I finished printing all the plastic parts needed to build a Prusa Mendel. Also a box of hardware and motors I ordered from Mixshop arrived so I was able to start assembling.
I decided to print all the plastic parts with 30% infill except the pulleys and gears which I did at 50% infill. I used a 0.28mm layer height, 0 extra shells and 2.88mm ABS filament in Print-O-Matic to print them on my Thing-o-Matic.
I followed Gary Hodgson’s excellent Visual Guide to Prusa on my iPad…made it really easy to see what order the parts needed to be attached and assembled.
I’m still waiting on some PLA bushings I ordered from eBay that are needed before I finish assembling the frame. They should arrive next week sometime.
As you can see from the photos, I opted to go with the army green coloured plastic parts. They printed really well and I think the end result looks pretty cool. I still have to assemble the extruder which I printed in ‘nuclear green’ but I may reprint it in a better matching colour (I can always sell the nuclear green parts).
The Prusa beside my Thing-O-Matic
After much research, I decided to order the necessary electronics for the Prusa from Ultimachine. I’ve placed my order for their pre-assembled RAMPS (RepRap Arduino Mega Pololu Shield board – basically a stack of electronics that runs the Prusa), Kliment’s SD RAMPS (an add-on that lets me print from SD cards without a computer attached), a heated build platform (which almost doubles the print area from my Thing-o-Matic) and a few pounds of PLA (green and blue) so I can print as soon as it’s all assembled.
Cost so far (including shipping and taxes) in case you’re interested in building your own:
Mixshop motors & hardware: $325
Ultimachine electronics & PLA: $364
Total: $689 not including plastic printed parts
Keep in mind I did purchase some higher end and brand new parts. You could easily bring this cost down by getting used motors from ebay, sourcing cheaper electronics (or buy them unassembled to save some money if you can solder).
That’s it for now until some more parts arrive or I assemble the extruder. I’ll leave you with this video that I hope to replicate soon enough when the electronics arrive and I get to test out the stepper motor operation:
As part of my continuing adventures with a 3D printer, my next project is printing an actual 3D printer, the opensource Prusa Mendel, a Reprap derivative. Well, printing a good portion of it anyways.
Aside from a larger build platform which utilizes a slightly different way of printing from my MakerBot (both the extruder and build platform move at the same time vs just the build plafform on the MakerBot), I’ll use it to print with PLA filament which is corn based instead of ABS plastic. As well, I’ll be using a smaller, thinner filament size (1.75mm vs the 3mm ABS I’m using with the MakerBot). PLA smells like candy when it’s being extruded and is bio-degradable too! Unfortunately, it’s not food grade so you can’t print candy..yet!
During the recent Vancouver Maker Faire, I got to see a number of Reprap printers up close, including those built and maintained by Wade himself, the man behind the geared extruder design I’m going to be using.
Hardware and motors have already been ordered. Just need to print all the parts for the frame & extruder (the green/red items in the illustration) and decide on a hotend and electronics package.
Total cost should be ~$500.
I found this incredibly detailed video of the process of printing with the Prusa Mendel on YouTube that should give you some more information if you’re curious about the Prusa:
Update: Already have Wade’s Geared Extruder printed:
Turned out awesome in Nuclear Green…the whole Prusa will be printed in this color of ABS. Printing the gear with 50% infill seems like a good torture test of any 3d printer:
It’s an add on module (aka a shield) for the Arduino hardware platform. It basically gives the Arduino the missing bits of electronics to be a self contained 8-bit videogame platform including VGA and sound ports to connect to your tv or computer monitor and speakers. Needless to say, it was wildly successful as a Kickstarter project and is now available from a bunch of distributors around the world.
I received my own Gameduino (each is individually numbered and tested) in short time after the Kickstarter closed and immediately had Space Invaders up and running on it:
I had this arcade style controller from the original Xbox days in my garage and thought it would make the perfect ‘host’ for the Gameduino since it has a joystick and a lot of buttons already mounted in a sturdy, wooden box.
Fortunately, it was very easy to remove the Xbox controller portion and wire in the Arduino/Gameduino:
I was even able to mount it inside using an Arduino holder that I printed with my 3D printer:
There is already a large community of people playing with the Gameduino libraries and some really cool games and remakes are coming out. Like Frogger which is the basis of one of the game design tutorials:
I haven’t had nearly as much time as I had hoped to mess around with the Gameduino but I’ve got some fun ideas to use it for beyond playing Frogger.
Easily the highest resolution model I’ve printed so far on my MakerBot coming in at a whopping 147mb (versus 1-5mb for a complex model on average). It took forever to render the toolpath in Replicator G but was worth it!
It took just under 3 hours to print this hollow (0% infill with 1 extra shell for those that care):
Note the clean white lighting inside the MakerBot – another upgrade performed this weekend to go with the green LED lighting which I can switch between or use both for a softer green light effect.
Aside from a few dropped loops that cleaned up easily, it printed really well. A dropped loop happened in his mouth that makes it look like he’s sticking his 900 year old tongue out.
I think I’ll scale this model down a bit (there is already a lower res model derivative on Thingaverse) and make a small army of them for friends.
Waiting for the Lucasfilm take down notice in 3…2…1…
Last month, I was invited by GM Canada up to Alaska to try out the 2011 Chevy Volt ahead of the Canadian launch happening this fall. My first encounter with the Volt was during the 2010 Winter Olympics when I got to drive a pre-production model on a test track.
Earlier this year, I also got to briefly drive a production Volt during SXSW as part of their ‘Drive a Chevy’ promotion where they basically offered taxi service to all attendees in Austin and let you drive the car to your destination.
This time though, I got to really try out the production model over the course of the better part of a week. As soon as we landed in Anchorage, Alaska, we were given our ‘own’ cars for the duration of the trip.
I’m actually a target consumer for the Volt. My current commute is just under 70 kilometres roundtrip from Port Coquitlam to North Vancouver each day. With the Volt’s electric range being around 86 kilometres on a single charge, I could easily go to and from work without charging and still have some range for some shopping trips on the way home.
Once the electric battery is depleted, the Volt will seamlessly switch over to power the electric engine using a conventional gas engine where it can continue for nearly 400 more kilometres. Unlike some hybrids, the switchover is unnoticable since the Volt just maintains the electric batteries with the gas engine and doesn’t directly drive the vehicle.
There are more and more options for charging an electric vehicle. Many hotels now offer at least a couple of stalls with power in their parking lots and recently in Vancouver, local parking company, EasyPark announced a pilot program to have a handful of electric outlets designated for electric vehicles in their lots around the city.
While it is possible to charge the Volt via a regular household outlet, it takes about 10 hours to fully charge a depleted battery. If you have access to a 240V outlet (like what your washer/dryer would use), you can charge the battery in about 4 hours. A 240V outlet can easily and cheaply be installed in your garage. The trunk of the Volt has all the connecting cables you need to plug in anywhere using the outlet on the opposite side of the vehicle from the gas tank.
I really enjoyed driving the Volt while in Alaska. As you can see in this short time-lapse video of the road trip, it’s a beautiful place and reminds me quite a lot of BC:
The roadways around the peninsula were surprisingly flat considering we were in quite a mountainous area. So while the Volt has a number of drive handling modes, I couldn’t really tell much difference between them considering the roads were pretty consistent the whole trip.
I’m looking forward to the chance to check out the Volt again once it launches in Canada later this year…and seeing how it really stacks up on my own daily commute. According to GM Canada, the costs of operating the Volt in BC is 1/5 the cost of a comparable gasoline only vehicle. That seems to be a pretty compelling reason to look into this technology closer, not to mention the environmental impacts of using less gas overall.
I stumbled across this clever animated short film called FULL PRINTED about how 3D printing is useful as well as a potential future of this technology.
I don’t often watch the fireworks from the beach, but thanks to some free tickets, I was able to view them from the bleachers at English Bay. We showed up just before the show started thanks to assigned seating and got out of there as soon as it was over easily.
Since I had a guaranteed seat on a stable grandstand, I decided to bring my camera and tripod and shoot some photos. I’ve never been happy with my photos of the fireworks but it’s usually because I can’t be bothered to try different settings once it’s all setup…not to mention the ‘randomness’ of the fireworks display and trying to capture just the right shot.
So, I decided to package up all my photos taken during the evening, about 550 of them, into a time-lapse where you can view the entire display in about 40 seconds:
Recently I printed Stephen Colbert’s head on my MakerBot (in ‘John Boehner orange’ as someone in the comments on Flickr pointed out):
and made a timelapse of the nearly 2 hour print process:
and then Cory Doctorow blogged about it on BoingBoing.net (thanks to Darren for submitting it).
Which then lead to my “A few weeks with a MakerBot…” post getting picked up by the Spanish version of Digg and over 30,000 hits in 24 hours to the post plus all kinds traffic to other posts and on Flickr.
I’ve had my MakerBot Thing-O-Matic 3D printer up and running for a few weeks now and thought I’d document some of the things that I’ve learned during this process. Hopefully these items will help someone else who’s interested in the world of 3D printing.
Keep in mind these thoughts are based on my experience assembling and using a MakerBot Industries Thing-O-Matic (serial number 4190) in June/July 2011. Many things, like the assembly instructions wiki, can change as well as the iterative design and manufacturing process used to make the Thing-O-Matic (ToM for short). Your ToM may or may not resemble mine depending on when you bought it.
Yes, it’s as awesome as you think it is.
I get asked daily about my 3D printer…it’s pretty wild to blow people’s minds when you explain what a 3D printer is and show them samples (I usually carry a few prints with me)…and you will get asked if you need 3D glasses to view the printed objects.
I’ve been able to print some pretty complex objects…some with multiple hours of printing of multiple parts but the end results have been awesome. I’ve also been printing some very useful objects like this Arduino PCB holder which I used in a project that I’ll be posting about soon:
A few technical notes:
Automated Build Platform (ABP) versus the Heated Build Platform (HBP)
The idea of the ABP is awesome – you hit print, the bot prints your item and then ejects it via a conveyor belt. It’s like magic.
It really is a cool concept. Except it caused me a lot of grief. Why? Printing with plastic requires a print surface that will hold it in place as subsequent layers of plastic are applied. I found that the conveyor belt would cause the prints to rock back and forth as the print head went over them causing curling and warping around the edges. Or worse case, it would cause the print head to knock the print free and basically lose it’s place in the print.
After reading extensive forum and wiki posts about the various platforms, I opted to assemble the Heated Build Platform. I had already ordered the aluminum build plate so I used that along with the 2″ 3M blue painters tape as a top layer. The difference in print quality once up and running was astounding. I then ordered the 4″ Kapton super wide tape which single handedly made for the best prints as of yet. Objects stuck perfectly in place on the platform with no warping, curling or knocked loose prints. I REALLY wish the ABP worked as well as the Kapton tape surface did. It’s like night and day. The only downside is that it can be trickier to remove your prints once finished since they are stuck in place really well. Just make sure to let everything cool for at least 90 seconds before touching it.
If you get one piece of useful advice from me it’s this: skip the (current) ABP and go with the HBP with aluminum build surface covered in Kapton tape.
Does the colour of the ABS plastic matter when printing?
Along with my ToM, I excitedly ordered a 1kg spool of green 3mm ABS plastic. Army green is one of my favourite colours and couldn’t wait to print in that colour instead of natural ABS or something else. Unfortunately, it seems (to me) that it’s possibly one of the worst colours to print with. After getting the ToM all dialled in, I printed a few whistles in natural and green. The natural print looks almost perfect and solid. The green one showed more imperfections and the layer lines were much more obvious. My theory is that it has to do with the pigments used in the ABS filament but I have no idea. I wasn’t able to find any definitive listing or table of ABS colours and their optimal printing speed/temperature/etc. I just received some ‘safety orange‘ and ‘nuclear green‘ ABS filament and like the natural, the prints are near perfect using the default 225 degrees for the print head. I tried all kinds of temperature settings with the regular green and none made a difference.
Installing better lighting
One of the things that first attracted me to the MakerBots were the intense lights I’ve seen many of them have installed in them. I scoured the MakerBot site and couldn’t really find any specifics of ‘pimping out your bot’ but fortunately, Greg @ MakerBot.ca filled me on how it works. So I ordered a set of green LEDs.
Using the MakerBot LED light strips, I simply peeled the 3M tape backing off and stuck them in place around the inside top of the MakerBot. Unfortunately, there is practically no documentation about installing the leds so I had to figure it out for myself. The LEDs are 12V so I used one of the extra lines from the power supply that wasn’t being used. I also printed a button casing for a switch that drops into one of the unused holes on the top of the ToM that I’ll wire up next time I want/need to open the electronics bay (the bottom of the unit).
but have since removed it because the LEDs were too bright and would wash out any photos/video as well, the mount got in the way more often than I’d like when trying to either shoot or monitor the print process. I’ve ordered a meter of the LED light strips in white that I’ll mount in the front sides of the ToM and use that for more even lighting while making timelapse videos or shooting photos.
First thing you should print: some kind of spool management helper!
My ToM came with an unspooled (but coiled) pack of natural ABS. It worked great for awhile just sitting on my desk until I started doing some serious printing then it all went to hell. It uncoiled itself, rather violently on my desk and I wasn’t able to get it all tidy again until I had to cut it to untangle it. It can also cause damage to your printer if it has to work too hard to pull filament into the drive and I’ve had a few close calls – usually from not paying attention to the filament as it unspools.
Even the spooled ABS isn’t 100% trouble free. I had similar issues with it so I printed some spool holders that attach to the frame of the ToM and things are much more under control now. I’ve also printed a heavy duty filament spool for my unspooled filament which I used to wrangle the natural filament that I have and it works great and it gives me options for having lots of colour options on hand for printing.
So to wrap up this post, I’ll conclude by saying that I’m really enjoying my MakerBot. It really does seem like this is a technology just about to really take off. It’s not currently for everyone since it does require a lot of care and maintenance but for those willing to spend the effort, it’s very rewarding and a lot of fun. It’s been a fantastic learning opportunity for me as well.
I’ve got no shortage of objects that I want to print from the Thingiverse and I’m just starting to dabble in some of the 3D software packages out there for creating my own objects.
