This Friday SuckedFollow

Oh, well, Trenton sucks. And don't go to Camden.

Wait, you're using your 3D printer to make parts for other 3D printers?

It's self-replicating! Quick, nuke it!

The printer is a somewhat older design based on a type called the Mendelmax, which is how I was able to aquire it as cheaply as I did. There are probably about 1,000 of them in the world, and maybe another 20,000 compatable printers worldwide. It's not a huge community, and many people have moved on to newer designs. Even then, there are very few people that are willing / able to design objects in 3D of that complexity. it's one thing to make a toy with a few parts. The more parts you fit together, the more things you have to take into account on design and placement, especially when you have existing constraints. . I can't afford one of the newer designs, so i decided to retrofit this one up to include all the features of newer designs. I suspect they didn't do something like this initially because it's really difficult to fit what I fit in the space available without compromising structure. The origional parts weren't bad. Mine are just more accurate. Cost isn't the issue, it's ability and need.

The ao-10x series of printers have an interesiting design evolution on that particular x axis area. At first they had a single leadscrew nut and both bearings were on the top clamp. Someone noticed that there was 20mm worth of unused space below the x axis and extended the clamp down and moved the bearing lower. Simple change, instant print improvement for everyone, and not thought up by the company. The company then released an entirely new design called the TAZ which has a spring on the side to absorb the angular motion, but the whole printer assembly was much larger than the ao-10x series and a different configuration entirely. I took that concept, redesigned it to fit their older style printers, added a few improvements to remove the z axis hysterisis from my CNC knowledge, and 10 prototypes later and $30 worth of plastic, I ended up with parts that work better than stock.

Thats the cool thing about 3d printers. Anyone with an idea and a bit of skill can do a brain dump of their idea directly into reality as a solid object, and aside from the cost of the printer itself which isn't inconsiderable, it's fairly inexpensive to do so.

I like to think i'm pretty good at the whole 3d modeling and design bit too for what it's worth.

I only got got about 10 words into that second paragraph before I fell asleep.

I do think 3d printers are really cool though.

Edited, Oct 11th 2013 1:30pm by Xsarus

I had a half day's worth of work, and my son had a half day of school, and it's really nice out...but the wife has a migraine and I have to go grocery shopping. Guess kayaking will have to wait till (tomorrow morning or Monday).

Update: Parfaits. Apparently they exist outside of European rom coms.

Kind of. I haven't had a chance to play with Solidworks itself, so I don't know if it has a direct print interface built into it. If it does, and if thats what you are asking about, I'm guessing that no one has ported a module for the specific RAMPS controller I am using, but you could attach pretty much any 4 axis driver platform to this printer and it would work, so if there was one that was compatable with solidworks, it would just be a matter of swapping out the controller and firmware. RAMPS 1.4 is Airduno based, so you can pretty much make it take any input if you can get the program to see the printer in the first place. You could probably swap it with a Gecko controller, though you would have to adapt the thermocouple interface to something, probably the Z probe inputs. RAMPS and the newer RAMBO derivitives are currently the most popular 3D printer controllers outside the big multi thousand dollar units.

I use the excellent and free Repetier host for the actual driving of the stepper motors with it curently http://www.repetier.com/ which can work with gcode, stl, obj, or nc files directly. Solidworks can save nativly to a stl file, so worst case scenario you could save as .stl, drop it into repetier and slice it into layers, and print from inside repetier without any additional cost. Just an extra step of labor. I use Autodesk inventor for my design work, supplementing with autocad as needed. Inventor can import just about everything, even older solidworks .sldprt models and output them to .stl. Or the reverse for that matter, so it's easy and effective to get a solidworks model to print, it just may take an extra step.

edit: i'm told someone made a makerbot 2 and a soliddoodle port for solidworks. both those printers use RAMPS based controllers, so it may actually nativly print.

Edited, Oct 11th 2013 1:20pm by Kaolian

Have you ever met a person, you say, "Let's get some parfait," they say, "Hell no, I don't like no parfait"? Parfaits are delicious!

Paddled out to the island in the middle of the river with the five year old in my lap; we need a two-seat kayak for next year. I'm thinking inflatable.

Build a bridge.

I actually prefer kayaks as the Hudson can get rough and choppy at times, with wind, speedboats, the yacht club nearby and cargo ships heading up and downriver.