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RepRap Printing Competition - #30DoC Day 8

June 8, 2012, 3:07 pm
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I have the excellent job of judging the RepRap Printing competition this week. So for Day 8 of my 30 days of creativity ( #30DoC ) as this is the last day in the competition I thought it was only fitting to share all the amazing creative work done by everyone who entered this week, I have been totally stunned with all the great prints, effort and advice this competition is bringing to the RepRap 3D printing community.

And I'm doing this blog post to help me collect the results so it's easier to see all the great work, and it should make the job of judging a little easier.

The Challenge! -  

Was to print a half sized & quarter resolution version of the great Voronoi D Tower - Math Art by @Dizingof  I made a Derivative version to print here on Thingiverse and my original Forum post to start the competition  is Here.

Image by @Dizingof

Dizingof's Math art is a stunning collection of very hard to print, but amazing models that use mathematical algorithms to generate 3D structures. I didn't realise at the time when I selected this model for the competition that is had a particular connection to RepRap. The inventor of RepRap - Adrian Bowyer pointed out that this particular model is using 3D Voronoi structures and Adrian apart from being famous for RepRap is very famous for the Bowyer-Watson Algorithm, which is one of the standard ways of computing multidimensional Voronoi diagrams.


No Rules this week *

* You can use my Derivative or the Original version or print it at a different size to my derivative, just make sure you state what size and version it was and whatever speed and layer height you like.




The Entries -  
Photos, details and images below are by their respective entrants in the competition.

Me, (RichRap) - Just to get some printing ideas going - Slic3r and Skeinforge prints, one was without any retraction at all!


Leeway - Gold PLA print, no Heated bed
.2 layer height, 3 perimeters and solid fills @45%. Sliced with Slic3r 0-8-2. Temp. 180 C 

billyzelsnack - Printxel. KISSlicer 0.33 layers. Overhead 40mm fan. 20mm/s. 2mm retract. 25mm/s retract speed. 10mm wipe. 1h18m estimate. 1h57m actual.


mhackney - Sliced in Slic3r 0.8.2 
Accuracy: .2mm layer height, 1 first layer ratio, infill every 1 layer 
Retraction: 2 mm len, .5 mm lift, 25 mm/s speed, 0 extra len, 2 mm travel after retraction 
Print Settings: 3 perimeters, 4 solid layers .25 fill density, 45 deg fill, rectilinear fill and solid fill patterns, random starting points, Cooling fan on extruder 

Printer: .5mm nozzle, Mach3/EMC gcode 
Filament: 1.69mm, 1 multiplier, 205 deg C extruder, 110 deg C hot bed 
Print speed: 20 mm/s perimeters, 15 mm/s small perimeters, 60 mm/s infill, 30 mm/s solid infill, 20 mm/s bridges 
Other speed settings: 300 mm/s travel, .5 bottom layer ratio - Took 1 hr 58 minutes to print.


benosteen - 0.25mm layers in natural cream ABS.
On tape prepped w/ a layer of glue (no hot bed or fan)
Mendel Printer

Hoani.cross - Printed in 1h45min 
SeeMeCNC H-1.0 kit 
[*] 0.3mm layer height 
[*] 20/40/60mm/s for small perimeters/perimeters/infill 
[*] 1mm retraction length at 7mm/s with 0.3mm z-lift 
[*] 70% line infill 
[*] 2 perimeters, 3 solid layers

Hoani.cross - 2nd Try and failed attempts (Really great to also see the failures! thanks)


PharoahsMummy - Print time: 1h:25m 
Material used is ABS, heated bed was on at ~110C and nozzle running ~210C. 
Almost no to little cleanup. 
SeeMeCNC H-1.0 kit 
Slic3r settings: 
; layer_height = .20 
; perimeters = 2 
; solid_layers = 4 
; fill_density = .25 
; nozzle_diameter = 0.50 
; filament_diameter = 1.8 
; extrusion_multiplier = 1 
; perimeter_speed = 20 
; infill_speed = 20 
; travel_speed = 120 
; extrusion_width_ratio = 0 
; scale = 1 
; single wall width = 0.70mm 


By Bean - In PLA

Euhedral - 
Printed on an orca 0.40 in PLA. 
No cleanup. 
Took 2.5 hours to print. 

; layer_height = 0.2 
; perimeters = 3 
; solid_layers = 4 
; fill_density = 0.125 
; nozzle_diameter = 0.35 
; filament_diameter = 1.7 
; extrusion_multiplier = 1 
; perimeter_speed = 20 
; infill_speed = 75 
; travel_speed = 500 
; extrusion_width_ratio = 1.535 
; scale = 1 
; single wall width = 0.31mm 

Guillem Tena (RepRapBCN Team) - printed with ABS in a Prusa Mendel smiling smiley 
It is sliced on Slic3er 0.8.2. 
We choose an accuracy of 0.2mm layer height as slic3r had problems slicing at 0.15mm. 
For the construction we put two towers side by side in order to enable each layer to cool easily. 
The temperature for the estruder was 222ºC on the first layer and 220ºC for the rest, and 80ºC for the hot bed during all the construction. 
The print speed have been quite slow, by 20mm/s on the perimeters, slowing it down on the small ones to 15 and 30mm/s on the infill. 


RepRapBCN - Professional SLS print !!
Part made in our Vanguard 2500. 0,1mm/layer and horizontal oriented. 




juslem - Print time was 1:52:04 - 
Unmodified STL from "Print competition Voronoi D Tower 1/4 res 1/2 size by @Dizingof" 
Slic3r + Prusa Mendel + Marlin 

0.25 layers, 25mm/s, 3 perimeters, 0.5 infill, on glass, bed temps first layer 60, next ones 50 


WoW! I hope I didn't miss anyone out, what an amazing collection of prints, machines and settings, I love them all.

The wonderful people over at Faberdashery are offering a £40 voucher to spend at www.faberdashery.co.uk  on their Awesome PLA for the winner again this week!

I'm really thinking we will need a dedicated section for Competition printing, Maybe we can talk nicely to one of the RepRap Admins to get us a dedicated forum under fabrication?

And it true competition style, I'm going to sleep on the decision, so I'll update with the winner in the morning. Thanks to everyone that entered this round, make sure you enter again next week for more challenging fun!


*EDIT* - 

The winner this week -  

It was a very close competition this week and a difficult decision, but after reviewing all the entries I'm going to select billyzelsnack as this week's winner.

Billy's entry made me think and really stuck in my mind - it was printed with the Printxel, one of the lowest cost RepRap printers currently available. And the fact is was done with quite thick layers (0.33) and all the holes came out so well is a great achievement, the base is very good and it made me checkout the Kisslicer,  very impressive.

I'm also highly impressed to see so many excellent ABS prints, especially benosteen done without a heated bed! so that get's a 'highly commended' award and almost pipped Billy's entry to the winning spot.

Over to you Billy - select us a good challenge for next week, and enjoy your great Faberdashery filament.

I would recommend starting a new thread for each week's competition, now that we have a dedicated forum section - thanks Rhys for setting it up.

*EDIT* - 

Thanks for reading everyone,


Rich.


P.S. - Another of my challenging goals at the moment is to print the Ball of Stars by @Dizingof, my latest attempt just finished seconds ago as I got to the end of writing this post - Using new support settings courtesy of Jean-Marc of RepRapPro (Thanks again) I have a much better looking print, but I printed this 100mm sized one very fast (2hours 46 mins) and didn't enable Z lift,so I still have a few issues that slowing down and lift will solve, now I know it's going to work, I will print a bigger one!


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123 Counting Fun for Kids - #30DoC Days 9&10

June 10, 2012, 2:24 pm
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Day's 9 and 10 of my 30 days of creativity ( #30DoC ) involved my Kids, they are always such a massive source of ideas and creative opportunity. We have been doing numbers and basic maths recently with them, using the normal flash cards and coins. They are still not visualising numbers all that well so I decided to try and design a basic set of counters that could form games and number play before bedtime.

The visual numbers board is similar to the ones used in UK schools, but as it's 3D printed I can evolve it over time.

A simple Sketchup design gave me a board of 100 squares, a strip of 10 and a single counter.

The main board is 150mm x 150mm so fits on a Prusa Heated bed, I also used this model to test out the 'Brim' idea to stop warping, see below- 

The 'Brim' as proposed by Idolcrasher here  uses the normal outline that's used to prime the extruder, but given 0mm distance from the part and with more outlines makes a 'Brim' on the border of the thing being printed. the only down-side is that it does not hug the outline of the printed object especially if you print more than one thing at a time.

This was a very large single print, but I was impressed with how level and smooth the first two layers went down, this was quite a mesmerising print to watch, build up, I almost watched the entire thing for over an hour.

It's printing at 80mm/sec so it's really nice to see no gaps in the filament.

I switched to Neon Pink, during the last final layer before doing the numbers.

Very Pink! 

I was very pleased with the end result, and so were the kids. No warping at all thanks to the Brim?

The files are up on Thingiverse here, if you fancy printing a set or improving it.

Thanks for looking,

Cheers,

Rich.
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Mini - MendelMAX - #30DoC days 11,12 & 13

June 13, 2012, 1:21 pm
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I'm getting a little behind Blogging my 30 days of creativity ( #30DoC ) updates, but it has still been going on.

Believe it or not, I do work full time, so getting any time for RepRap is actually extremely tricky, and the daily updates have been getting later and later, so I'm going to blog a few days at a time until the end of the month if I can actually manage to stick it out that long!

One thing this has taught me is that I really enjoy writing up my ideas, developments and adventures with RepRap, but I prefer to do it after a good long session of work rather than every day...

That said, I do think it's pushing me to get around to starting all the many things I have had on my RepRap list for so long. I may not get them finished or even working, but a start is better than nothing, so I'll continue to blog ideas as I think of them and hopefully take a few of them all the way to complete solutions or working prototypes. I also think it may help as I have had so many comments, suggestions and people contacting me with similar ideas, that it's convinced me that a few smaller updates are better than one big one  when the project's finished - let me know what you think?

Mini - MendelMAX -


Recently I have had a need for a smaller machine, that's rock solid, and prints mainly smaller parts with a finer nozzle and 1.75mm filament, so I decided to build up the parts into a mini sized MendelMax (as I had initially planned many months ago, when I built up my first MAX)

Mini MendelMAX - small but great. - progress so far after 3 evenings building up.

It's not all wired up and without electronics or power at the moment.


I printed this set of parts last month, but didn't get around to deciding on a build for them, it's based on the MendelMAX V1.5 and some excellent derivatives I'll talk about below.

The lower vertex sections are the integrated design by Jib there is even a triple height version now!

The Awesome printed Y axis is by tommyc - LM8UU Y carriage for MendelMAX, and I love this design.

I disassembled my earlier frame made of green PLA-V1 MendelMAX parts and replaced them with shiny new Gold and black parts. All the black parts including the Y carriage and Quick-Fit X are made with RepRapsource ABS, all the other parts are printed with Faberdashery PLA.

I'm planning for this to print in both PLA and ABS, so I have made my own smaller heated bed with resistors and PCB Material.


I will be using the little quick-fit  'Huxley sized' extruder on this machine.

The new MendelMAX Y mentioner is really handy, as you can make your belt a little tighter just with a quick turn of the screw on the front.

The lower Motor mounts work very well, and just make the machine even easier to assemble.

For the Z Axis I decided to stick with theM6 threaded rods, they work so much better than M8, this machine will not be doing very high printing, but it will be doing very low layer heights, so M6 being 1mm pitch is a good choice.

The only thing I'm changing is by using an M6 studding connector instead of two M6 nuts, I think this should give me a little more stability, and a little more friction to deal with.

The only other mechanical change I made was to add some little PTFE end-caps to the threaded rod ends, this helps stop them wobbling around and reduces noise.

I also wanted a small printer robust enough to carry around to events and meetings, this should do the trick, it's going to be bomb-proof.

I'll let you know how the rest of the build goes, and also how well it prints.

Thanks for looking.

Rich.
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Nozzle nasties and easy Pikachu #30DoC Day 14

June 18, 2012, 12:20 pm
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I have had the most frustrating last four days, 4 Nozzle jams! 4 of them! Arrrghhh! and I have finally worked out what was causing it, it was not the hot-end or the electronics. I'm too annoyed to write it up now, but I'll do a post tomorrow with an update.

Oh and before all the nozzle jams I did manage an easier to print Pikachu for #30DoC day 14. I should be back on form tomorrow, lots of Ideas, little time.

Rich.
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Jammed Fr!gg!n Nozzle! - #30DoC Days 15...18

June 19, 2012, 3:56 pm
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An update! - life and frustration with things failing on me temporarily got in the way of 3D printing :), but I did managed to design and print a few more things over the last few days while my main printer was down -

Firstly I had 4 jammed Nozzles in the last 4 days ! That's something that has not happened to me for about 9 months now, really annoying, but at least I worked out what was causing it! - I was not amused... see below for an insight and some questions...

This all started because I wanted to print a few things in Translucent plastic, and the only stuff I had was some old (about 1 year) Chinese PLA from Esun, I had given almost all of it away and stopped using it about 9 months ago when I switched over to use Faberdashery, Orbi-tech/GRRF and Ultimachine PLA's.

It seemed to print well and I made a few things, then I did a test print of a new extruder and it jammed up Solid, ground the hobbed bolt and stripped the filament.
The first two failures, little did I know what was causing it - see below - 

I tested a few things and came to the conclusion my hot end had failed in some way so, I disassembled it and investigated.
An hour later I had cleaned everything and checked all the hot-end parts, and it all looked fine so I re-assembled it.

I switched over to some Black Makerbot PLA and finished my test print, It all worked fine.

Then the new Reprap challenge appeared (Impossible Spheres puzzle - proposed by Richgain) and I thought   I would try the translucent (Esun) Chinese filament again - I printed with Yellow, switched to red and back to yellow and then my nozzle Jammed again.

'Bad' Esun PLA - see details below.

With the nozzle hot and some manual pressure on the drive gear I inserted a 0.45mm drill bit into the nozzle, it immediately allowed PLA to extrude out, I twizzled the drill bit and removed it, the nozzle jammed again straight away. I removed the extruder and disassembled it cleaned out the hot-end and continued on printing.

I had another jam and another clean out, then it jammed again so I switched over to some White PLA and attempted to push out the block, it did not work, and after using the drill bit again and having the same results, flow when the drill was inserted and no flow after removal I concluded that something was inside the nozzle and I was pushing it up with my drill bit, it was flowing back down and blocking when the drill bit was removed.

It was only when I cleaned out the nozzle again with the help of the white PLA I noticed a dark spec in the blocked filament.

I thought it was part of my hobbed bolt's teeth to start with, but after looking at it closly I was starting to think it was a ball bearing...


I checked it under a microscope and - I was right! 


This ball bearing was removed from my hot-end after using some PLA manufactured by Esun PLA.

Since this had happened 4 times and wasted quite a lot of my weekend with cleaning out my hot-end I checked over the last 100m of this filament and I found another 3 ball bearings embedded inside the filament!
The question is how and why are there ball bearings in this filament?

I had ignored bubbled in the filament before this as it's a common fault of low-grade / low-cost filament, I just had not expected to have contaminants also embedded inside. Signs of the bubbles along the filament usually indicated a ball bearing close by.

I had four blocks this time and I found 3 more bearings in the remaining filament, god knows how many more  there could have been in the Black stuff I had struggled with in the past?

So if you have any filament with bubbles you can see, check if it also has any contamination in it.

If you were looking to block a 3D printer hot-end in the most effective way, using a ball bearing bigger than the nozzle size is the best way I can think of, so is this an accident or intentional?


I stopped using the Black Esun PLA last summer after it caused so many blockages and fine stringing with my 0.4mm nozzle, I now wonder if they were also ball bearings or other contaminates, 
Image from Last summer (2011) - the black Esun PLA also shattered on me last summer, I still don't know why.

The moral of the story, you get what you pay for, buy materials from a source where you know who makes it, and watch out what you put in your 3D printer. 3D printing is already hard enough without nozzle blockages to deal with.


I will take my revenge on the last 100m of this Esun PLA, it's going to make a nice piece of PLA scrap Art, not that this nasty PLA deserves any more of my attention... I won't be putting any of this in my 3D printers ever again.

Has anyone else had any experiences like this? am I very unlucky?

Translucent plastic can look really amazing, just watch out where you get it from and what's in it!.

I am still after some high quality translucent PLA, if anyone can suggest a good source.

The only other thing that comes out of this experience, is that if we could find a way to control a bearing in a nozzle you could almost completely stop any ooze in a dual extruder set-up, we were recently discussing how to overcome dual extruder dribble over on the forums, if someone can think of a valve, I can now vouch that a ball bearing makes a perfect blockage and a 0.45mm drill bit acting as the 'pin' releases it.

And now my printer is back up and running I managed a nice print for the RepRap Competition with my Faberdashery PLA -
Slic3r 0.8.3 - 0.3mm layer height, 60mm/sec print speed, 0.5mm nozzle (or so I hope after all the blocking and clearing incidents!).





I feel better now, having vented all that.

I have some Raspberry Pi, a new extruder prototype and some other interesting things waiting to print out, I'll catch up on my missed #30DoC days now.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Rich.
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Ball joints, Fans, RPi, Hearts and fairy dust - #30DoC Days 19 to 22

June 22, 2012, 3:16 pm
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Hello, and I hope you are having a good day? Here is an update of my RepRap adventures over the last few evenings -

For #30DoC - Day 19 I printed the Impossible Sphere for the weekly RepRap competition (see last post)-

Here is another one at 0.2mm layers - using the SCAD script richgain posted a few days ago -

I have not yet tried Greg's high resolution version, but it's on my list.

Day 20 was a Raspberry Super Pi Case - On thingiverse Here - It's a jazzed up version of the great case by HansH with added mounting ears and SD card support, light guides, etc.

Here it is in 'Special Edition' Gold and Glow in the Dark!




I also have my Printer running from my Raspberry Pi, with The Arduino, as it still does an ideal job due to the limited I/O on the RPi, I will do a separate post on setting up the RPi with Pronterface for RepRap printing. The Raspberry Pi is my excuse to finally learn more about Linux, so maybe you can give me some pointers along the way. There is also an active post in the RepRap forums on RPi, Pronterface and RepRap If you want to join in the development ideas with Raspberry Pi and RepRap.

Day 21 was an attempt to make a direct-able fan mount for MendelMax (and any other printer) - I have been using fans on and off for about the past year when printing in PLA, I'm really keen to understand how fans help with the build process, so in an attempt to learn more I wanted a mount I could direct airflow across, along, and even cyclone around my printed objects.

I used the ball joints from the great Fully printable PCB Vice by Sneakypoo as a starting point.

I love the Screw and threaded ball joint, it works perfectly.

The idea was to have it mount on the MendelMax 20mm Aluminium frame - but you attach it to any surface or bars with ty-wraps.

Above is the Vertical mounted fan.

As the ball joint can't quite do all angles, I have also done a Horizontal mount with M3 nut-trap (above), but not had time to test it yet, looks like it fits the 80mm fan just fine.

I have not yet had a chance to fit them to the MendelMax quite yet, but I'll keep you updated how well they work.

And for speed control I'm using a standard PC fan controller as they are just a few pounds, and give me individual control of four PC fans, it was easier to buy one than make up my own.
It also has one input power feed so you could still control it from the RAMPS Fan output but with the bonus of having individual power levels for all four fans.

The Universal 80mm Fan mount files are up on Thingiverse Here - 

For Day 22 we needed some urgent printed gifts for my daughters birthday party gift bags - after a bit of discussion and searching Thingiverse we decided on a secret box to store precious things or fairy-dust in, magic!

I first thought of the stratasys demo pot but that didn't quite hit mark -

Then we discovered the many twisted Boxed by Wizard23 and decided a Heart box would be great, check them out, they are all fantastic and they fitted together perfectly.


I needed to print 15 of them - here is a work in progress action shot -

Getting the size just right, they are very quick to print.

Printed in perfectly ideal colours from FaberdasheryButtercream and Cherry blossom pink - that reminds me, if you want a filament that sticks really well to your heated bed, I have yet to find a type or colour that sticks as well as Buttercream, from my experience with it, it's close to warp-proof.

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I have also just got my new extruder prototype assembled, and it works! with a simple first test - I just need to change the design a little as it's almost impossible to assemble at the moment. - More on that next week.
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Thanks for reading, more soon.

Cheers,

Rich.

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More Scrap Art, Gearboxes and PanelMax - #30DoC Days 23 to 26

June 28, 2012, 3:06 am
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Greetings,

I have a long....... list of things to print, make and design, most of them take much longer than a day to do, so as a final push for #30DoC I wanted to do some of the quicker things that have been on my list for ages.

Starting with another go at PLA Scrap ART - this time to celebrate my 30 days of creativity in 3D printing.

I was doing a lot of cooking on Day 23 in preparation for a birthday party on the 24th. :) So some PLA ART was a good choice to break up the day.

Day 23 -  
It has some of the scrap I collected during the last 30 days or 3D printing, and was melted in layers in the oven - Here is how to do it -

I used a fully Aluminium picture frame this time.

Staring off with a plate of translucent red (the only failure from my number counting day) and some clear pla from failed ball of stars experiments. Let that melt for 10 minutes at 210 Degrees C on a baking tray.

Add more layers of scrap plastic - most of this was from the Half a ball of stars test, melt again.

Print a quick and rough logo. Add various spare parts likethe planetary gears (see below) and cook for another 8mins.


Done.


Day 24 - I Did nothing to do with RepRap or3D printing  :)

Day 25 - Was finally time to make up an LCD screen for my Max


PanelMax interface - I bought the parts a while ago and had not found the time to make it up. It's not quite up and running just yet, as I was missing a connector and suitable Pot for the contrast.

I'm putting the LCD and SDRAMPS connections to just one dual row 0.1" box header connector, it made wiring very easy and connection to RAMPS 1.4 almost foolproof.

It's going to be used with my MiniMax printer as a stand-alone system for portable printing.

Tommyc has an excellent Blog post about it here and the files are upon thingiverse here, best of all it works with Marlin firmware.

Think3DPrint3D also have a post on a version of the Panelmax here
I'll update when it's all working with my printer.

Day 26 was all about the awesome new RepRap challenge, set this week by Greg Frost.
It was the turn of the Tiny Planetary Gears set by aubenc.


I had not tried to print this before, so gave it a go using Slic3r V0.8.3.
I had a few issues with the tiny planet gears getting in-filled but resolved that and managed to get some sets printed out.


Pearlescent White for the basic two gear set, all printed well apart from my filled in planets, don't worry I'll do those again later separably.


A nice Buttercream expansion set to make it a 4 stage gearbox.


The sets were printing very quickly and I had two printers doing them, so I thought, why not make the bolts much longer and go for some more stages.


So I made some much longer bolts in Sketchup from the originals. Just over 86mm tall.


They printed fine on their own, so now I just needed more sets of gears - 






Everything fitted together so perfectly.






It ended up as a Six stage gear-set, the longer bolts are up on Thingiverse here as a derivative.

I'm delighted with how it came out, and how well it works, it's a really great design and goes together very well indeed. it's nice to watch the motion, each planet is a different colour so you can see them orbit around the centre shaft. After about 4 stages it's almost impossible to see them turning, but they do move,just very slowly indeed.

Just one more thing before I go - 


I was reading the RepRap Forum while the gear-sets were printing and Enlightx mentioned some experiments with adding primers to heated beds for PLA, I liked the idea of PVA so I tried it out.


I used a 1:8 mix of very low-grade PVA glue and water so it was very thin, brush it onto a heated bed and it dries in less and 1 minute.


I tried it out on two different printers at the same time, one was printing a Green gear set, I raised the starting layer by 0.1mm and it stuck down really well, no problems in the print and they removed with a little force when cold. I had very nice printed parts with no bottom lip at all, that was the best gear-set I printed.


The other printer was set at 0.2mm higher than I would normally print a 0.3mm layered print. This means the first layer of filament is barely touching the heated bed, this would normally result in the print becoming detached or warping very badly. That was my way to test if it was better or worse than mirror-glass as a print surface.


The Print completed and I was very surprised to see not a single bit of warp or the parts detached from the bed. When I turned the part over you can clearly see how little was attached to the PVA primed Mirror-glass surface.


This Extruder body is 100mm wide and about 80mm high, I have has slight warp with it before even when really squashing down the first layer, so I was amazed how well this worked.




I need to print some more things, but at the moment thinned PVA applied to the heated bed looks like a very good idea. Thanks for the discovery Enlightx!


I printed three sets of parts on this PVA treated heat-bed, almost all of the PVA stays on the glass, and if you need to touch it up, when you apply more it all melts and re-forms into a new smooth layer. It's looking like a  very nice surface to print PLA onto. Give it a try if you can.

As always, thanks for reading, and let me know what you think and how 3D printing is going for you.


I have also noticed a significant increase in visitors from Japan to the Blog over the last few weeks, so if you are reading in Japan, Konnichiwa :) do leave a comment and let us know how you are doing.

Rich.


P.S. - And before I forget, Slic3r V0.8.4 is OUT, and it now does a perfect job of printing the gear-set above without the odd infilling of the planets I was experiencing with V0.8.3. It also has lots of other upgrades and changes making this one a must upgrade for anyone using the Slic3r, go get it now, it's great!

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Geared Peristaltic Quick-Fit Pump Extruder experiments

August 3, 2012, 2:59 am
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Even before my universal paste extruder, I have had it on my list to re-investigate the peristaltic pump at some point.

This was one of the last things I started for my 30 days of creation back in June #30DOC.

Many peristaltic pumps are already on Thingiverse, but none of them really jumped out at me, so I decided to design a geared version of the peristaltic pump for use on my Quick-fit X carriage.


My main aim for this project is to be able to pump and therefore extrude and print with cements, plasters, clays and super saturated sugar solutions, but small steps, first I need to get it working.


I was very aware that the tube is a really critical factor in any peristaltic pump, it can make or break a perfectly good design.


I had seen some designs that used quite inflexible plastic tubes and Motor's directly driving the pump mechanism, all leading to low performance and high torque requirements, that looked like a bad idea to me, so I decided from the outset to use Silicone tube and a herringbone gear set along with 4 bearings in an attempt to reduce pulsing of the pumped material to a very minimum.




My first prototype used a 6mm silicon tube with 4mm internal dimension, it was not as soft as I wanted, but was all that was available from my local aquarium shop.




The design went well but had one major flaw, it was almost impossible to assemble! I could not get the set of bearings in place while the tube was already inserted, and feeding in the tube afterwards was very tricky. 


Around this time I managed to get hold of some other silicone tubes from a model shop, these are normally used as fuel connections in RC models and aircraft.


The pink one was exactly what I was looking for, was soft, but with quite a think wall.


I revised the design dimensions to accommodate the new pink tube and split the top to make assembly possible - this has a lever on top so you can feed in the tube after the bearings are in place, then screw it together.



The second prototype assembled easily and to my surprise actually worked quite well.


It had one flaw, the lever wants to spring out, so the horizontal screw on the left hand side allows the tube to bulge out, it needs vertical pressure on the left hand side, the same as I did on the right.

Problem area for the V2 design.






In the video I'm holding the left hand side down, every now and again it pushes up releasing pressure on the tube, so the pump stops working. That's easily fixed in the next revision V3 below - 

Now you can assemble the pump easily and insert the tube when the gear and bearings are all fitted, then screw down the top clamp.

The tube is retained and fixed in place with this clamp, it uses a 4mm outer (2mm inner) PTFE tube as the nozzle.



Next steps are to attach a motor and work out the esteps then try to print something with some different materials!

I decided to release it now in the early development stages as I have a lot of things going on at the moment and may not be able to do much more on this until after the summer.

And as I type this, I'm exactly at this point with the development, so if you want to join me and maybe even beat me to getting it all working, head over to Thingiverse for the files to print one out and let me know how you get on!
And just to remind you it 's another thing designed to fit on my Quick-fit X-carriage.

Still lots of things yet to resolve with different materials and also if they are going to need to be under pressure to work at the viscosity you need to print out something?

Exciting? I think so, I have visions of a cement printer.... and maybe an unlimited supply of garden gnomes :)

Thanks for reading.

Rich.

P.S. - I also just started up a dedicated website for richrap.com - still early days but it'll grow over time, let me know what you would like to see on it! And I'm not going to stop blogging on here, just do more and more hopefully.

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3-way Quick-fit Extruder and Colour Blending Nozzle

August 23, 2012, 5:54 am
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Three extruder's and One Nozzle - RepRap material blending

Hello everyone, I'm really excited about this one, I hope you like the results - 

Very first print.

It’s taken a while to get this post written up, but a few recent things have really spurred me on to get it finished.

It’s been over a year now since my first layer selective colour experiments and filament joining, not a month of RepRap has passed that I have not thought about multi-colour/material 3D printing.

I started work on colour mixing earlier this year and had some promising results with a basic, manual setup. Things moved onto other 3D printing developments and I got sidetracked for a few months.

Dual extrusion has been the focus for many machines, but this has some significant problems of alignment and oozing of the inactive hot-end and the fact you cant mix/blend materials with two separate hot-ends.

Background - 

I always wanted a single hot-end with multiple driven feeds, so that’s the focus of this particular development.

Before I forget, the files for this project are up on Thingiverse here.

In recent months we have seen some more movement with filament mixing, Adrian Bowyer and Myles Corbett have done ground-breaking work on both multiple fed hot-ends and mixing of plastic filament. The final Report Myles submitted recently is an essential read, great work indeed.

Another wonderful advanced example of layer selective of colour printing has been this set of stunning 3D printed iPhone cases by Matthew Bennett (norcalbarney).
Photo and 3D printed iPhone cases by Matthew Bennett - Thingiverse
Seeing the work by Myles on the RepRap Blogand the prints by Matthew spurred me to re-start and finish off my own rather elaborate colour blending extruder development.

Stop-Start -

I had previously stopped my development because I was having some issues getting two colours to mix well in the nozzle; I introduced mixing slits and a spiral in the PTFE tubes (in and after the PEEK block) and added steps in the nozzle barrel, it had reasonable mixing results but was very tricky to make up by hand.

The same month I saw that Myles had exactly the same issues with the black and white mixing I decided that not mixing the colours well would produce more interesting effects and give more artistic looking prints. So during #30DOC in June I restarted the development and added three feeder tubes. I had initially intended these to be separately driven Cyan, Magenta and Yellow feed, but after some testing realised that all sorts of blends could be made by running single or multiple extruder's at intervals separately or together.

That’s why I’m not calling this extruder a colour mixing setup. I’m opting for blending together 1 2 or 3 materials to produce some really interesting effects. 

Unfortunately my Antique Lathe died in February, which is one of the main reasons this multi-head hot-end didn’t get further development, but with a bit of work I managed to do everything I needed (all of the following below) with just a Pillar drill and hand-tools.

Introduction Video Part 1 -



Building the Extruder's (X3) - 

I’m using a custom variant of the Huxley sized quick-fit extruder from June’s 30 Days of Creativity, along with Herringbone gears and push-fit Pneumatic connections on the bottom.



Many thanks to RepRap Pro for supplying me with the M6 Hobbed bars, these really are made so well and work perfectly with this extruder as it's a modified eMaker Huxley variant.

Quick-Fit 3-way adapter - 

I was going to design a more complex bracket, but I decided to keep it simple for the first test, and as I had plenty of room on my MendelMax X axis, this was the simplest design to test out the idea.



I know! what a monster!


It’s designed to fit on the Quick-Fit Xcarriage.

3-Way Hot-End - (Version 1 - ... it dies a bit later on, but bear with me, it gets better with V2)

Without a Lathe, I decided that I needed a simple hot-end that clamped together; this would allow easy manufacture and experimentation.



First steps were to make a simple over-sized heating block and using a step-drill I bored a stepped hole in the middle, 4mm at the bottom and 14mm at the top.

The nozzle is a M6 brass bolt with a 0.5mm hole, this is cut down to 8mm long and held in place with an M6 brass half nut.

The filament feed tubes would be held in with a block of PEEK clamped down onto the heating block. 

And clamped to the hot-end with a Stainless steel plate.

 Nice and simple construction.

The PEEK block has three holes (you could have more), drilled on a slight angle so they spiral into the stepped heating block. It uses 4mm PTFE tubes to allow the extruders to be angled around the Quick-Fit X-Axis plate. 


I was aware this was not going to last a long time, but I wanted something simple to test the idea with actual driven extruders first.

I was expecting rope seal adhesive to be a good way to bond the PTFE tubes into the PEEK, but this turned out to be a very bad plan. Maybe my Rope seal is just no good, I still have yet to get any reasonable results using it. Nophead however uses a different brand for bonding his heating resistors without any issues at all, so I may revisit this compound in the future.

Blending nozzle V1, assembled – the Stainless plate is clamped to the heating block using long M3 Stainless screws, the PEEK has some Copper tape wrapped around it to aid cooling.



This only has a single 6r8 Resistor, so takes a few minutes longer to get to temperature than a ‘standard’ sized heating block, but gives a good stable performance when insulated up.

First manual test, very easy to push the separate filaments by hand, this might just work!


I finished the manual tests and mounted it all on the printer, ready for test and calibration.
Testing each stepper driver, extruder, hot-end heating and thermistor feedback took about 1 hour.

I got it all working and 'calibrated' well enough for a first print, when... the hot-end assembly died. :(
It did print the striped heart box shown in the very first picture in this blog, then slowly the tubes started to pull out of the PEEK block.

The Glass rope adhesive was soft and had allowed the tubes to be pushed out, quite a mess.
I really think my glass rope adhesive is bad or out of date, it only ever seems to get semi-set no matter how long I leave it, even at elevated temperature.

Never mind, lesson learnt and I know exactly how I'm going to make the next one -

3-Way Hot-End - (Version 2 - ... the one that didn't die! and worked gloriously well)

The heating block and nozzle worked perfectly, so I'm re-using that. I just need to make a much better PEEK and tube holder -

Start with some raw materials, 4mm PTFE tubes, PEEK and Aluminium bars. I'm saving up for a new Lathe, but it's going to take a while to get a new one. So at this point I still only have a pillar drill and hand tools, here goes -

PEEK was cut, drilled, then filed and sanded in the Pillar drill to get a domed plug.

Aluminium bar was also cut, drilled and grooved (with a hack saw!) all rotating in the Pillar drill. (who needs a Lathe!)... - I still do actually :(

Holes are tapped M4 threads.

Use a pencil sharpener on one end of each tube, just cut a little.


Picture shows, normal tube at the bottom, lightly sanded (500 grit) middle, top is threaded (see below)

Before you try to cut the thread on a PTFE tube it VERY important that you lightly sand the outer surface of the tube or you will never be able to grip and turn it in the die!

It's quite easy to cut the thread, you can use a piece of sand paper to grip on the sanded tube while you rotate it in the die, don't cut too fast and go both directions.


You do not need to use the liquid PTFE, but I had some and wanted to try it out.


The thread is more than enough to hold in the tube, but I wanted to see if the Liquid PTFE made it easier or harder to screw the tube into the PEEK.

It did add some lubrication, but does not seem to make much difference, most of the Liquid is pushed out, but I feel a little happier knowing it was added.


All done, let it dry and trim the tubes at a 45 degree angle to each other and to the walls of the heating block. 


Once cut you must drill/ream out the PTFE tubes back to be 2mm internal bore, it will have narrowed due to the threading and fitting into the PEEK block. Do this very carefully and make sure you remove all the PTFE swarf.

Then you can assemble it.
This time the stainless plate is clamping both the aluminium heat-sink and PEEK, this works exceptionally well, the Aluminium block stays warm and can be fan cooled if required, Stainless plate is cold.


New V2 hot-end and extruder assembly.

I know what you are thinking, how heavy is that lot! well it's not as bad as you would think, the extruders are lighter because of the Nema14 motors, but still, it's a significant weight - Note:- I'm running this on my BIG MendelMax using M8 smooth rods and it's still working fine.

I'm getting an X/Y travel speed of 170mm sec without any issues at all on my bigger MendelMax, I changed the acceleration down in firmware to 4000mm/sec, and set X/Y jerk to 15mm/sec.

I have tested print speeds of between 20mm/sec and 65mm/sec at the moment. It seems to be most happy at around 45mm/sec and a 1.4mm extruder retraction. (using 3 x 1.75mm Faberdashery filaments)

Electronics Expansion -

Ideally you would need to drive all three (or more) extruder's as separate outputs from the firmware and send sets of Gcode commands to enable and mix the colours for the object being printed. That’s all future stuff and quite doable as the next stage.

For now I'm using my standard RAMPS 1.3 setup with a modified Sanguinololu PCB to act as a stepper expansion board.


I decided as a first development to expand a single Extruder channel to drive 4 separate stepper drivers and control these stepper enable lines separately so filament blending could be tested with just standard Gcode and normal firmware. Slightly crude, but simple and very effective.

You still need to populate some components on the Sanguinololu, and fit Pololu or stepstick drivers. Components around the steppers are required, including the Microstepping select jumpers, these should be set to whatever your normal Extruder drive is set (mine are x8)


You do need to make sure each extruder drive has a separate enable line. Some are shared on the Sanguinolou, so cut the tracks to make them separate.

Also use a 4k7 resistor for the enable pull-ups as the main controller has a very weak pull-up (100k) already fitted on the enable line, if you don't fit smaller ones on this expansion board it won't switch the extruder's off quickly when you disable them.

You only need 5 wires coming from the original Extruder driver, Step, Dir, Enable, and +5V.

The Sanguinololu board must have +12V and GND connected to it's normal power rail input.

The 3 separate extruder drivers on the Sangunnolo are controlled by the single enable line from the main electronics. For ease of testing the enable line can therefore be switched on or off for each extruder. Spare output pins from the micro could easily be used for enabling each extruder, but for a proof of concept, switches allow the easiest way to experiment and evaluate performance and operation.

Make sure you set the trim-pot reference voltages to about 0.42v for NEMA14 motors if you are using Pololu setpper drivers. If you are using Stepsticks, that’s turned about 95% of the way around (about 1A)


All ready to go...

Setting the Firmware-

Now that 1, 2 or 3 extruder's will be driven together, you need to set the Esteps in firmware

For me the Esteps are 360 (x8 micro-stepping) for one extruder. So if you want to run a single extruder at a time and switch individually between them, 360 is the correct number.

More interestingly you can run any two extruder's at the same time, so the two filaments are combined / blended together, you still have three output combinations and it's actually possible to swap out the 3rd inactive filament for a different colour while it's printing using the other two, then switch to another set of two extruder's using the new colour/material. to do that the Esteps need to be half the value as you have two feeds both giving half the volume to the nozzl, 1/2 of the number above = 180

And finally running all three at a time can give some great looking prints and different colours from each direction of the object! to do that you will need 1/3 of the Estep value = 120

It's easier to see the different effects in the video than in the pictures below, but take a look at both.

Video Part 2 - Construction and Prints -



Prints!-

You must be wanting to see some prints by now :) - Here you go -

Single extruder feed at a time, Gold, Red and Blue filaments used.

Single extruder feed at a time, Gold, Red and Purple filaments used.

More pots, Single extruder at a time.
The one at the back also had a colour swap of gold for the last section.



Two extruder's at a time, Pink, Blue and Pearl White filaments used.

You can see in this picture, that Pearl White is the common colour and Pink and Blue are alternated as the print progresses. (Ignore the yellow outline, that was the purge from the previous used colours)

This picture shows the two extruder colours and how they work on a printed object, this is the same part just rotated 180 degrees, using Orange and Silver filaments.

Two extruder's at a time, Punk star Pink (Magenta), Electric Blue (Cyan) and Mellow Yellow filaments.
Here you can see Greens, Oranges, darker Blues and Reds in the mix. 

Lots of stretchlets.

Orange and Glitter*.

This shows the same pot, rotated 180 degrees - Using Cyan, Magenta and Yellow.

Lower part of the frog printed with Magenta and Yellow, top has Magenta one side and Cyan on the other.



Frog - Red, Purple and Gold filaments.

Left frog - Pink and Silver.

Orange, Purple and Glitter*.


A Universal Paste Extruder body printed with Red, Yellow and Pearl White filaments (2 extruders enabled at a time). - Same part, just rotated.




Mega Stretchlet bangle, Red, Yellow and Blue, all on together.

Close-up of Stretchlet - see the 'toothpaste' effect.




I used up all my 1.75mm filament stock in these test prints, but I'm keen to build up a whole printer in glorious multi-colour blended wonderfulness!

And Imagine using different materials, soft PLA for modifying hardness or doing a flexible 'hinge' in the part. or Glow in the Dark with a hint of whatever colour you like for daytime and night viewing.
Mixing both ABS and PLA together would be an interesting experiment, maybe one to try at some point.

For now more work getting the electronics a little more integrated and maybe a multi-fed Bowden version?

Other news - 

Raspberries - 
I had the pleasure of presenting at the recent Raspberry Jam in Bristol on Monday this week, (not 3D printing this time around, but maybe next time) it was a splendid evening and we had some really great presentations and demo's. Thanks to everyone that came for the Jam.

And a big thank you to Patrick for giving me one of his first really nice Laser-cut (home-made) Acrylic Raspberry Pi cases. If you don't want to print one, you can get hold of his very nice version here -

Clay -
I do get lots of messages about the Universal paste extruder, thanks and keep them coming, and I am planning on doing much more, both on clay and other materials and also the Peristaltic pump extruder as soon as I can.
I do have Metal clay to try and also Paperclay (very good for low warp - perfect 3D printing material)


Rostock - 
Finally I need to mention the Rostock delta printer. If you don't already know?, go and read all about it , Right now, it's totally Awesome with a really big A.

Thanks as always for reading, and please post a comment or contact me to say what you think.

Until next time.

Rich.

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TCT2012 show report and Industry growing pains.

September 27, 2012, 9:22 am
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I don’t normally do wider 3D printing industry news on this Blog as it’s a technical resource, but quite a few big things have happened over the last few weeks, that have made many people look in a slightly different light on the whole 3D printing industry. (Makerbot's decision to close source is discussed below)

I visited the TCT Liveshow at the NEC in the UK this week.


Todd Grimm opened the show with his presentation of where the 3D printing and Additive manufacturing industry is in it's life-cycle in a nutshell, "we are not yet ready for consumers using 3D printers" 

I had an interesting & mixed experience at this years TCT show – Quite a different one from last year, let me explain –

So last year I visited TCT in a professional capacity with suit, shirt and tie, this year I decided to go along as a Maker – Jeans and a Woolly Jumper – general enthusiast to see what reception I would get from all these many (different sized) companies looking to sell machines for the next desktop industrial revolution to the ‘general public’

I’m calling my dress code the ‘maker test’ would I get any attention at all from these companies?, I’m sad to say generally most of the companies failed, ignoring me for people in suits that actually had very little interest in their product offerings.

Last year, only Bits from Bytes and A1 technology were representing the lower-end market sector and entry level machines.

This year was very different.

The A1 technology stand was empty; they didn’t turn up on Day 1. 

 3D Systems - Cube - 

My very first stop was on the 3D systems stand, just by accident, but the Cube was on display at the front of the stand with the Cathy Lewis guarding the Cube printer.


(Cathy lewis is the 3D systems representative in the Cnet video shown lower down in this post, in an interview with Makerbot on the Replicator at CES2012)


The Cube was trying to print, but unfortunately very badly, the drive mechanism looked like it was partially blocked resulting in terrible surface quality with lots of little holes and pips where variable extrusion was occurring. It was also printing very slowly and at one set speed (I estimate about 20mm/Sec), with only slightly faster travel speeds.

What is it doing with that bridge? and why is the surface quality so bad. And why has it wasted Raft material on sections with nothing on them! - Poor software!

I stood looking at the Cube for many minutes, many other people in suits asked the same things time and time over, how much is it “$1300” says Cathy, do you have a brochure, “no, sorry we don’t” – How much are the cartridges “$50 each, and they can print about 10 of these” – pointing to a 1.5” high chess piece.


Finally, after everyone else had gone I said to Cathy it was nice to see a big company doing a reasonably low cost machine “yes, some people think we are crazy”.
I asked if she likes the printed cases (pointing to a number of Raspberry Pi cases scattered around the Cube printer) – “yes they are wonderful, people really like them”


Do you know who designed it? I ask, no says Cathy, Well I had a hand in it’s design, really says Cathy, not really believing me. How did we get hold of it then asks Cathy...
Well, you would have got it from Thingiverse, I said. At this point Cathy’s face says it all, she looks really uncomfortable and clearly wants to stop talking to me as soon as possible. We then briefly discussed what a Raspberry Pi actually was, Cathy had no interest whatsoever, and I was left wondering how they were going to sell and support this machine to the general user and enthusiast?

In many ways it was worth going to the show just to see her face, in that moment and short conversation.

It was then that I realised the Cube had not printed any of these cases they had on display around the Cube printer, but they had been printed on a Bits from Bytes machine. BFB showed my same printed RPi case on their blog Aug 16th, with no mention of the case origin or designers. – so much for Creative commons Attribution – So I’ll do it here – the Original case was designed by HansH

I then changed it in Sketchup after using a Raspberry Pi for a little while and released my derivative to Thingiverse.

Makerbot - Replicator 1/2

Makerbot had the Replicator V1 at the show, I didn’t see it actually printing anything all day, everyone else had running machines.

If you want to be a Makerbot Distributer, the Minimum order quantity is 10 machines and for that they will give you 25% discount, Makerbot has two resellers in the UK, and they were very keen to sign up more on these terms.


I was fortunate enough to be standing on the Makerbot stand when Todd Grimm asked the Senior American Makerbot Sales representative a few interesting questions, the response coloured by recent events and the Replicator 2 launch.

Todd asked about the Replicator 2, what makes this machine a pro grade (prosumer) machine and how is it different from Version1?
Makerbot – It’s now 100micron layer resolution and we have tightly controlled PLA printing materials that deviate less than 100micron in size.
This machine is PLA only, we have removed the heated bed so users can get printing faster and we have a simple 3 point levelling system.
It’s also a single extruder system only.

I was thinking – That’s a lot to remove, why is it then so much more expensive than a Replicator V1? And can’t a Replicator V1 do 100micron? It should be able?

When pushed on the reason it was now a Pro machine, the support staff were talked up as the main reason for Makerbot being different at the lower-end machines – Thingiverse was also mentioned a lot in the conversations and is obviously very important for them -

Makerbot –“Some people will not like that we have gone closed source, but they all use Thingiverse whether they like it or not, we have the biggest community”

The discussion continued, I moved on.
Sadly, they also failed the Maker test; I was reasonably ignored every time I went on their stand. I didn’t pick up a Makerbot sticker… Where would I put it now?

Maketbot are obviously seeing a change on Thingiverse, they are trying to focus on the Terms of Service questions that also sparked up debate and fractures in the community along with the bigger issue of going closed source – They even have their Lawyer trying to explain that ‘everything will be ok’ Trust us.

Can people in the community trust a company that changes one of its most fundamental founding principal’s?

Will Makerbot’s new Pro-sumer customer appear, and will 3D Systems now be free to take the entry level sector with the Cube? Do any of us now really care?

It’s never a dull moment with 3D printing.

Remembering back - On 3Dprinting.com the blog post in Jan2012 stated this about the video below –

“This is a great interview that shows the development in the personal 3D printer market and the differences between the open-source product of MakerBot and the closed-source product of 3D Systems.”



I do now wonder how different 3D systems and Makerbot will look in Jan2013 at the next CES?
If it's consumers or pro-sumers they are after then maybe the closed source 3D printer war has now started, while the open source community just marches on regardless, I hope Makerbot does not regret it's decision.

Also look out for the comment about the Replicator case looking wooden, I bet they was the point Replicator V2 got a metal overcoat!

And Cnet just posted - Pulling back from open sourcehardware, MakerBot angers some adherents


Enough of all that.


Here are some really great things I spotted at the Show - 

3D printed Mug - Bits From Bytes had a separate bigger stand (last year just a corner of 3D systems) I spotted Ian Adkins and Ed Sells (Sells Mendel) walking around; they were doing a lot of research by the looks of things.
Another one from BFB, they ignored me and so failed the 'Maker test' this time around.

There was a lot of 3D scanners at the show, this chap with the beard was being 3D scanned with a hand-held unit.

This is a Prop for a Film printed with a Voxeljet 3D printer - they can print 4m x 2m objects!
Voxeljet printers are used by Car companies to make massive prototype parts.

Propshop model-makers Ltd - Passed the 'Maker test' with flying colours, he even showed me some secret new massive 3D printed models for a new film coming out on his iPad.

Another Voxeljet print
Ultimaker - 

Yea! Ultimaker! - Always had their machines running all day! - They had the busiest stand out of almost everyone, including many of the really big names. 

Very friendly people and amazing quality things on display, thanks Ultimaker you made my Day!

I also met Paul Candler on the Ultimaker stand, he has made some of the finest profiles for Netfabb. Ultimaker users are enjoying resolutions down to 20microns!

Needless to say Ultimaker passed my Maker test.

Leapfrog - 
It's big, slow printing and looks like a BFB printer with a metal overcoat. I could not find out much more about it as they didn't talk to me :( 

Fabbster - 

Fabbster have a Closed source printer (Sintermask) that operates in a similar to most RepRaps, it has no heated bed at the moment and uses Rafts for prints. Quality is reasonable.

They have a patented stick deposit system, this is basically Injection moulded plastic sticks of material that are loaded into a magazine and snap together as they exit into a PTFE tube onto it's way to the extruder.
They have many materials including a flexible (soft PLA style) that was very nice to handle.

The machine is big and well built. They were very nice at the show and passionate about people using their printers and materials. They passed the Maker test and we chatted for some time about the machine.

MiiCraft - 
I ended up with a very bad photo of the Miicraft printer, so I'll just show some of the printed objects.
Very nice people and happy to tell and show you everything about their resin based 3D printer.
Ships from Taiwan, UV resin is quite expensive, machine is $2200 but the results were stunning! - Very good, Maker test - pass

PP3Dp - 
The PP3Dp printers are looking a little old now, but still performing well, if not a little slow to print.
Didn't talk much, they were not really communicating with the people showing interest. 


They had some free samples of screw-pots and a few different machines. Maker test - Poor (D-)

Mcor - 
Inside an Mcor 3D printer (not really a printer, it cuts models out of sheets of office paper)

They are all paper. I'm not sure it that's a good thing or not. They must be selling machines? and I expect they will do well in the movie industry, props, and animation maybe even some product design etc. but I can't quite see a good use as functional models and certainly not with consumers.

Very friendly and animated about their machines and low-cost process. Maker test - Pass


Lots of other companies were at the show, some interesting, others looking very dated. Most of the others ignored me.

Thanks for reading,

Rich.


Other news - 

The open Hardware summit is going on as I type this - Follow it and check out what's being said.

We may be getting our own Mini Maker Faire down in Bristol (UK) - keep looking out and googling for further announcements.

Check out this video featured on the Discovery channel - 




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Yearly RepRap adventures roundup 2012

November 1, 2012, 9:06 am
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Another year of RepRapping development adventures is over (for some historic reason my development season runs from October to the end of September each year)


In the last year’s roundup (2010-2011) I had the following to say – Link if you need a reminder.

This last 12 months have been intense and exciting and what a lot of changes this blossoming industry has seen.

Things I’m glad I got on and finished – (is anything ever finished?)

  • Universal paste and Chocolate printing, I had been thinking about this for well over a year before actually starting any testing, it was a good learning curve in 3D design (Sketchup) and iterative model testing.
    • I have countless people ask me about Chocolate printing!
    • It has had quite a few revisions and design changes by other people for other machines and bigger syringes
    • Parametric! Version by BonsaiBrain (ifeelbeta.de) - See Thingiverse for details

If you have not yet seen the wonderful video by RepRapBCN, take a look below!


  • The 3way extruder– Colour blending, lots of further potential, great fun doing it and seeing the first prints.

Joris Van Tubergen also made a 3 filament extruder, but his goal was to be able to extrude more filament for the amazing Kamermaker project his aim is to be able to extrude 1kg and eventually 5kg/hour of plastic.

  
Switching across to Slic3r and doing the tutorials was a good experience.
Part1 - Settings and extruder calibration
Part 2 - Filament calibrating and printing
Part 3 - How low can you go? - printing with small layers

I have been meaning to mention the various translations of the Slic3r tutorials out there and also a new getting started guide by Ivan Bortolin and Lorenzo Cantini - the main website Can be found here
The new guide in English PDF and Italian Here

Other translations of my Slic3r tutorials and extended work can be found in Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Italian. - if you know of more do let me know.

Slic3r continues to move on and get stronger with more people using it every month.
If we had 3D printing awards Slic3r would get my vote for first place. My warmest thanks go to Alessandro for bringing Slic3r to all of us.


30 Days of creativity– Was hard work, but a very good focus for getting things started and having some fun with my printer.


I have really enjoyed printing more things for my kids this year, they love them!

It’s certainly easier when you have more than one printer up and running.

More group meetings with local RepRappers – it’s been a great year for getting people up and running.

Things I have not finished quite yet –

  • Geared Peristaltic Pump– I have grand plans, and it's working so well but it’s going to take more time before I can get back onto this. Keep an eye out on this development, I'm planning a dedicated printer to use it for something interesting.


  • Ceramic Printing, I had all the best intentions to do more ceramic printing, Precious metal clay printing and ‘other’ materials, but just not had the time to set it up again and have a good run at it. – When I think back I did the whole paste extruder development in about 2 weeks. - New 'RepRap year' resolution - 'find, use and develop more materials to 3D print with'



  • Further rounds of Polycarbonate printing, I started and then got side-tracked. I’ll pick it up again at some point along with other sorts of materials (Like Laywood).

  • My own machine development– Again started, many things worked out, but everything moves so fast it always needs a little rethink.
  • My design looks a little like the TK-O from LulzBot (Aleph objects), so I may take some more inspiration from that to finish-off my 'ultimate 3D printing machine'.
  • Recent time has been taken up with Rostock (see below) so what I learn from that and seeing how the TK-0 develops can go into the next revision



  • Rostock+, doing it now, but stalled a little for the last 6 weeks, need to build some more electronics. 
    • The ‘Plus’ part is for the use of Spectra fishing line (Like Tantillus below) instead of belts and pulleys, should look cool and be FAST!

  • More tutorials and guides, I have started some, it’ll be easier to focus on them in the winter, but I want to make it easier for people to get good 3D printing results and understand more things about the process. > Still learning every day myself!

Things I wish I had more time/resources for –


  • Actual 3D modelling and design, I’m planning to spend more time over winter doing 3D design and modelling, some organic and creative, other things more technical.
  • I want to learn Autocad123D as I have failed to spend any time with it this year – if anyone knows any good starting guide? – I have not really used the Autocad interface and I find it quite counter intuitive.


  • I have been inspired with so many works of 3D printing Art this year, far too many to mention, but ones you should really take a look at are the beautiful works by @Dizingof , the mechanical wonder of the planetary gears by aubenc and very stunning Trilobite’s! by AuntDaisy

     

  • Print challenges are Great! - (link to the RepRap forum printing challenges section) 
    • I love to print tricky models, it takes time to work out the best settings and it’s often different for each complex object, but hopefully we will continue to do challenges – they are a great way to learn ‘how to 3D print’

  • I do wish I had more time to meet more of the 3D printing community; we need a few more places to meet up during the next year. Any ideas? maybe video links?

  • Visiting more printing events and shows, they are great, but take time and money to attend. And are not very family friendly L very disappointed I could not make the London3Dprintshow and the 3D printing event in Eindhoven, but I did make it to a few events.

  • I also didn't use IRC as much as I wanted, started off the year using it, then also started on Twitter and didn't have the time to do both along with doing actual physical developments of things.
    • But I’ll get back on IRC soon, it’s a great community.

  • I answer a lot of e-mails and messages, and try to help people as much as I can, recently the RepRap forum has boomed with new people and questions; it’s hard to keep up!

  • I started a dedicated website (richrap.com), with the idea to show projects, tutorials, guides and general RepRap related developments. It needs more time spent on it, but it’s a start.

  • Software development, I should spend more time refining some of my developments (3way extruder to be automatic, more firmware integration) I need enough long periods of time to focus on it.
Things I have not started yet (but are on my list) –

  • Electronics – I was sure I would have time to do some real electronics development this year, but again so many new boards popped up, my own plans didn't need as much attention as I had thought- still we are some way off a real plug and play solution.
  • A really big printer! – I really wanted to do something like the Kamermaker (room builder) - cost, space and time just let me down, but I still have a vision for something not quite as big...
  • Concrete/cement printing – I’m seriously thinking about a good way to do this - anyone want to help me make it a reality?

  • Loss wax casting (with PLA) – Some good examples this year, would love to give it a go.

  • Resin printing – Almost got motivated to start on a LemonCurry, again didn't get time past reading all about the great project. – Interesting to see the Formlabs printer using a Laser and Resin just got over $2.9 Million on Kickstarter, Wow!

  • Experimenting with new support materials – I did just start doing this, some interesting results with sugar, needs a lot more work, Sugar seems very compatible with PLA.

  • Wax printing – Still not sure how best to move forwards with this – maybe try a new design of my heated universal paste extruder, it should work.
  • A Portable 3D printer - I still don’t have a true portable printer (folding or just easy to carry) – finishing Tantillus is my best option for the moment.

  • Lasers! – Powder and Sintering – I doubt I’ll be able to work on this area anytime soon! But it’s on the list!

I would still like to buy a new Lathe; still saving up…a few people have offered to help me out with new things needing machining – Thank you.

+++ Lots of stuff I have not even thought of yet !

Final thoughts - 

So, I have had some real proud moments in my 2012 RepRap developments; I have had fantastic people from all walks of life contact me. My work has been featured on lots of blogs and in magazines, interviewed, mentioned and cited in reports and academic works. I have done presentations and uploaded work and videos to university intranets and had people translate my projects into different languages.
Thank you all.

This is all open-source and as a hobby on a very teeny tiny budget, and I’m just one of many makers doing lots of things in this Great community.

The next development cycle has now started, I have some big goals for the next 12 months, no one knows where 3D printing is heading, and what it will look like in a further year, but it will continue to be exciting.

If you can make it, come and join us at Cheltenham Geeks in November, It's free but with limited spaces, go and register now over at meetup.com. Hamish and I will be presenting an evening of RepRap fun and developments, along with 3D printing demo's and beer, what more could you want? 


Thanks for reading; I hope you are enjoying the adventure, See you soon for more.

Rich.
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Christmas Printing!

December 11, 2012, 2:13 pm
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Seasons Greetings and Happy Holidays Everyone.

I hope you are all having a good end to the year, for me the last few RepRap months have been extremely interesting. Lots of machine testing and calibration, continuing and starting some new developments and printing a lot of presents for people.

More about machines and developments in the new year along with some overdue tutorials I plan to get completed over Christmas. - Have a great time and happy Christmas printing - Rich.


This is an advent Blog post for Christmas, my kids have been selecting Christmas things from Thingiverse to print out and put on their trees. I have been following and printing out the great advent calendar tree by Pleppik, other things have just naturally been printed out as presents and gifts.

Here is the progress with our printed Advent Tree - 

Days 1 & 2 - 
It starts with two nicely wrapped presents under the tree

Printed in Christmas Gold for the base of the tree.

Days 3 & 4 - 
Candy Cane  Sledge and an X-wing!

Trunk of the tree in woodland brown, Sledge is in punk star pink and X-wing in white and robot silver.
The Sledge is very fine, if you have a 0.5mm nozzle, you may wish to set the nozzle size to 0.35 if using Slic3r or it's not going to print out all that well.

Days 5 & 6 - 
Train and a bright white Snowman.

The train really needs some support to print correctly, I missed that and had a small shift in printing as the bottom got a little messed up, but it still fits in the box.


Days 7 & 8 - 
Glow in the dark candle and an orange coffee mug.

Green happens to be my favourite colour, so I tend to have quite a few different shades. I'm going for darker at the bottom, getting lighter as the tree gets taller.

Days 9 & 10 - 
Brown church and a slightly off-white igloo (Architects stone white).

We are starting to get some form and real colour to the advent tree. 

Days 11 & 12 - 
Gingerbread House and a Makerbot Replicator 2

The Gingerbread house needs support, or if you don't want to use support material then use my modified Gingerbread House here.

The Makerbot Replicator 2 model also needs support, but I have modified it slightly to allow it to print without any support, Get the non-support version here.

Days 13 & 14 - 
Tree in Nuclear Green ABS (the only bit in ABS so far) and the Gingerbread Man is in the much under used but so loved Buttercream PLA


Nuclear Christmas tree and a Gingerbread Man!


Days 15 & 16 - 

Bell and (good enough to eat) Candy Cane


The Awesome candy cane is printed in Awesome Aurora PLA from Faberdashery.co.uk - it's UV light reactive and changes colour from a wonderful light sugar pink to a stunning vivid blue.


Days 17 & 18 - 
 
Dr Who Tardis and a Pearl White snowflake
Day 18 had the 3rd different White PLA in this Advent tree, this time it's Pearly White, one of my favorite's
That's it for white now, if I need any more I'm going to have to get creative.


Days 19 & 20 - 

Day 19 was a Santa Hat, this is a little tricky to print in one part, and would require support material, I didn't fancy doing that, so I sliced it in half and glues it back together with a drop of superglue.
You can find my split version here


These boxes are printed in the 6th different Green plastic - Jade Green


The Day 19 Santa Hat is printed in the stunning new Mercury Red (Metallic PLA) - it basically makes anything you print look like a Super Hero, really fantastic material.

Day 20 is also a new Metallic PLA - this time Space Marine, totally intergalactic.

I'm almost out of different Greens - I did mention it's my favorite colour :) I have two remaining...


Days 21 & 22 - 

Some multicoloured prints - 
Burning logs (Brown,Red, Orange & Yellow)
Plate of cookies (White Plate, 'Butter cream' cookies, layer of 'Bling Bling gold' and 'Woodland brown')


The minty green was never going to really fit, but I wanted to use them all.



Days 23 & 24 - 


The Festivus Pole accompanied by a Grinchy Claus :)

And a super rocket!

Almost done !

Christmas Day - 


A snowy top of the tree, Bling Bling Gold star-burst and a Neon Cyber Yellow Star.


Have a great Christmas, Happy Holidays, Seasons Greetings !


Tree decorations - 

I'm loving this Gyroscopic snowflake by Roman_Hegglin, take a look on Thingiverse here.
It's BIG, and a great object, it's all printed in one go, when you pick it and move the rings a little the parts just start spinning perfectly!

Roman also has some smaller snowflakes on the Thingiverse link above, check them out.

My kids are selecting a thing a day to print, advent style to decorate their trees and rooms, here is the progress so far with links to the great Christmas models and designers on Thingiverse. 


For starters the great Christmas tree by TopperDEL

Most of these are printed in the fantastic Pearly white PLA by Faberdashery

And yes, that is a very pink Christmas tree!


The winter star by Faberdasher
Try to print the modern star if your printer's up to it!


And if you fancy even more twinkle for your tree take a look at the new Sparkle range from Faberdashery.
Space Marine and Mercury Red look amazing and if your giving a Raspberry Pi for Christmas get hold of some Raspberry Spark and print my version of the Super Pi case.


Really like this one, slightly tricky to slice if you are using Slic3r - make sure your nozzle size is about 0.42mm and you should get nice lattice work - 
Also set the first layer width to be the same as the rest for a nice looking print.


Snowflake by JonMonaghan - I have printed so many of these, they are great to print and look amazing especially in different colours.


Snowman by ChristineBowyer - This little snowman is a real family favorite, we have printed a lot of these in many sizes, I even printed some in Sugar paste earlier this year.


Snowflake Ornament 6 Points within Circle by beauturner
This one is a really interesting one to slice, you can go for a big nozzle width and get just shells for a very quick printing time, or a smaller fine nozzle and get a lot of tiny infilling slow print but a more filled look.

I also had some interesting differences with two recent Slic3r versions while attempting to slice this model, here is what I was seeing with Version 0.9.1 (my usual version at the moment) and testing out V0.9.5 

This was with Slic3r V0.9.1 - 0.42mm nozzle and 0.67mm single wall width, no infill - Slic3r makes a few little mistakes in the model but this GCODE prints well and quickly, the middle section is just loose enough to pop it out if you feel like it.
GCODE file is 200KB

This was with identical settings as above but with Slic3r V0.9.5 - This actually makes for a nice looking print but it has lots of tiny points of infill and a lot of extruder moves - it should also NOT be doing any infill, all filling and solid layers were turned off.
GCODE file is 250KB

This version is back to Slic3r 0.9.1 but with 0.42mm nozzle and 0.47mm single wall width, 20% infill, you really do end up with a dual ring around the snowflake, a nice print and quite quick.
GCODE file is 400KB

To test the infill problem of Slicer V0.9.5 I used 0.42mm nozzle and 0.47mm single wall width (as above) but had 0% infill and 0 top and bottom layers, this should give a hollow object, as you can see above it made a nice and filled star. This GCODE, 2.5MB and has some nasty high speed infills causing resonance in my printer and a massive number of extruder reversals, not one to print!

The photo hanging on the tree was with a slightly tweaked single wall size of 0.5mm GCODE was about 1.5MB Using Slic3r V0.9.5 - I never did manage to get a really nice print out of V0.9.1 but as Slic3r has moved on quite a few revisions now  I'll take another go with the next version as I type this it's V 0.9.7

Ultimaker Christmas Robot by ultimakerinleipzig
A great little robot with support already designed into the model.



Grinchy Claus by Cerberus333

Gift Boxes -
Another popular present to print is the Extra Printable Companion cube by Keegi, this box is just perfect as a gift and can be scaled to any size easily.

The Original Companion cube upgrade was made by Landru, well worth a look if you don't want a box.


It also makes for an impressive Russian doll style stacking box set if you scale them to fit into each other.




Over the last few months I have printed more than I can count of these, the smallest being about 7mm and the biggest so far printed on a Rostock printer at about 186mm wide. 



The RepRap presentation at Cheltenham Geeks in November was great, lots of people turned up and we had quite an evening discussing all sorts of 3D printing and additive technologies. Thank you all for a great evening, can't wait to do it again. - I'll have the presentation and notes available soon (sorry for the delay)

Meeting in December (13th) for drinks and planning events and hacking for next year, see here and come along if you can.

Follow Cheltenham Geeks on Twitter here


Merry Christmas Everyone, and have a very Happy New Year!

Cheers,

Rich.


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It's a small world, Tiny 3D printing on RepRap (FFF)

January 31, 2013, 6:21 am
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I'm having fun trying to print small things at the moment, not something I have really done before, so after printing some rather massive things over Christmas (on Rostock - I'll post about it soon) I wanted to try the very tiny.

While I'm waiting for a good Resin printer design to experiment with (for small detailed prints) I decided to see how well tiny FFF printing on RepRap could look.

Everything below was printed on a Tantillus 3D printer with a Bowden extruder setup (again, I'll do a post about Tantillus soon), so you may even get better results with a geared non-bowden printer, do let me know if you try any tiny printing, it's awesome fun.


For some idea of scale for all the below images - 
The UK £1 coin is 22.5mm in diameter.
A EU 1 Euro coin is 23.25mm in diameter
And a USA Quarter Dollar coin is 24.26mm diameter.

All the below prints are straight off the printer, no cleanup - as if you could at this scale :)
All the below were printed at a not so low 0.15mm layer height, so still room for improvement.


First up, something for a seasonally topical print, and remember it's not all about size!

This is Nophead's great Heart shaped box, but printed at 30% of the original size - yes, the lid fits perfectly.
These above are printed in natural Taulman3D 618 Nylon material, but is just as happy to be printed in PLA.

Another point to mention is that this box is thing number 61 on Thingiverse, way back in the early days, if you have not yet printed it, go get the download now it's almost Valentines day! - if you didn't get the hint.

PLA this time, it could do with slightly less flow. PLA needs a fan to cool as it prints, don't use a Fan for Nylon printing.

And the lid still fits wonderfully, even with PLA.

I'm printing these at quite a high speed (for the size of object) and most of the time as a single object to really reduce the chance of blobs and stringing, that has some big challenges of cooling.

I spent a lot more time photographing these objects than they actually took to print, that was a major challenge in itself.

Next up is the always great Frog by Owen Collins, this frog is normally 30.83mm wide and 15.28mm high, it's a reasonable challenge at normal size and you need good retraction for the feet.

This frog is half the normal print size

This showed up an interesting issue with Gcode infill, at this point I had calibrated my Tantillus using a very old version of Slic3r 0.7.2b as this is what's recommended with the standard configurations.
You can see the infill is not complete in the feet, after playing with the settings, I moved over to Slic3r 0.9.8 and this problem completely fixed itself, with almost identical settings.

If you want to try my profiles for Tantillus Slic3r Version 0.9.8 take a look at the post here for a download.
Do remember I'm using 1.75mm filament on this Tantillus, so if you are using 3mm, then change the settings.


I had a go at half size in Nylon, printing a plate of three at a time, as I'm not using any fan cooling at all for Nylon printing. They came out better than I expected, but extruder retraction needs another 0.5mm and a reduction in flow. It's even harder to photograph the Nylon.

This was one of the very first things I printed using the Taulman 618 Nylon, and a little too hot (235 degrees) for such a small print.

This was the smallest frog I could manage without it breaking apart getting it off the tape.
It's just 29% of the 'normal' size.
He is sat on a UK £1 coin for scale and measures - 8.94mm wide and 4.43mm high

The next print to try was the classic twisted pot -

This prints well, the original has a thick wall so when scaled to 50% (middle) it has two perimeters, and at 25% (right) it has a single perimeter.

The 25% one above is 10.14mm wide and 7.8mm high.

This little pyramid showed up an issue with my Z Axis speed, you can see a missing (squashed) layer at the base of the arms.

 I'm still trying to get a good looking 40% (14mm) calibration Pyramid, this is tricky, especially the top.



If you think you can do better, we have a 'tiny' competition on the RepRap forum here, take a look.
All the scaled down models I have used above will be on the RepRap Forum competition post, if you want to try out a few on your printer.

As I type we have two entries in the RepRap tiny printing competition -
Photo credit Petrus

One very nice print from Petrus of a hand sitting on a 1 Euro coin - at 0.05mm layer height!

Photo credit Gulf

And one from Gulf, Correct me if I'm wrong but that frog is sitting on a US 1 cent coin (19.05mm diameter) - Wow!

Thanks for reading, and do have a go at tiny printing, and post your results (good or bad) on the forum, you never know someone may even offer a competition prize if we get a few more entries.

And in other news... if you are not already signed up, take a look at the rapidly growing 3D printing community on Google+ Here, it's just bust the 10,000 member mark and is a great source of news and all things 3D printable.

Until next time.

Cheers,

Rich.

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The RepRap magazine

February 28, 2013, 7:02 am
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Hello everyone,

I just wanted to let everyone know about the new RepRap Magazine, it's from the community for the community and is intended to help everyone. From the curious user looking at 3D printing to experts in self replicating systems and all in between.


The Magazine can be found here - http://reprapmagazine.com/

And discussions about the magazine should be directed here on the RepRap Forum.

And if you prefer the RepRap magazine also has a page on Google+ is here, for discussions and information.

Go and read the first issue now, it's got some great information and background to the RepRap project.

And please do get involved with content for future issues, details are in the magazine or e-mail me.

On that note I'm doing another article on RepRap electronics and firmwares for Issue 2 of the magazine, if you have anything new in the works or would just like to get involved in this article do get in contact with me - richard 'dot' richrap 'at' gmail . c o m

And on a slightly longer timescale I'm also planning a comparison review of different RepRap hot-ends, so same again, if you have something to add to this, get in touch. It's one area that's booming with lots of new designs and tried and tested products being revised for printing new materials.

Until next time.

Rich.
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2013 review of developments, 3D Printing book release and more challenges.

February 13, 2014, 1:39 am
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#2014

I missed doing my annual roundup of 3D Printing adventures before Christmas, so here it is, with some plans and updates for 2014.

Firstly thanks for reading this blog and to all the wonderful people who contacted me in 2013, I believe this year is going to be the best yet for 3D Printing, stay tuned and do get in contact if you have something to share or a project collaboration idea.

To catch up on other things I have done over the years, here are past annual reviews, 2012/11, 2011/10

My 2013 year of 3D printing development started with a pledge to be my year of ‘yes’, wherever possible I planned to say ‘yes’ and get as involved as I could manage (with time available).

This led to trying out many new things including speaking at various shows, festivals, events and even on the BBC website and World Service about 3D printing.

I'm working on new designs, prototypes and ideas. Collaborating with different people and always looking out for other 3D printing projects and experiments too, do keep in contact and let me know what you are up to too.

3D Printing for Dummies -



One of the real highlights of 2013 was the experience of writing a book. It’s always been on my lifetime achievement list, and it feels really good to now be a published Author, I really hope to do more as the experience really was exhilarating from start to finish, something I will never forget.

It was a real privilege to be part of this book, and I was very lucky that my co-author Kalani Kirk Hausman had already put in so much work to get the project off-the-ground with the world famous publishers Wiley – so when the chance to contribute to this project came about it was a very easy ‘yes!’. We had a short timescale for the 300+ Page multi-chapter book, and it had to cover a wide range of 3D printing aspects.  The book covers some of the 30 year history of an already well established additive manufacturing industry, and looks at the current and future uses for this technology.

Many people and fantastic developments have helped to make this book a reality, I want to thank everyone involved in the project and all who kindly allowed images to be used for the book.

3D Printing for Dummies on Amazon - Here - 

You can take a look at the Dummies guide to 3D printing book on Amazon now, it’s available in either print or eBook, and various translations are planned. If you do get a chance to read it, Kirk and I would love to know what you thought.

Another interesting aspect was a flurry of 3D printing writing activity from many different people who contacted me during 2013; asking for image permissions in their own books, some are also now released and some ongoing with releases this year. I’m sure much more will be written on the subject, it’s such an amazing technology that will some day impact and benefit the lives of everyone. I'm sure plenty more will be out soon.

On that note, I also finished reading MAKERS by Cory Doctorow ( @doctorow ) again over Christmas, it's now available for free or donation download in many formats here. A fantastic story (it's fiction, not history, but will be :) for anyone living and breathing the 3Dprinting and the fabulous Maker movement. I highly recommend reading it.

I have not added as much as I wanted to RichRap.com some of this was due to the already heavy level of traffic on it, it’s about to blow another bandwidth limit so at some point this year I will fix that, update and add more tutorials and content. In the mean time I also plan to get shorter but more frequent blog posts up on here, some while I do developments rather than a massive post at the end.

Tiny Printing - 



Printing small was a lot of fun, it taught me a lot about 3D Printing and how best to control plastic extrusion, when to use heat and when to cool, more information here.

RepRap Magazine - 

The RepRap Magazing was launched, this is again another great project by people in the community to document and give a wider voice for all things RepRap. - We would like to do and release more issues in 2014.

3D Printing in NYLON - 



My Nylon printing and colouring experiments attracted a lot of attention, this was a lot of fun and very much still something I continue to experiment with. I plan to do a follow-up article later this year about Nylon, mixed materials and further colour experiments.

3DR –



I have always planned to release a RepRap 3D printer, and after a frantic 5 week development during the earlier part of 2013, I had the first 3DR ready for testing.

For me 3DR has been amazing to watch as it goes out into the world as my take on a 3D printed Delta, watching it then evolve into something much more is great.

Releasing 3DR as an open-source project occupied a lot more time than I had expected last year, but it also led to some really great conversations with people and lots of other great things. You initially think that releasing everything and seeing what people do with it would allow more time to work on other things. That was not the case, it's as much work as if you released it for sale or started a company.

I'm planning to release at least another three machines this year, keep an eye out ;)

For me the starting point into the delta geometry was the Rostock, this was a great printer to build and allowed a lot of experimentation, especially with tall prints that had not been possible before.

Open Hand (and an open heart)- 


The Open Hand project by Joel Gibbard was a fantastic project to see come into life, and with healthy backing the project is well underway.

Joel also won the Venturefest award for best newcomer. Congratulations again, and best wishes from me for the ongoing project.

IndiGoGo perks shipped out and hand-designs well under way.

Shows and Events - 

The London Makerfaire, London 3D printshow and TCT Shows were another great highlight of 2013, we have more great things planned for shows this year, TCT is moving to a 3 Day event and will be bigger and better than ever.

Associations - 

We are starting to see many different 3D printing associations and 'standards' being setup, so I was delighted when the 3D printing association asked me to be a member of the board of advisers, we are aiming to promote, guide and advise as many people as possible with 3D printing and all forms of additive manufacturing.

News and dedicated 3D printing websites boomed in 2013 and will continue to grow and mature with both content and advice. It's almost hard to ignore 3D printing now and it's also very apparent, that many people are starting to be aware this technology is becoming useful for small businesses, and at a justifiable cost level.

My go-to news sites for 3D printing news are the 3DPrintingIndustry who I also try to write interesting articles for as time allows, most recently I posted one on filament recycling (tech for trade).

And another is 3DERS.org - an entire website with news and everything you can imagine to do with 3D printing, it's amazing what and how fast they pick up 3DP news and PR.

Sharing - 

We have also seen sharing sites grow and evolve. There are far too many to mention now, but one I have used and will continue with is the Excellent Youmagine (by the Ultimaker team).

And GitHub, where all sort of cool things happen, all the time :)

Kickstarter and IndieGoGo  both had a huge number of 3D printing and associated projects up for funding.

3D Printing Future - 

As usual time and other work got in the way of all the other things I wanted to experiment with and do, my list of projects and ideas grows bigger every month, but I still managed to design and do a lot of things over Christmas, I'll get up blog posts and images as soon as I can on these and future planned work, if any of you want to collaborate on any projects or innovation, do get in contact.

Lots more to share soon. It's going to be a very interesting year indeed.

Nils posted some great predictions by a few in the 3D printing community, lets see how many happen or disappear.

And for inspiration it's world #InventorsDay - go invent something... anything.

Rich.
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Temperature effects with PLA printing / RepRap News

February 28, 2014, 1:58 am
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I did a little experimenting with temperature and PLA printing last April (2013) when building the Rostock - and it looks like I totally forgot to post a blog article about it!

I found the pictures today, and you may find it interesting, so here is what I remember about the experiment and process -

Last year when I didn't manage to get hold of any Laywood for testing, I decided to see what effect temperature had on PLA when it's printed smoothly at a controlled rate. I randomly selected Blue and Brown PLA and also used Natural (clear) as a control as I was sure that would show more obvious external differences with a change in temperature.

First test was just a simple change from printing at 192 Degrees C (lower section) then changing to 198 Degrees C (upper section)


I thought it might be neat to try a gradient effect, this is simply a change in extrusion temperature by + or - one degree C every ~3 layers over about 20 layers. 

I tried the same gradual gradient with Brown, that shows up a gradual change from matt to glossy as the temperature increases. (camera can't really show it well)

This actually didn't work as I had imagined. it's better than the photo shows, the camera is not able to pick up the gradient very well and you also get a strange optical effect as you move around the object, quite interesting.

You basically get a more obvious effect with a sharp change in extrusion temperature, here above the matt bands are 190 Degrees C and the glossy are 200. 


The speed is also important for a good change, I found running at 80mm/sec or faster was about optimal for this PLA and a J-head MK5 Extruder nozzle.

A mixture of gradual temperature change over a number of layers and sharp changes produce some really nice finishes.


To help select the bands I did make a small script to post process the G-code, but sadly this seems to have gone missing from my files.

If I do any more with this process I may produce a more friendly program to allow shades and stripes to be drawn on the Gcode, unless anyone else wants to produce something to do that.

Printing in PLA - Just a temperature change - nothing else. (the model is custom MakeALot Bud Vase btw)

Purple colours also seem to work exceptionally well for this effect.

I also destroyed one of these vases at the time to see if the temperature made any obvious differences to bonding strength. I could not find any difference while splitting and ripping the different temperature printed areas.

Let me know if you try anything like this, or with other materials (it obviously works well with Laywood), I'm sure other translucent PLA's and even PET (Taulman t-glase or Coloutfabb_XT) would also show this effect too.

Next time I do this I'll also try out a single walled 'spiral vase' print with temperature changes, I imagine that should look very neat.

RepRap News - 

If you are in the US or can travel 14-16th March, do check out the 2nd Midwest RepRap Festival - Goshen Indiana - more info Here - http://midwestreprapfest.org/ Loads of fantastic people will be there for a dev packed weekend. Sadly I can't make the festival, life gets in the way of 3D Printing some times :(

Feel the Force young developer - Force Sense Resistors - 

Johann has done some great experiments using three force sense resistors to measure pressure applied to the build platform on a mini Kossel - RepRap Wiki page here and Johann's Blog info here. 

It would be neat if only one could be installed on the hot-end itself, but that's going to take a bit more work. These sensors are very simple to measure using a spare Analogue input, more info here.

Now all we need to do is print our own force sensors rather than buy them, conductive filament at the ready :)

Cheltenham Geeks - 

I'm doing another 3D printing night at Deep Space Works in Cheltenham Monday 24th March 7:00PM - if you want to come (it's all free) sign up on Meetup here - I look forward to seeing you and if you can bring a 3D printer, 3D scanner, projects etc. let Tom Howlett know via the comments on Meetup.

And anything you want me to talk about or demo, leave me a comment here.

Rich.
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Universal 3D printing filament spool standard 2014

March 13, 2014, 6:46 am
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One spool to rule them all...


Coils and coils of lovely 3D printing filament, I'm usually surrounded by them, I struggle with them and often spend time and energy mounting, clamping, switching and feeding them into to various printers.

There has to be a better way. (lets please all find a better way)

* The problem *

Every single one is different, bare coils or reels, some are even different from the same manufacturer.

Just to point out here, this is only a tiny selection of 3D printing filament reels available, these are the ones I happen to still have around me. Even the long list on RepRap.org of filament suppliers is a fraction of what's actually available.

Loose coils of filament are both great (no wasted spool or extra cost to ship packaging) and also the work of the devil. You usually need to cut a random shorter length of coil off, just so you can use a section of material in a sensible way, or run the risk of getting into a tangled mess of coil and printer. You then risk not having enough material to finish the print, something that seems to happen more often than I would like.

Once when trying to use a 750gram loose coil of 1.75mm material (about 300+ meters) I had a tangle so bad the extruder pulled an entire shelf down onto a laptop below, smashing it, bending rods on the printer and also messing up a very nice print. I had mounted a home made spool holder to the shelf above the printer in an attempt to use loose coiled filament. My 20 euro coil of filament cost me over 400 in damages, I didn't do that ever again.

After a lot of messing about with making my own 3DPrinted spool holders, printing other peoples, making them by hand and using various mounting systems, I resorted to using a rack as shown above. It looks ugly, the filament gets dusty and problems like tangles still happen. But as I can't find a really good solution for various printers, this is the best I have.

The closest thing we have to a 'standard' reel is based around the use of 3mm plastic welding rod/coils for automotive repair industry, these very large coils have been used with 3D printing for many years. They have a lot of benefits, but also plenty of negative aspects. Mostly being heavy and big whilst also using more than 300g of ABS to make each one.

Recycle, Recycle- 

One of the reasons I would like to see a spool standard is that I would also like to see less waste from 3D printing, and a way to recycle items like spools and packaging.

A few manufacturers like Josef Průša have already looked at cardboard, producing filament already on lightweight recyclable spools.
In this case the center mounting hole is rather large. The inner coil diameter is big enough not to cause the filament to be too tightly wound.

Dense or corrugated cardboard what would be best?

One of the very first filament orders I ever made came on cardboard spools, since then it's all been plastic of one form or another.

Lets take a look at some filament supplied on reels -

And lots of loose coils of filament too -

Ident
Make / manufacturer
Outer size diameter
Inner coil diameter
Mount hole diameter
Notes
A
Makerbot 1.75mm (1Kg)
202mm
92mm
51mm
Makerbot seem to have a new bigger spool? Can anyone confirm details.
B
Colorfabb 1.75/3mm (750g)
200mm
105mm
53mm
Now using a clear ABS reel (same dimensions)
C
RepRapsource / GRRF
297mm
215mm
52mm
‘Industry Standard’ 2.2Kg (1)
D
PP3PD / Afinia
200mm
103mm
52mm
ABS for Up! printer
E
Prototype Cardboard
215mm
100mm
53mm
(not in production)
F
RepRap World
160mm
50mm
31mm
Manufacturer unknown
G
Taulman3D Nylon
127mm
50mm
19mm
Mini Spools
H
Taulman3D Nylon
195mm
80mm
none
Old style packets
I
eSunPLA
190mm
103mm
38mm
Various reel types used by eSunPLA
J
RepRapper
160mm
58mm
31mm
mini reel
K
RepRapper
202
78mm
52mm
new reel? (conductive ABS)
L
Unknown from eBay
200
79mm
31mm
2.5Kg spool
M
RepRap World
200
79mm
31mm
2Kg spool
N
eSunPLA



5Kg card spool
O
eSunPLA
220mm
72mm
32mm
1Kg card Spool
P
Spectrum Filament
177mm
75mm
74mm
Metal/Card ~800g spool
Supplied
as Loose Coils




Q
Faberdashery
320mm
230mm
N/A
Coil 3mm filament
(100M / ~800g
R
Faberdashery
320mm
270mm
N/A
Coil 1.75mm filament (100m / ~260g)
S
Mendel-Parts
420mm
340mm
N/A
Coil 1.75mm filament (750g)
T
Hang on, that’s the same
image
as
H
Correct - It is…
U
Protoparadigm
185mm
130mm
N/A
Polycarbonate / also using spools now.
V
Unknown from eBay?
Worst
filament
ever
Can’t remember
W
BendLay (Kai Parthy)
175mm
140mm
N/A
Via 3Dfilaprint
X
PVA (Kai Parthy)
210mm
150mm
N/A
Via Orbitech
Y
LayWood (Kai Parthy)
190mm
120mm
N/A
Via Orbitech
Z
LayBrick (Kai Parthy)
200mm
140mm
N/A
Via Orbitech

(1) - These large ‘Industry Standard’ 2.2Kg spools were first used in the plastic welding industry, it's the closest thing we have to a standard.

I looks like both 30mm and 50mm mounting holes appear in many different reels, that's something 'standard'

Lots of different spools in lots of sizes - the odd looking one (middle left) is an example (one of many) of a 'home-made' spool to help make loose filament less of a pain to use.

The Question ?

Would it be possible for manufacturers to have a set filament standard for spool size, shape and mounting? Can the 3D printing community help develop that standard?
Can we make it Eco-friendly and recyclable?
Does anyone want it?
Lets find out.

Making the 'perfect' spool has a number of challenges - 
  • The inner coil diameter needs to be appropriate for the type of material and size being wound.
* Bad Spool *
3D Printing filament is not like coils of wire, don't try to cram as much as possible onto a spool.

This is 3mm semi-translucent PLA, you can clearly see the bruising of the filament as it's very tightly wound around a 50mm diameter core. The last 1/3 of the spool contents are useless due to being deformed and much too tight to feed into an extruder resulting in really nasty things like lifting the entire Z axis away from the object being printed.

This started to fail before the last 1/3 of the spool, due to pull-back and carriage lifting. Lower quality prints are also often observed during the second half of a 3mm spool this tightly wound.
  • Spool mounting diameter - Some physical resistance is good for spool mounting. Quite often a printed spool holder is used to mount the reels of filament, many different sizes force users to produce smaller diameter mounting rods in an attempt to be able to mount different types, often resulting in noise and rocking around as the spools unwind. Currently one size does not fit all.
Illustration of Inner diameter, Outer diameter and mounting.
  • Width of spool and overall outer dimension is also important, but more in deciding how much filament is required for each spool.
We have seen a trend is supplying less filament per coil over the last few years, We started at 2.3Kg reels used by the Automotive plastic welding industry, then slowly manufacturers moved to a 1Kg reel and many now supply 750g or 500g per single reel. 

Length of coil is also used by some manufacturers, often 100M of either 1.75mm or 3mm material is a 'standard' length supplied. Many manufacturers are now also offering 50M coils often targeted at retail outlets or as a way to try out new materials and colours.

That's all quite a challenge for a standard spool, but if we were flexible on the width and possibly had two outer dimensions it would be possible to make a standard more people could easily use and manufacturers could implement. Just as important is the ability to design them into new and existing 3D printers.
  • Print material - to some degree defines the minimum internal coil size. 1.75mm material can be wound in a tighter coil and materials like Taulman Nylon or Recreus FilaFlex are both so flexible they can be wound very tightly with minimal impact on the ability to print with them.

  • Nylon's, flexible and PET materials also have a tendency to try and unwind from their coils so a bigger inner coil diameter could also help them be less likely to loop and get tangled.
Cost - 

Another major factor will be cost of the spool and any packaging. reducing weight is good for shipping costs and making it from materials that can be easily recycled really needs to be a major goal.
Plastic spools used today cost under $1 and in reality customers are not likely to pay a great deal more for a standard spool? but how much and can a robust spool made from materials like strong cardboard be viable?

Ideas - spark more ideas - 

We now have dimensional information above on some of the types of spools and coils available, and to get the ball rolling here are some simple ideas for filament spools I have been thinking about.

We can see that many reels already have a 50mm mounting hole diameter, so this looks like a reasonable starting point, Both the Ultimaker and Makerbot Replicator use a 50mm spool mount.

The inner inner diameter, bigger is better, but you need to allow enough room for filament without also having a very large outer diameter. A size of around 120mm for the internal seems to work well for most types of plastics and filled materials in both 3mm and 1.75mm sizes.

A diameter of 220mm for the outer will allow for a typical quantity of filament depending on the width of the spool, 75mm shown here.

Cardboard spool concept, 1Kg spool or 3 x 250g based on the same specification of mounting hole and overall size.

The plastic dust cover/case is an item I would also like to see available (or 3D printed) - make it easy to mount on / in a 3D printer and refill with the recyclable cardboard filament spools.


How you can help - 

If you want to get involved (and please do), a discussion thread on the RepRap Forum is started here.

  • Start discussions wherever you want, and spread the word, lets make something happen.
  • Ask your filament supplier if they can support the standard, if they say no, ask them why and let people know the reasons.
  • If you manufacture a 3D printer, what do you require from a filament spool?
  • Sketch or design something, say what would work for you and your 3D printer, what's not working now and how you solve it (or not).

The 3D Printing Association is providing support for this project and also looking for feedback and ideas to help with this campaign, both from filament manufacturers and everyone in the community.


Filament manufacturers response - 

I have contacted a number of manufacturers to suggest the idea of a universal or standard filament spool - designed by feedback from the community, all the responses have been very positive, with many immediately supporting the idea and wanting to help make sure it's viable for them and their customers.

Individual manufacturers (both filament and 3D printer) can submit feedback and ideas directly and I hope more will also get involved and see if this can result in something good and useful for all.


Thanks for reading.

Rich.


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Makerbot Patents twist the knife on open source 3D Printing roots, community responds.

May 27, 2014, 4:50 pm
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Something is leaving a bad smell in the Open source community, could it be the recent Patents of big cheese Bre at Makerbot.

It's always very sad when you see a company or group turn their back on whatever community or project that helped make them successful.

Makerbot seem to be traveling down a darker and darker road as time goes on. I'm not sure if they felt invincible or that no one would notice but a recent patent frenzy by Makerbot has angered the open source 3D printing community. And we don't yet know what more is to come.

I prefer to use this blog to document work and talk about good things, so this is really a summary of past and recent events and links for you to find out more and make your own mind up about Makerbot's actions and community reaction to these disappointing and Machiavellian maneuvers.

And before we go on, I am not against Patents, they can be used for good to protect ideas and costly investments into research, that for some is a necessity to fuel sales and marketing of a product or invention. I don't think they are very fair and certainly not appropriate in many (most) cases, but they are not going away any time soon. For this trade off of hard work you can exploit an idea under a patent for a set period whilst also disclosing information about the invention and use.

Yes, RepRap and many open-source developments were built on expired patents. That's how it's supposed to work. A company gets 25 years to exploit it's patented invention, if after that time the market demand is still there and competitors can build a better mouse trap, then competition usually kick-starts another industry cycle and one could argue the original patented idea was not exploited well enough or the market was not satisfied with just one source of mouse trap.

What angers individuals is when ideas and developments that were in the public domain, very often with a specific open-source license are taken and patented by a company so others automatically now infringe. (or could be accused to infringe).

Patent trolling or this is abuse of the patent system is about as insulting as you can get to a community that encourages open innovation and sharing of open source developments.

Companies that can afford to mop-up open innovation into hundreds of patents, loosely based on ideas common in an industry or sector often have the power to legally threaten anyone that becomes a competitor. Using this abuse of the patent system can tie up smaller companies and stop new developments from even starting due to this sword of damocles handing over head.

Many things are just not worth patenting for companies or individuals, due to the cost and return possible along with the ability to be able to defend your patent if required. But if these seemingly insignificant ideas are patented by bigger companies who can afford the process, as a way to expand their patent portfolio, even if they were not 'invented' they take on another form of power.

Makerbot did 'invent' and patent an automated build platform, this was a commercial failure and proves the point not all ideas are worth patenting. Also the idea of an automatic build platform was openly discussed by various people when I first joined RepRap, long before the Makerbot patent, the difference here being that no one found it useful, practical or in any way essential, so the news Makerbot patented it was just not such of an issue.

Recent turbulent Thingiverse/Makerbot history - 
Back in September 2012 changes to the Thingiverse Terms of Service along with various concerns that Makerbot was moving away from it's RepRap and Opensource roots led to an Occupy Thingiverse campaign.

This was exactly what Thingiverse looked like on 20th September 2012 -


It was the Same day Thingiverse decided to promote and feature my 3-way colour mixing extruder. (And it had already been on Thingiverse and my Blog for 28+ days before this) - See image below 'Created by RichRap 28 days ago'


And the very next day after on the 21st September 2012 they filed a patent for build material switching.

Along with my 3-way multi-input material extruder above, I also posted, documented and shared my simple solution using lengths of different materials to produce multi-coloured objects - that was back in June2011.

Makerbot want to patent various things to do with multicolour and multi-matrial mixing, much of which has been done and documented in the open source community (Even directly at Bath University - UK as early as Feb 2012 and mentioned on the RepRap Blog June 2012 - Myles corbett report) This, over the last few years and is a very active area of open-source 3D printer development for myself and many others.

Plenty of other patent applications are also being submitted, we can only see the ones that have been published, so who knows what other things are in the pipeline...

Many of the recent Makerbot patent applications can be seen and read on this site here - You can search for Makerbot, or click on this search link here 

Title - BUILD MATERIAL SWITCHING
Abstract - A three-dimensional printer uses transitional lengths of build material to facilitate changes from one color to another during a fabrication process, and more generally to achieve multi-color objects corresponding to color patterns on the surface of a three-dimensional model. The transitional lengths of build material may be positioned inside a fabricated object, such as for infill, or outside the fabricated object where undesirable aesthetic properties of the transitional lengths will not impact the desired distribution of colors on the surface of the fabricated object.

Title - COLOR SWITCHING FOR THREE-DIMENSIONAL PRINTING
Abstract - By reversing the direction of a first build material fed into an extruder, the first build material can be wholly or partially evacuated from the extruder before a second material is introduced. This approach mitigates transition artifacts and permits faster, more complete changes from one build material to another.

A founders Perspective - 
A day later after the 2012 Occupy Thingiverse - Zach Hoeken posted his view of the changes he observed to Makerbot here-


Makerbot Patent Rage Coverage - 

OpenbeamUSA has one of the best overviews of recent Makerbot patent troubles, it's well worth a read, and I don't need to repeat things here - Stay classy, Makerbot

This also contains the details of how you can file a prior art application to help block a patent that is based on someone else's work or in the public domain.

Another good summary of the Quick Release Extruder Patent Here - 

Hackaday.com covered - makerbot files patents internet goes crazy 

Fabbaloo Posted - Has MakerBot Crossed The Line? For Some, Yes


Edit:- Added more coverage -
3deee.ch Makerbot Vs Open Source

TechDirt - MakerBot Files For Patent On A Design Derived From Work By Its Community


Please discuss, share and the tag #TakerBot seems to be being used by people - 

Visual guide graphics below courtesy of Anthony Clark.





If you are now looking for a place to share, YouMagine is a very good starting point.

GitHub is also an option, and a simple method to export all your things from Thingiverse uses a simple Python script by Carlos García Saura - Look Here for info.

Repables is also looking good for content sharing, and is being further developed right now.

Ultimately work like the Thing Tracker Network, by Gary Hodgson may make it easier to link and share designs and models from almost any source, so don't stop sharing and keep it open source.
 If you see any other coverage on the Makerbot Patents, post links below. Thanks.

Other news - 

The 3D Printing Filament spool standard campaign is still going well, updates soon.

E3D Just released the V6 hot-end -I have had one for a while -  it's amazing !

++Lots++ of new things to share with you soon, new printers, extruders, developments and materials :) So long as people don't take them and patent the work as their own...


Rich.
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Makerbot Patents and the Open Source 3D Printing community

June 6, 2014, 8:44 am
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MAKERBOT * PATENTS * TRUST

I was just about to move on, thinking the message was clear and enough was said on the Makerbot Patents, trust and treatment of the Open source 3D Printing community debate, when a Google+ Post popped up from Eddie Kay 3DPrintboard.com . (One man's defense of MakerBot's patent filings. ) What do you guys and girls think?) That pointed to a post here -

I'm all for defence and debate, it made me document a few more things below on this topic -

I'm not 100% sure if the poster Dragons_Blood and Eddy Kay on G+ are the same person? feel free to let me know, I would be happy to discuss this further if needed.



I just had to reply on this, here on my blog - The points and my reply in blue to them below -

From the points on 3DPrintboard.com -

Dragons_Blood - “I just wanted to let my voice be heard. I'm not a huge fan of Makerbot but I don think that what they are doing is not exactly their fault.”

RH - Who’s fault is it? Is someone holding a 3D printed gut to their heads? Using a broken system is not an excuse.

“Makerbot has 2 choices here. Either patent these designs which aren't already patented, or allow another company to do so. “

RH - Other choices include, releasing the exact same documentation you use for the patent out into the public domain as Prior Art, and then happily manufacture these designs. This can be done directly or by allowing the Patent application to lapse, then it becomes Prior art and no one can then patent, but anyone can use the idea / method.

“If another company patents these designs, then they can prohibit Makerbot from ever using them on any of their future 3d printers. However, if Makerbot patents them, they ensure that another competitor (i.e. 3d systems with cubify) doesn't patent it and hold them out of the market. “

RH - See above about public domain and prior art.

- Most of the open-source and maker community is not concerned about companies fighting over patents, infringements and IP, that’s their choice for constantly going down that route.
- What would have made all the difference is if Makerbot made a statement saying they will not go after anyone in the open-source community, or designers where inspiration for these types of ideas also appeared. The fact they have patented so many interesting aspects of Home 3D printing that are also being developed in the open-source community and that they have not engaged at all with that community on this aspect, means they want ownership of patents covering these things, and they didn’t want to highlight what they were doing ‘in the background’. Many companies face this ‘big business problem’ that’s fine – it’s clear that Makerbot is not going to stop down that route, they have stated many times now “we need strong patents” – the concern is over what they intend to do with them and that they have not been open with an open-source community they once held closely at the heart of their business model.

RH 
{
-          RedHat (another very big company) also built on Open-source – Do indeed make a Patent Promise - http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html

-          Over on Google+ if you search you will find an this post from  who claims he offered to assist Bre Pettis (Makerbot) over a year ago with similar type of promise to the ‘community’ – I find it a real missed opportunity that was not taken up or used as a guide for a similar statement from Makerbot – if it had, this would not have caused such a bad feeling of betrayal and brocken trust within the open-source/RepRap community and Makerbot’s patents.

Jan's G+ Post - "Dear +MakerBot , here's an idea for you to ponder. Take a look at http://www.redhat.com/footer/patent-promise.html The Red Hat Patent Promise. To put it in simple terms, we at Red Hat apply for patents, mostly out of defensive reasons in a world of patent trolls. But we are fully aware that we must defend the freedom of Open Source and Open Innovation. So we have the legally binding promise that we will never use our patents against developers of Open Source software. It's not the perfect solution, but it is definitely better than your current approach of filing patents and not declaring what the community can do or NOT do.

A year ago I offered +bre pettis my help in working on a similar approach for Makerbot, this however never happened. I am still ready to help and hook you guys up with my network. I think you could have avoided a lot of negative vibes with a patent promise in the Red Hat style."

-          Pledges like the RedHat Patent promise not to go after open-source contributors to a project / technology are already being used by companies that need to have strong patents for legal defence, but also do not want to alienate a community that supports them and can often lead to ideas worth patenting.

-          Without this sort of statement, what are people to think? How will Makerbot use their power and Patent arsenal? For or against an open source community or open-source company? Who knows, but waiting to see is going to be too late.
}

“If that were to happen, it would be very difficult for MakerBot to do anything about it. “

RH - Companies design around patents all the time, and produce more innovative products in the process, also producing more IP that can then be opened up or kept secret, whatever works for you.

“I highly doubt that Makerbot plans to use these patents to profit off of, or keep anyone from entering the market. They are doing it simply to protect their ability to use these currently unpatented designs in the future. “

RH - Why would you assume that? One of the only reasons to have a patent it to get some leverage from it, by making someone else afraid to go near your patented method in-case they say you infringe. Or to attack someone (a competitor doing quite well in the market, but not well enough to defend a big legal battle). And then also to have a patent armoury as a final card to play if someone comes after you.

“Right now they are all free to use, since there are no patents on them. However, if Cubify (3d systems) came along and patented them, they could hold MakerBot ransom. “

RH - Ransom, Threat, Stalemate, stand-off, war, stranglehold, limiting innovation that's what patents have come to stand for. You can decide to patent almost anything, if you have enough money and think it will benefit you.

“Sure Makerbot could go to the courts and say that these designs were created by someone else but then that other person may be required to either patent the design or allow someone else to. They would be stuck in a catch 22, where the patent would either belong to the company that filed the patent, or the original filer, who may not even wish to file a patent for the design. “

RH - The Patent system was supposed to stop things in the public domain being patented in the first place; the scenario above will always appear if companies decide to gather as many patents in an area as possible with the intention of patent litigation in the future.
Most patents are vague for the very reason of letting some later process in the courts or by expert testimony win over an infringement claim, or so simply sink the other party in legal debt before the case is finished.

“I think Makerbot is getting too much heat for just protecting their future business model. Until we see them actually sue someone for using these designs, I think we should let them be.”

RH - It’s too late once they sue a growing open source company - who will already be on their radar - like Printrbot, Ultimaker or RepRapPro for Patent infringement, what they could have done is make a Patent promise not to go after these types of open-source companies in a similar way to how Red-Hat handled their growth. That’s the true missed opportunity to unite a now big company like Makerbot with an entire (and very smart) community to forge trust, rather than shatter and divide it.

RH - That takes true vision and courage, Bre Pettis could have pulled it off if that’s what he wanted to achieve with Makerbot and the wider 3D Printing community. That’s what I'm personally disappointed about.

__________________________________________________________________________


Other posts have appeared over the last week on the Makerbot Patent/trust storm, including some high-profile sites shining a big spotlight on the debate.

Cory Doctorow Posted over on BoingBoing - It's way more balanced than many posts on this subject and raises some fair points for debate, unfortunately I think we have seen the direction Makerbot has decided to take, so we may never see them reach out to build back any trust with the Open source community. And as Cory states, head over to Adafruit to buy a LulzBot TAZ 4 open-source #RepRap 3D Printer 



Even Adafruit themselves do not seem to be able to decide if they want to stock Makerbot/Stratasys products.

John Biggs on TechCrunch posted The Next Open Source Battle Is Being Waged In The 3D Printing Industry
John does mentions Red Hat, but unfortunately not the point about a patent promise I talked about above.
  
Makerbot finally released a statement, (here on TechCrunch) it's bland sees right past the issues of trust and duplicity with the 3D printing community. 

The arguments could easily rage on back and forth, If Makerbot only want to focus on the Quick-Release Extruder - Members of the community have highlighted extruder designs that have the bistable spring implementation posted to Thingiverse as early as 2011 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7129 "by MiseryBot, published Mar 19, 2011" Not quite as "slick" but it does have that key "bistable" bit. Makerbot, I feel you are now on your own.

Plenty of other comments and views are also being aired all over on various forum's and blogs, 

Jeremie Francois Posted his thoughts and opinions here



The sun is shining, and I have real 3D printing to do, so the next Blog post will be a return to all things RepRap. Promise.

Thanks for reading, it was rather a lot of text.

Rich.

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3D Printers - Big printers, Small printers, Wide printers, Tall printers

July 8, 2014, 6:49 am
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Big, Small, Wide, Tall, You have brains in your head. You have tools you can use, you can design a 3D printer any way you choose :) - thanks for the positive thinking Dr Seuss.


This is a summary post, going over some of the machines I have been working on over the last 6 months. Much more information, design details and files are on the way, just fighting for time at the moment.

Back in Feburary (13th) I posted an update of my adventures, and a picture of me for support of the open-hand project, in the background you can see my machines in their early development stages, not many people spotted them, a few did, you know who you are and get 10,000 bonus points, well done :)

And a brightness warning ! - I always let my kids decide on the colour scheme for all my 3D printer prototypes, so watch out below - some of them are very bright and bold !

Recent Development History - 

3DR was my attempt to try and keep Delta printers using 3D printed parts, and take more of a RepRap approach instead of the trend in machining everything for 'professional' results. 3DR seems very popular and I put that down to the majority of parts still being 3D printed, even if they are a little more complicated and time consuming to produce parts than other RepRap machines.

Other than lots of variants and diversification by other people in the community, I have not needed to do anything to the original design of the 3DR, it's still my go-to printer for many objects.

I want to expand on the 3DR family, this post is an overview of the work in progress machines I have going on at the moment and a little more about them.

And before we go any further, I firmly believe we can't have enough RepRap designs, variation and machines, the more the better. None of the following replace 3DR, they all add to the RepRap family.

3DRnano - 
Back in December Gina Häußge(the creator of the awesome Octoprint) asked the G+ 3D printing community if any small 3D printers were available, for demonstrating and transporting to shows, events etc.


I had a few things underway and 3DRnano is starting to be a very capably and portable 3D Printer.

The clear/Polycarbonate carriage in the middle is a normal 3DR using LM6UU linear bearings. On the left is a 3DRmega (see below) Using LM10UU bearings and rods and finally on the right is a 3DRnano that uses tiny little LM4UU bearings.

For some idea of scale, left is the nano almost fits inside and actually provides more print area over the physical size than a normal 3DR.

Using the j-head as a light-weight hot-end for now, but a smaller or stainless steel trimmed down e3d V6 would be great ;)

It uses tiny little everything, including LM4UU bearings and 4mm rods ! Spools, carriages and spectra-line, all small and detailed.

Very tiny carriages, even the smallest Ty-wrap looks large with a 4mm Bearing.

Arm assembly is similar to the normal 3DR, just using even smaller parts.

The assembled nano arms do not compromise much on print area or movement, and are just a little scaled down from normal 3DR arms.


It's designed to be Battery and/or Solar powered, light and all the 3D printed part to fit on a 200mm x 200mm bed.

Motor choice -

Top to bottom NEMA17, NEMA14, NEMA11 & NEMA8

The spool for a NEMA8 was so small to print, but actually came out and performed very well.

For the prototype I experimented with NEMA8 motors, you can see one fitted above, for this size printer NEMA8 proved to be just a little weak, but you could make an even smaller printer using one (3DRpico?)

I settled on the NEMA11 for the 3DRnano

And full one piece solid prints for all the main structural parts.

It's using the Awesome tiny Makerbeam 10mm x 10mm Aluminium extrusions - standard stock size of 300mm long - so it's a compact printer with still a decent 160mm build height.


My kids selected some stunning Faberdashery colours for the 3DRnano prototype, Punk star Pink, Aurora and Pearly White.

Hall effect end-stop sensor's have always been good for me, so again I used them on the nano, they could do with being a little smaller, but work exceptionally well for this machine.

If you are wondering the hole in the middle is where the extruder motor goes :)

The top electronics section and LCD enclosure is going through a re-design at the moment, this was one part I was not happy with on the original design.

More build info, files and video's on 3DRnano. It will be up on Youmagine here as soon as I can.

Lots of people said after I posted various images of 3DRnano - put it up on Kickstarter, and yes I could especially as even the most unbelievable things seem to get funded without any issue at all - Anyone for Potato salad? - head in hands, they are not even trying, and it's working...

Now for something rather BIG - 

3DRmega - 
This one is kind of self explanatory, it's big and most things are scaled-up -


This is a really old picture, apologies for that, where it's being developed at the moment I simply cant get back enough to fit it all in the photo.


Sketchup again for the design, what can I say. It still works well for me and it's so nice to see a model turn into a real thing without errors or problems. I only made one set of files from the design and everything fitted perfectly.

Painful development - 

This development has gone really well for the printed and mechanical design, and much less smoothly almost everything else, especially with choices of electronics, power, wiring and the (arrggghhhh - see below for my pain) heated bed.

Success! (prototype, should have just stopped) - 

I actually has the prototype up-and-running without a heated bed in Feb2014, my aim then was to work more on cement printing and more exotic extruders (more on that in the next post).

I made the mistake of doing a re-design and adding a heated bed :(, new Smoothie electronics :) and industrial stepper drivers, all great things, but so much more development pain. To give you an idea of the up's and downs on this project, I totally designed, refined and finished Sli3DR (see below) during my sulking phase of V2 3DRmega...

Well it's almost all finished now and worked out, here is more of the progress and some of the setbacks.

Outline (new) spec-
  • Bigger Motors - NEMA 23's
  • Bigger Drivers - Dedicated 3A 128microstep (prototype used normal Ramps and drivers)
  • Bigger Electronics - The great ARM based Smoothie board is being used for the (new) prototype.
  • Bigger Rods and Frame (10mm Rods and 30mm Aluminium box-section)
  • Bigger Printed parts - most parts are 100+mm is size (total printed parts weight is just under 2KG)
  • Bigger Print head / multiple / materials / feeds etc.
3DRmega now stands around 1.8M tall.

For some time now I have specifically wanted a printer that I could place down onto almost any surface (to print directly onto) - that means not having parts, electronics, motors or even any real structure at the bottom of the machine. The reason for this is so you can print things 'in place' - like a Stone sculpture directly onto a paving slab already fitted - cool !

The nano and mega for scale.

A set of 3DRmega 3D printed frame parts, just under 2Kg of filament used for these, they are also designed to minimize warp and maximise adhesion to the build platform.

The carriages snap-fit onto LM10UU Linear bearings and are running on 10mm smooth stainless steel rods, just like 3DR but bigger and stronger.

Left to Right - LM10UU, LM8UU, LM6UU and LM4UU

Integral belt lock and points to attach the delta arms.

When assembling the delta arms, it's vital to get the flat surfaces of the universal joints parallel and spaced perfectly apart. I used a simple wooden Jig and bolts to make sure everything was lined up before tightening everything and adding super-glue.

The arms are made from carbon fiber tent poles, cut to size and have an all metal universal ball joint fitted to each end. This allows the center carriage to move in any direction as each arm moves up and down.

The center carriage is one of my favorite mega parts, it's solid and not yet quick-fit is easy to install alternative extruders.

The entire frame is made of just three different lengths of 30mm Aluminium box section.

When designing the printed parts I added various viewing windows, in this one you can see the pencil center line on the aluminium section lines up the the point of the RepRap logo, this makes it easy to get everything lined up correctly before doing a final check and tightening. 

The frame is solid but to aid with both thermal stability when printing very large parts and for extra light-weight support, 10mm clear corrugated poly-carbonate roofing sheeting is wrapped and fixed around the outer frame, an opening door allows full access inside the build chamber.

Smoothie electronics, power supplies and industrial stepper drivers sit inside the top cover for the V2 design.

Like the nano, but unlike the standard 3DR I have mounted the Motors at the top, this allows much more freedom for the design and flexibility of printing on almost any surface.

Even with everything fitted including side panels 3DRmega can still be lifted, moved and re-positioned by hand with only one person. I have not weighed it, but I'm estimating it's under 18Kg in total.

Extruders - 

I designed a few different extruders for the mega, the main requirement was at least one design that didn't use a bowden feed and fed 3mm material, after some interesting re-design around the available 3D space when the arms move around, I ended up with a nice vertical geared design that's stable and works amazingly well.

I have a few other very exciting extruders to share soon, stay tuned for more info :)

Glass - 

For the heated bed I had been on the lookout for some round sheets for a while, whilst on a routine shopping trip I spotted a vintage 70s mirror, almost the correct size, I bought it for £2.50 and was rather impressed with it.

Upon closer inspection it had a date on the back of the mirror, 1977, it's almost the same age as me! I decided not to use it as the glass and mirror looked quite brittle.

For ease of use, simple fitting and a solid base. I ended up with a 12mm Ply base, Cork insulation, thermally reflective sheets (see below) heated bed and a 4mm sheet of glass on top.

These grill and oven pads are amazing, they have a highly reflective metal surface, and thermal insulation on the back - I use them on all my heated bed's - One fits a normal Prusa heat-bed, tape more together with PET or Kapton for bigger requirements. Very easy to cut to size too.

and a cork base is not required for a normal heat-bed, but I added one underneath the fat pads to be sure no heat would be wasted.  

Disaster strikes - 

I spent quite a while on the heated bed design for 3DRmega. It's a big sheet of glass to heat and insulate well.

Shortly (like 5 mins) after completing the one-of-a-kind and very large 36V heated bed prototype, with glass top and triple insulated base. I went and dropped a heavy NEMA23 motor right onto one corner causing this wonderful mess.

I had just tested it, worked perfectly... then butterfingers, smash :(


If it had only been the glass that got damaged I would not have been so annoyed with myself, but a NEMA23 is heavy and the heated bed and wiring needed repair. Also sourcing more (toughened - this time) glass ended up taking a lot longer than I expected.

And guess what? When I posted about 3DRmega in February, I had a flood of requests for design files (I posted way too early, sorry) and also hundreds of people saying I should put it up on Kickstarter...

That's enough of the mega for now, I'll post more and release the design files when I'm in a better mood with it :) and I can document them a little better. I will also get some video's done to show it printing, it's even more impressive than when you saw your first delta printer, big smiles for big 3D printers.

More info and design files will be up on Youmagine here as soon as I can

3DRultra - 
Well, not yet. but for a really massive Delta printer, moving to LM16UU / LM20UU or linear Rails would start to give you a very large printable area indeed - Bigger frames can be made out of even larger Aluminium box sections, even scaffolding poles if you want. If someone wants to fund the parts, I'll design and make it... (seriously, get in touch).

This post is getting rather long, so I'll delay the full post about Sli3DR for a few days, here is a little of what it's all about and as so many people asked me about the mechanism, that's shown below too -

Sli3DR - (pronounced Slider)
Sli3DR is not a Delta based printer, rather it's based on an intriguing 'unnamed mechanism' that was floating around on the RepRap Forum and G+ last year. Billy ZelsnackIdentified it as used in a very old (Rikadenki) Pen Plotter design here.  A few people have tried it out for 3D printing using off the shelf mechanical parts, I wanted to make it with 3D printed parts and Spectra Line based on this mechanism. 


Tim RastallMade a great sketch of the 'unnamed mechanism' - still unnamed as far as I know.



Maybe it was fate but it was also only a few weeks after the Ultimaker 2 was announced, and not yet actually ever managing to be an Ultimaker owner (one day) - I always wanted to build something similar.



After using the Tantillus (very similar to Ultimaker position mechanism) and looking into both CoreXY and HBot systems for a while this 'unnamed mechanism' seemed perfect. It's very old, not patented, (or if it ever was that's expired), and I can use the same Spectra line as the Tantillus and 3DR's - Now to design it.

It's using Spectra Line on all the axis drives, including the Z axis - my quest for ideal Z movements moves ever closer to perfection.

Tim Rastall was also designing a Super-big Tantillus called the Ingentis around the same time. I printed an early set of Ingentis parts, but after seeing the above mechanism I just had to design a printer based on it. I did borrow the style of Tim's Z-Axis arms, (Thanks Tim) everything else needed to be designed and had to be able to be scaled up or down.


I used Sketchup again, I still find it east to use but I must admit after getting in all the 2D dimensions and measurements, moving to 3D parts does not give you much chance to refine the concept into a beautiful looking 'product' before you get trapped into blocky looking parts. But it did the job for a new concept design. - I desire a much more Organic feel for the the next project.


If you were wondering, the parts are printed in Faberdashery Cyber Yellow, it's ultra day-glow Yellow and looks great, day or night.


Hot end and carriage system


That's not all Kapton tape - It has some layers of ceramic insulation.
Side and back panels too, and a clear door.

Sli3DR is actually the closest to be releasable, I need to attach a few licenses to the design files and then it will go up on Youmagine here - I have put up lots more pictures too.

Yea, I know, I should put it up on Kickstarter, thanks.

If you want to spontaneously fund me 'without a Kickstarter' I have a donate button over on the left of my blog.

Potato salad is over $35K and rising as I type this - madness, total madness. - That said I do make a wicked Chili...

RepRap Barcelona - mash.

And talking of Potatoes, RepRap Barcelona have done a mash potato extruder based on my Universal paste extruder design - great work guys :)

Other news / updates - 

The UK 3D Printing TCT Show is happening in 30th Sept - 2nd October, over three days this time, the RepRap hub is planned to be bigger and better than ever, but only if people get involved and want to help make it a success - if you want to take part please e-mail me on - tctshow@reprapmagazine.com

Many companies have decided to take their own spaces so if you want to be part of the RepRap Community Hub, then do let me know.

TCT Show Floorplan is available to view here


3D Printing development and the 3D Printing industry is a massive roller-coaster, I would have to say that at the moment I'm on a big downward plunge into a dim tunnel, my wallet has fallen out and people are screaming all around me. See you next time.

Rich.
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