax, right? You can do investment casting directly out of the plastic. Here's a proof of concept bronze casting, with a not particularly well printed model. http://blog.makerbot.com/2010/09/28/casting-bronze-from-a-makerbot-print/ http://picasaweb.google.com/jarkman/100923_lost_abs_casting A better print would yield a better finished product, but you can see how well it took the texture of the original print. You could always prep the plastic model some with sandpaper or acetone to give it a more finished texture. I'm sure there's an economic argument somewhere between the cost of wax, and the cost of plastic. But there's also being able to do custom investment casting and model it quickly. Or maybe bulk ABS filament is cheaper per volume than wax, I doubt it though. Or, if you're ambitious, it might be possible to convert one of the icing/syringe mods to work with liquid wax. And then there's this kind of thing. A kind of wax carving tool head. But if you're carving, a CNC mill setup would likely be better (which there are also affordable home-built solutions), just so you'd have more axial flexibility. See http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3216673&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
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Mar 24, 2011 03:59
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techknight posted:The main advantage to PLA is that it apparently smells like maple syrup when printing, as opposed to ABS devil's breath. It's clearness/crystalness is also quite attractive. http://blog.ultimaker.com/2010/11/18/pla-print/
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Apr 13, 2011 07:56
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I suppose I should note, that statue is a shell, there's no infill. Solid prints look a bit different, but still interesting. Image from http://www.keegan.org/reprapblog/archives/390
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Apr 13, 2011 23:06
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If you've wanted a printer for a while, but haven't gotten one for some reason, I have news for you. They're selling off the remaining cupcakes, for $200 off. CupCake CNC Ultimate Kit So if 700 sounds good to you to start fun with, I'd get one. To put it in context, if you build a prusa mendel, and really shop around, you'll end up with a bill of 400-500. Prusa kits tend to be more expensive than this price, if you're going for a quality kit. You also get the automated build platform, and their new extruder design. The platform is great, its heated, and it dumps the part out when it's finished. The extruder is good as well, but hasn't attracted much attention in the community outside makerbot. The only real downside to this vs a prusa (other than price) is that a reprap has a much larger build area (200x200 vs 110x110)
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Apr 21, 2011 06:48
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Claes Oldenburger posted:Is anyone else following the DIY DLP 3D printer still? The alien head one. It's really hard knowing that his guy is doing a TON of work, and all the comments on his blog posts are just people making GBS threads on him for not releasing it for free They definitely understand that it took tons of time and money to develop. Many of them already did it with the reprap and makerbot projects, which took tons of time and money. The reprap project created a community to spend money and time to make something workable, and then to make the technical info free. Vendors have sprung up to make and sell parts and printers. The Makerbot is completely a commercial product, and still gives it's technical info out for free. It is completely his choice to not do so, but the opposing clearly works, and benefits everyone.
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May 15, 2011 22:39
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. Do these people just not understand these things take time and money? I hope he knows that people will still support him. I want one soooo bad.
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In the end, he's just scared that if he just opened it wide open he'll get screwed. It's a genuine and reasonable fear, but at the same time it really hasn't happened. Thus far, in the homebrew community if you are making better things, people buy from you. The negative reaction he's getting is largely because of the larger homebrew community has succeeded on openness, and he's doing the opposite. El_Matarife posted:I've seen this sort of debate before. Truth is, blueprints if reasonably priced are going to be 1/20th of the price of building a good machine. This guy is throwing away his weekends, vacation days and everything else on this, and probably using design software that's really drat expensive too. There's nothing wrong with asking for $100 or less for his time and effort, and it's a good motivator to keep him working hard. Even the Free Software Foundation encourages projects to sell their software, but obviously with "free" software they can just be copied so projects generally have to figure out a value added way to do it or just guilt the community into paying. Except hardware already has built in copy protection. Physical objects need to be bought from someone. For open source software, anyone can just copy one for free and instantly. Building a reprap, on the other hand, you need to source dozens of bits, and spend hours and hours assembling it. If you assemble one it from scratch, and source basically every single part from the absolute cheapest source, you save yourself basically 200 off a kit. And spend tons of time on it, and frequently you wind up with a collection of inferior bits, such as drilled dome nut extruders. Or you could pay quite a bit more and have a very polished kit, because you've effectively paid someone else to do all this research for you. He's already stated he's going to be building these things to sell. If he's already put the necessary research to build them at profit, then he's already done the hard bits. Any real cost savings will come from either inferior substitution, in which case he has a quality advantage or genuine innovation/better design, in which case if its an open device he'll benefit from being able to incorporate it. Claes Oldenburger posted:Ohhhh. He has already said he wants to release the info and plans through crowd funding, so maybe he just wants to recover some of his losses before he lets it out to the community? Again, I don't have a problem with this, but as a point of reference, makerbot did it in the reverse order. The founder of makerbot basically started with the reprap project, found that it was difficult to get a high quality machine out improvising everything, and made a company building better kits.
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May 16, 2011 01:35
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El_Matarife posted:Is it possible to sand ABS or whatever plastic you're using? What about using it as a positive for a mold? A molded version might come out way cleaner. I wonder if plastic tool rubberized grip coat wouldn't be good for analog sticks. http://www.flickr.com/photos/34519968@N03/4149603694/in/set-72157622911002038/ And yes, ABS sands beautifully. It finishes very nicely with fine, and holds shape well against coarse. Aurium fucked around with this message at 19:52 on May 19, 2011 |
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May 19, 2011 19:48
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ante posted:What kind if materials do 3D printers use? How expensive is it and how is it packaged? Like, plastic sticks that are fed into it? The common printers use long spools of plastic. Most people use ABS, some people use PLA. Other plastics are really rare. Makerbot sells 1kg of either for $43/kg. Colored plastic costs more. Because of the small market and additional processing, the spools are actually rather expensive per pound in comparison to granular plastic. Mister Sinewave posted:Apparently the shrinkage of ABS wasn't accounted for (that's my best guess) so the cartridges don't actually fit. Another 1mm+ would probably have done the trick. As a general rule, ABS generally shrinks by Aurium fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Oct 9, 2011 |
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Oct 8, 2011 23:20
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Mister Sinewave posted:4%? Really? My empirical tests led me to think it was more 2.5% or maybe 3%. As it turns out, I'm awful at remembering and it really is closer to 2%. Oops.
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Oct 9, 2011 06:25
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Splizwarf posted:I want to get into 3-D printing. Tell me what my minimum nest egg needs to be for equipment; assume I can put stuff together mechanically and figure out the software but can't solder or build breadboarded circuits so I'd need to buy pre-made boards. I have been eyeing this: Let me suggest this kit: http://www.indiegogo.com/RepRapPro-Huxley-3D-Printer-Kits It includes fully soldered electronics, and at $675 is about the cheapest good kit. It's a huxley, so it's print area is 140cm x 140cm instead of the 200cm x 200cm of the mendel you're looking at. This is still bigger than a makerbot. For a bit more money you can get a prusa mendel from makergear. http://www.makergear.com/products/3d-printers $825 gets you one of the best kits out there, and for another $50 they'll assemble (read solder) the electronics for you. EDITS: People have self sourced a full prusa mendel for $500 for something that doesn't have quite so many quality parts as the makergear kit. Basically it would print just as well, but fewer durable parts. If you're really really willing to scrounge and work for it people have done it for as little as $300, but it takes forever. 500 isn't nearly that hard to build to though. Oh and the print quality goes down at the $300 level. No heated build plate, salvaged uneven screws, etc. Aurium fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Nov 19, 2011 |
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Nov 19, 2011 01:44
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Splizwarf posted:Cool, thanks for the links. What kind of tensile strength can I expect from extruded plastics? Am I looking at Tupperware bendy-ness or can I make stuff as stiff as, say, the material that a monitor shell or a computer mouse (or Legos) are made of? None of the commonly used plastics are flexible. Infact the most common printed plastic, ABS, is the same stuff that Legos are made of.
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Nov 19, 2011 01:54
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Splizwarf posted:What kind of fidelity can I get? Is it possible to make Technics-grade stuff with fine gear teeth? The first two Neat Things that sprang to mind were custom game pieces and plastic gears. You can make many kinds of gears. I've seen objects with details as fine as technic gears before, but I've never seen anyone make gears as fine as technic gears. So I'm guessing you could make them, but they probably have fragility issues.
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Nov 19, 2011 04:31
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Splizwarf posted:So, uh, are they good? Looks like out of my ballpark. Smaller build area, slightly nosier, good support, dedicated community, great marketing department. No better or worse print quality than a well built prusa. The one thing they do have that nobody else does is the automated build platform, which automatically removes completed items and allows it to start on the next one without supervision. They used to be the only provider of a quality kit at a reasonable price, but other individuals have stepped up to the plate as well. They've also recently discontinued their workhorse model, and what's left is their substantially more expensive all the bells and whistles model.
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Nov 25, 2011 22:11
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Manchild King posted:Hello 3D printers! I must confess to having not read the entire thread yet. I'm not sure that it'll get you rich, but stratasys (SSYS) is a publicly traded company. They were an early pioneer of the FDM techniques that the hobbiest printers currently use. They still hold some patents on it, but the key ones are either expired or will be shortly. I don't think that they've moved into any of the higher resolution methods, but they are quite entrenched in the current market. Make sure to do your own research on them though.
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Jan 10, 2012 03:41
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Theseus posted:I've been toying with getting one of these, and I'm curious: most of the models I've seen posted here have lines on them as relics of the printing process. Can these be sanded down reliably? Secondarily, can any of the materials be used safely as, say, a plate or as a mold for food? To your first question, ABS the most common plastic used, takes sanding very well. Pieces that have this sort of post processing can look fantastic. If your too aggressive with a machine sander you can melt plastic instead, and that looks bad and gums up the abrasive, but it's easy to avoid. Food safety is a much harder question. There are food safe items made out of both ABS and PLA. So the simple answer is that it is food safe. This is not the correct answer. First, printed items are generally made water tight by overlapping a few slightly porous layers. This leaves crevices that food can be ground into and spoil in. In addition, plastics can have additives added to them, and not all will be food safe, but the resulting plastic would still be labeled as the same kind of plastic. ABS, for example, only describes the general family of plastic, different proportions of the A the B and the S can have wildly different structural properties. All are called ABS, additives further compound this. All of this is disclosed on material sheets from he plastic maker. As most of the plastic filaments sellers are actually resellers, you frequently don't get this sheet, even if you were qualified to read it. (Access to this has been improving, as knowing your exact mix can help with the quality of prints.) Because of these issues, plastics are generally not considered foodsafe unless the manufacturer specifically says it is. In most cases they are safe, after all poisons are typically avoided even if it isn't expected to go in your mouth, but why risk it. On the other hand, the inaugural print of many a machine has been a shot glass. Of course there are options. The best ones are to coat what you make with something that is foodsafe, like a hard food grade wax like carnauba, or a shellac. Both of these would soak into the porous structures preventing food from getting in, and isolate the food from anything that might be in the plastic.
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Jan 10, 2012 05:40
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Splizwarf posted:What's the melting point on that sort of wax? Is it a concern when washing dishes/dishwashering/making tea/pouring boiling soup in? I've honestly never heard of wax being used for food containers other than medieval cups and flasks. Carnauba wax melts around 82-87C (180-187F). Boiling water would be a no go. Shellacs can melt anywhere between 70 and 120C (158 to 248). Unfortunately, many are on the lower end of that range, and wouldn't work. There are plenty of foodsafe polyurethanes too, so thanks for the reminder techknight. They would meet your temperature requirements. As far as how serious a threat bare plastic is. It honestly is hard to say. To my knowledge nobody has gotten sick from printed items, and the vast majority of unsafe additives have long been withdrawn from the market. But some moderately hazardous ones remain if there no expectation for food handling, things like fire suppresants, industrial lubricants, and the like. All of this would be on the material sheet. For my personal use, I'd be ok with something like a cookie cutter, but not with something like a soup bowl where a hot liquid would sit in it and possibly either leech out, or get trapped in the porous structure and spoil. Even the soup bowl would probably be safe, I just wouldn't, unless I knew more about the plastic than just what kind it was.
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Jan 10, 2012 17:50
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Theseus posted:Since you seem to know what you're talking about with regards to food safety, I intend to grill you further! I would need to be able to withstand dishwashing, and regular use - so for example, a soup bowl would be both exposed to hot liquids sitting in it and the scraping of a spoon. As I am fairly risk-adverse, I am looking for the kind of food safety where one could legally sell it as a food-consumption-related product. My hope is to make things along the lines of bowls, plates, and molds for a variety of food materials (like chocolate, or jello). I have a few chemist friends who are qualified to read MSDSs. Do the polyurethanes accept sanding as well as ABS? I assume that they would be used as a casting material rather than as a coating. If you're getting onto casting your items whole, there's no reason to restrict yourself to just polyurethane. In the context of 3d printers, it's just a durable, easy to use and available foodsafe coating. You can sand it, but many of the formulations are far more abrasion resistant than abs, so you'd really want to do all your finishing work first, and then do a coating for permanence. One typical woodworking use is apply, sand and repeat. Note that polyurethane, like most plastics is a family, its available as anything from hard solid plastics, flexible foams, 2-part epoxies, and dippable coatings. But if you're casting, you can basically pick just about any foodsafe plastic, and there are certainly foodsafe ABS formulations. The problem with foodsafe 3d printing is that these plastics simply aren't sold as filaments that a printer can use. If they were, this would be a much simpler problem. My personal bias, if you're doing casting or molding, would be PET plastic, but I don't know if the needed equipment would be out of your reach. Two part polyurethane epoxies could make it substantially easier in a small operation as you wouldn't need any heating or molding equipment, simply the molds themselves. Note that even when the result is safe, the unreacted polyurethane resin and catalyst can be dangerous. Lastly, I am not a food engineer, a food scientist, or a lawyer. If you want to sell anything in the food industry, make sure you talk to someone who is. A FUCKTON OF WEED posted:Just out of curiosity, how smooth are projects made from the home 3D printers? Will I have to sand and buff a printed object so there are no fine ridges all over the item? For your first 2 questions, is a tenth of a millimeter good enough for you? In the end, that's roughly the scale that hobbyist printers can deal with. The positioning systems are actually orders of magnitude better, but in the end, they're dealing with a viscous swelling liquid that wants to do it's own thing. And it will have ridges. Generally, a well calibrated machine keeps the geometry well, so that while the piece shrinks, it's also repeatable, and can be compensated for. If the piece partially detaches midway though, it warps. This is what a heated build platform helps with. The idea of wax prints for lost wax come up occasionally. A few obstacles present themselves. First is that waxes go from solid to thin liquid much faster than plastic, and FDM printing needs a certain viscosity to build anything. There may be ways to engineer around it, like, say, directed cooling, or something, but in the end no one has actually done it. The other reason is that it's not really necessary. If you use the molten metal to burn the wax out, you can use molten metal to burn plastic out instead. Experiments have shown that ABS burns out cleanly at the temperatures involved. I know that some lost wax casting methods remove the wax in an oven ahead of time. I suspect that plastics would be less suitable for this method, but may still work, to my knowledge, nobody has tried.
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Jan 16, 2012 02:32
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The Trickster posted:I just read through this whole thread, and was hoping I would see more discussion about the latest and greatest in RepRap electronics. It seems like I have a few options available: Sanguinolulu, Gen7, RAMPS. What's everyone using these days, and why? I'm hoping to keep my soldering to a minimum, as my soldering skills mostly involve getting solder everywhere except for where I want it and burning myself. I'm prepared to spend in the neighborhood of $200-300 on the electrical side of this project if I know I'm getting my money's worth. It's been a while since I've tried to source electronics, but here's a rundown. Way back in the beginning of time, reprap used Microchip's PIC line of micro-controllers. Then arduino got popular, and people wanted to take advantage of it, but the micro-controllers used by official arduinos were only barely sufficeient, the lack of I/O crippled it. So people used a compatible, but more capable Atmega 644P to make the Sanguino, which evolved into the Sanguinololu, when stepper drivers came into vogue. It's a single board solution. Later the arduino people made a board using a micro-controller with tons of I/O, the Arduino Mega. Reprap people looked at all the I/O available and said, this is great, how can we use it? The answer was another board that plugs into the top of the Mega. The name RAMPS gives it away. RepRap Arduino Mega Pololu Shield.* It's a multi-board solution. Later again, people experimented with solder extrusion, and eventually were able to make PCBs using only a reprap. This became Gen 7 Electronics. Otherwise, it takes most of its lessons from the Sanguinololu. Practicals: 1. Gen 7 is hard to acquire. Few people actually make it as something to buy. If you find someone local, you may be able to convert their reprap to print it. If you're lucky, they'll already have it set up, but most likely, it'll be a lot of work for little gain. The upside is that it has the possibility of being cheapest, but far and away the most work. 2. Sanguinololu is easy to buy. It's also cheaper than RAMPS + Arduino Mega, by around $10-$20. 3. RAMPS gives you the most headroom. The 644P** commonly used in the Sanguinololu is running out of I/O and memory space. It is currently sufficient, but the arduino mega and RAMPS combo has plenty to spare. *Shield is Arduino speak for a daughter board that plugs into an arduino. Pololu is the name of the stepper drivers. **There is some talk of using a atmega1280 in the Sanguinololu which would alleviate some of the issues. This doesn't make sense to me as the 1280 isn't available in the same form factor.
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Jan 17, 2012 07:33
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There's previously been some talk about 3d wax printing for lost wax casting. I've said before that people have had good success with simply burning out the plastic to make molds instead. Also, that wax doesn't really respond well to FDM extrusion. Well, a SLS wax printer just showed up on the reprap wiki. It's not yet fully documented, so you can't quite go out and build one. He has some video of it in action at http://vimeo.com/user8627618
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Jan 24, 2012 01:59
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The short answer is that it's easier to get good results with 1.75mm, where as 3mm is cheaper.
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Jan 26, 2012 16:27
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ABS is cheaper. PLA shrinks (and thus warps) far less. You can compensate for ABS warping with a heated build area, which is all but standard these days. PLA is made of corn, not oil, and is "biodegradable." In quotes because it needs special conditions, not just a landfill or by the side of the road. Also, there is clear PLA which looks all crystalline, while no clear ABS filament is available.
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Jan 27, 2012 17:06
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nesbit37 posted:Have any of you used the clear PLA before? I am wondering just how well it works. I wouldn't expect it to be crystal clear or anything, but can you at least see through to the other side ok once it has been printed or is it really more just something that light will pass through after being severely diffused? It looks like this: Here's Another example. You can see the other half of the sail through the support, but it's highly diffused. Aurium fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Jan 27, 2012 |
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Jan 27, 2012 17:34
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Astrolite posted:I'm considering getting a 3d printer, perhaps a Prusa or similar. However, coming from an engineering background I can't help but feel that the mechanical components typically being used are extraordinarily flimsy. Is this a problem in practice? Does the print quality suffer from using threaded rods and plastic joints? Do you have to do a lot of time-consuming realignment if the print head runs into the table or a printed model? In general, the reprap is more than strong enough. The prusa, as opposed to the original mendel achieved much of its popularity from being much faster to print, and faster to assemble. The former was done largely plastic from its printed bits, making them flimsier. In come cases they went too far, but most of them have been adjusted back up to where it needs to be for sufficient rigidity. The original mendel is also a large step back in rigidity from the darwin model, which had much more cross bracing. You have to remember that opposed to CNCing, the tool head loads are very low in printing, the biggest causes of deflection in 3d printing at these scales is the acceleration of the print head. Larger printers do have issues with deflection from weight, but those are 2-3 times the size. Such larger printers have typically gone to t-slot extruded aluminium for greater stiffness. There has been some effort to make smaller printers out of t-slot to increase the ability to withstand higher acceleration. At this point its pretty much the minimum for reasonable stiffness for the current size. There is some argument to the idea that the current used geometry is just defective in terms of which axises its actually stiff in. But that's a whole other topic. Because of the nature of 3-d printing, the print head almost never hits the model or the print bed. That sort of calibration is basically a snap too. Adjust the print head to be almost touching the bed (like paper width close), and run a calibration routine. Similar routines are for other moving bits. There are other calibrations, like steps per MM wrong, and you need to experiment a bit by printing off a cube. But after you get that right, its almost constant over the life of the machine. The ARE calibration issues whenever you put new filament into the machine, and they can be a pain. Different colors need different heats, and due to tolerances the filament can vary in size enough to need calibration too. Workflow is basically download STL, run one of the host programs for your printer, which will slice it up and generate the G-code and download it to the printer. The stepper controllers are pretty much a single chip per motor. Some printers also have a SD card reader so you can download the Gcode to a sd card, and the arduino can read it off the SD card without needing to occupy a computer. All in all, you were pretty much right here. There some work done on mach 3 control. It's generally not considered an ideal fit for the problem space, but is mostly workable. All the work on it basically started because a cnc company got interested in it. They also are a plastic molder, and have put together a very aggressively priced kit (~$350 for everything but a mach 3 license), so if you're already familiar with such things it could be a very good way in. Aurium fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Jan 29, 2012 |
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Jan 29, 2012 22:57
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peepsalot posted:I really like the idea behind the Mendel90, building the simplest frame that keeps stiff along the correct axes. But it's still new enough that the designer, Nophead, is still tweaking it and as a result has not released the design yet. Also I just don't like the idea of working with wood. MDF, not wood. Yes, MDF is composed largely of wood, and most of the rest is glue. Of course fiber plus binder is pretty much the description of any composite material. If you're really concerned, acrylic sheets are always an option, and has some nice aesthetics. Aluminum Mendel is a pretty good arrangement, but it falls into the same idea of simply substituting a stiffer material*, rather than a more intelligent arrangement of forces. Arranging the panels of MDF in parallel with the forces that panel opposes allows you to take advantage of cubic stiffness gains from increased length even from a very inexpensive and easy to deal with material. Admittedly the tslot beams do have much more material in plane than threaded rod would. *so much stiffer that reducing the vertical bracing, as opposed to the mendelmax, is pretty reasonable idea
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Jan 30, 2012 06:06
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ReelBigLizard posted:There's already work happening on a GRBL shield for the Raspberry Pi - a new embedded linux dev board. Which knocks seven shades of poo poo out of the 2560 Mega in cost, features and capability. Running linux isn't really a good thing here. Things like machining really should be backed by a hard realtime OS. With soft guarantees, and only 700mhz, I'm no sure its a good solution without external buffering hardware. There are realtime linuxes available, such as RTLinux. All in all you're talking about more work to get the hard scheduling that a bare microcontroller gets out of the box. In the world of physical computing, there's also a bit of a false economy going here. The Raspberry Pi has very little general purpose I/O on it and no ADC. My projects have never used ethernet or a monitor display. On the other hand, they use lots of digital and analog input. For a Raspberry Pi you'd have to buy a general I/O board to do that kind of thing, which is estimated at something like $20. Which pushes it back into the Arduino range, and above the 3rd party clones. I'm not saying it's a bad project by any means, I'm saying its a hammer, and many of these problems are screws, not nails.
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Feb 1, 2012 17:50
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peepsalot posted:Yeah moving away from arduino to ARM processors is going to kick rear end. There's lots of work being done currently on new board designs and firmware. Arduino isn't a processor, its a platform. It currently happens to use the Atmel's AVR processors, instead of ARM processors. There are plans for the Arduino Due which will be an ARM based arduino. If it will get traction, either in reprap or overall remains to be seen. peepsalot posted:Smoothie firmware looks promising: http://smoothieware.org/ Another board to look out for is the R2C2, it's shown itself to run at some pretty good speeds. That said, there are some barriers to fully integrated boards. First off, repraps have frequently been evolving projects, today's fully integrated board is tomorrow's half a board with another board providing new functionality. Partially integrated boards have this same issue, but they don't use full integration as a selling point. Another is that fully integrated boards typically fix you to a single CPU's with a set of limits, the Sanguinololu is a relatively early example of a rather highly integrated board, and it's cpu has almost no headroom left in either GPIO or space for more featureful firmware. A daughter board allows the possibility of simply attaching it to a more advanced micro controller setup. Basically there a good chance that the RAMPS will work with the Arduino Due when it comes out, which may increase it's longevity. Another one is that a fully integrated board basically implies manufactured. Reprap boards avoid SMD components when possible for ease of home assembly, when they do use them, it's almost always relatively large resistors and capacitors. Reprappers want kits to assemble, or even source themselves, to save money. Gen 7, for example uses no SMD components what so ever. Processors with reasonable capabilities are all SMD, with many many tiny close together leads. USB to UART is almost always SMD. Stepper motor drivers are SMD, and so forth. To allow for this kind of thing, and still let home assembly be widespread, they basically abstract these devices as daughterboards, and just plug them in a socket, as though it simply was a single component. On the other side, we have things like the Gen 6 electronics. Professionally made, fully integrated, no daughterboards, no sockets, lots of SMD. Difficult to make at home. It's a pretty good solution that is completely integrated, if it has a fault, it's that it's the same low on headroom CPU as the popular Sanguinololu. The Gen 6 is not very popular. Why? Because only one set of people make it. It's designed to be professionally made, and not many outfits that make that kind of item wish to go into such a focused product. Instead they make the microcontroller boards that go into anything. They make the stepper motor breakout boards. And so forth. For those that do wish to make a board especially for reprappers, they'll make something that they know is popular. It may get to tightly integrated boards, but while it has its benefits it's actually cross purposes to what many people are actually working.
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Feb 2, 2012 04:21
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peepsalot posted:I'm sorry, you're right. I'm just having a lovely day and being an rear end in a top hat for no reason. I'm going to shut up about the serious business of thread titles now. With a little modification, those would be pretty awesome for ye olde makerspace. Just add the name on one of the side of the model before you print it off. While we're looking at cool things we've recently found, how about a printable lathe?
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Feb 2, 2012 05:05
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InternetJunky posted:The metal miniature I posted and the yoda figure from that link are not comparable because they are created using completely different methods (metal casting versus being built layer by layer). However, the resin system uses (ultraviolet?) light to cure the resin with way more precision than 5 LPFG (layers per finger groove Actually, it isn't that much better. The yoda figure has a calculated layer height of 74 microns. Junior Veloso says that his resin printer has a layer height of 50 microns. The smoothness you see is due to the viscosity of the resin not allowing sharp cutoffs between layers, not tons an tons of layers. Now the difference between 50 and 74 is almost 50%, but a few months ago 100 micron height was bleeding edge FDM. Even when FDM goes past 50 micron, it will probably still look worse than lower resolution resin because it's layers still won't be blended together.
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Feb 4, 2012 02:24
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) if I understand the build process correctly.
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Claes Oldenburger posted:Haven't people reported 20 microns with ultimakers? I was about to ask you if you meant 200 microns (.2mm) because that's been possible for a while, and that 74 micron one is amazing. Before I made that post, I decided to look it up instead, and lo there are people claiming 20 microns. Here's a 20 micron yoda. No microscope pics though. Here's some more high res ultimaker stuff.
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Feb 4, 2012 21:34
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kafkasgoldfish posted:I'm waffling between that and the Replicator. The Ultimaker has a larger print volume but the Replicator sports a dual head which could run water soluble PVA for support structures. I could've sworn the Ultimaker guys had a dual head setup they were going to release but I can't find dick about it, just the Ultimaker+ which also isn't available for general consumption. If it helps you decide, the ultimaker would be the faster of the two. One of the the problems with dual head ultimaker is related to the bowden extruder as well. Makerbot's extruder is directly driven, so it's much easier to control oozing when one of the heads isn't printing. All of the tension in the bowden cable is much harder to deal with. While it doesn't apply to either of you, I'd like to remind everyone else of the bang for your buck option. A nicely optioned Huxley kit for less than 700 dollars. Less than half the price, and still capable of good results.
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Feb 5, 2012 19:26
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Anta posted:What do you guys think about the Printrbot? It looked good to me and I'm way too lazy to source all those parts myself, so I ordered one while it was on Kickstarter. I've yet to see the price beaten at least. On the one hand, ~500 is definitively low cost for a complete printer kit. On the other hand, much of the cost savings come from massively cutting back on bracing. The cantilevered combined z and x axis guide rods will not stand up to rapid movements without shifting. It means that you'll need to print slower for equivalent quality. I do like the vertical arrangement of the x axis though. People have worked on Mendel modifications in that area, and it's a good idea here too. I guess the take away is that it's good deal over all. You can definitely spend more and get less. When you want to upgrade its capabilities, he is making a good effort to make it along the reprap development model and support end user tinkering and experiments in upgrading it. At least some of which will probably be Mendelesque bracing. If you were willing to source it all yourself, you'd get a more capable machine for the same money, but it's a sliding scale between machine, effort and money. I guess that's really my biggest reservation. I really want to say buy more of a machine now so you don't have to later, but that's not always the right answer or all I'd ever say is buy Ultimakers.
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Feb 15, 2012 06:27
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Obsurveyor posted:From what I have read, oval shape and inconsistent diameter are the two common characteristics of cheap filament. There's Nophead's blog. The official Makerbot blog is also often worth reading. The official reprap blog has a number of gems and experiments. There's the partially defunct and mostly unfindable reprap builders blog is kinda similar to the forum, gems and useless items in equal abundance. peepsalot posted:One of my most favorite of recent announcements is the Tantillus. Latin for "so small" Looking into this one, they're doing something new with the mechanics: quote:Uses an interesting drive train: low cost wire rope (fishing wire) or High test Braided fishing line instead of costly belts (It wraps 5 times around the rod and then goes through a hole and wraps an additional 5 times resulting in no slip). This is a roll on roll off system with a fixed anchor in the middle. I wonder if this kind of setup may displace timing belts. error1 posted:The silver dragon print is how the ultimaker performs usually, you have to spend quite some time removing strings because there's a pressure buildup inside the bowden feed mechanism.
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Feb 19, 2012 03:47
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peepsalot posted:The difference is that none of those showoff prints really have to deal with any retraction. They are very solid countours. Bowden setups are always going to be more difficult to control retraction than with a more direct drive. The yoda heads would, also the rabbit ears. On the other hand those are far and away the messiest prints on that page, so good catch there.
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Feb 19, 2012 08:02
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insta posted:Brutstruder uses a custom 5:1 planetary reducer that goes onto a NEMA17 stepper motor with a metal drive gear. 4 springs provide the tension, and the gear teeth dig in way deeper than the hobbing on a Wades/Gregs extruder. Its strong enough that it tends to break hotends instead of stripping teeth, so make sure your firmware has minimum-temperature-to-extrude prevention Both the Brutstruder on the reprap wiki and on thingiverse (also this one) are DC Gearmotor designs. They use the Gearmotor off the Mk4 or Mk5 Makerbot Plastruders. There are a few adapter plates for using a stepper motor on a Brutstruder on thingiverse, but none of them have a planetary reducer. Makergear has a stepper extruder with an integral gearbox. I've found some evidence that the brutstruder may have been inspired by trying to make a makergear style extruder without having access to the custom geared stepper. They certainly share a number of features. The makergear extruder also references a Bruthead Filament Drive.
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Mar 1, 2012 06:06
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Solkanar512 posted:So I just found the thread and was looking around Thingiverse and found the following. There are hobbyist class laser cutters in the sub 2k region. Like this one. There's also the Lasersaur which aims to produce an open source style cutter, they're most of the way to the 1.0 version. Their current BOM prices out the lasersaur to around $6,700. That said, the 2k FSLaser is a 40W cutter and the lasersaur is 100w. FSLaser doesn't offer a 100w cutter for less than $10000. I'd like to note a few things. One, I have no idea about the relative capabilities of 100w vs 40w. Two, I don't really know typical pricing of a 40w cutter, the FSLaser may well be an excellent deal, or maybe not. Most of the money in the Lasersaur is not in the laser(only around $1200), so you won't save much money going to a weaker laser if you choose to make one. Aurium fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Mar 3, 2012 |
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Mar 3, 2012 05:11
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Cockmaster posted:More power basically lets you cut thicker and tougher material. I think 100W even lets you cut thin sheet metal. Is 40w enough for say 1/8"-1/4" plywood/MDF/Acrylic? Here's a SLS wax printer. It looks more like a Selective Laser Melting than Sintering to me though. Either way same process and work cycle. More info here. peepsalot posted:SLS doesn' have to be metal. Did somebody say lens focused heat?
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Mar 11, 2012 04:13
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peepsalot posted:Heh, i had a feeling someone might post that link. It's an interesting proof of concept, but the focus/resolution is worse than candyfab. I'm thinking something smaller scale, more precise and consistent. So you admit to being just being an enabler to my solar sintered fantasies do you? Anyway, instead of lenses and fiber guides, I wonder if you could use a DLP setup to focus and direct light to a single spot.
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Mar 11, 2012 07:40
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SniperWoreConverse posted:Run it with an air based fluidic "brain," let it self-replicate and bam, silicon based life. Did you see this DIY inkjet? Their thingiverse page has most of the documentation. I also like plotters, which scale up really nicely too. insta posted:Apparently inkjet printers use a piece of plastic with variable opacity so the print head can determine where it is along the sheet of paper. I bet if you replaced the rods, belt, and that plastic strip you could scale it as wide as you want. Some also use gray codes for positional sensing, which could be expanded easily as well. Back before optical sensors got nice an cheap, most were run by stepper motors.
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Mar 12, 2012 03:51
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Rodney Chops posted:Trying to figure out if I want to start building a huxley or a mendal. Does anybody here have a Huxley? How limited is the smaller build area? I plan on just messing around with thingverse items... I should be ok 90% of the time? It's not very limiting at all. Many of the Thingiverse users are Makerbot users. The Huxley has a larger build area than a Makerbot. einTier posted:OK. I'm interested in 3D printing myself. It's literally a very limited replicator. I'm not interested in building BIG things, but I am interested in building very small quality things. Direct metal printing in the hobbyist price bracket (eg, less than $10,000) is basically impossible. Wax printing is possible using professional machines is possible, but if you could get the 10k together it could be done. DIY style wax printers are still in their infancy. You don't need wax to cast. Printed ABS or PLA parts are cleanly burnt out in aluminum casting. Take a minute and look though these. They were printed on an ultimaker, which basically has the current best quality FDM plastic printer, it's under $2,000.
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Mar 22, 2012 18:01
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On lost plastic vs lost wax casting. If you do plastic master for a wax mold, you gain the ability to quickly crank out duplicates, printing takes longer vs filling a bunch of molds with wax. What you loose though is shape complexity as there are shapes out there that reusable molds simply cannot make. Basically, internal and some overlapping features. One big example is engine blocks, you need to make multiple sacrificial molds and join them up before casting to produce all the internal features. For one offs, the only times I can think that a two step process would justify its effort is if you were casting something with a low melting point that it couldn't burn out the plastic, or if you had need of incredibly strict purity control. Even then you could do a conventional lost wax process and burn the plastic out in a separate firing.
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Mar 22, 2012 22:26
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