After a few months of eager waiting, [Brook Drumm] has finally released the files for his paradigm-shifting 3D printer, the Printrbot. If you didn’t order one of these during the Kickstarter, you can now print your own set of parts.

[Brook] gave his Printrbot to the world last November with the promise of being extremely cheap, extremely easy to build, and having a relatively high print quality. The simplicity of the Printrbot was amazing, which probably led to the Printrbot getting $830k worth of funding on the initial Kickstarter. Although the files for the 3D printed parts are out in the wild now, there still aren’t any instructions on how to build it apart from a Flickr slideshow.

[Brook] promised to release the files for the Printrbot much earlier, but we’re guessing he’s been busy printing and assembling  the 1200 Printrbots that were claimed in his Kickstarter. While we’re on the subject of cheap 3D printers, [Richard Sum], the English gent behind the SUMPOD sent in a link of one of his $600 printers milling MDF and extruding for seven hours straight. We’re on the cusp of Star Trek-style replicators here, people.

If you’re like us, you’ve been infatuated with the small RC helicopter you picked up on Amazon up until the point where it careened off a wall and broke its blades. Now that you’re wondering about what to do with that small pile of plastic, metal, and electronics, why not print some helicopter blades on your 3D printer?

[Taylor] printed these blades on his Utilimaker, but we don’t see why they couldn’t be printed on a Makerbot or other RepRap. The first set of printed blades worked on the top rotor, but they were too heavy when all four blades were replace. The parts were edited in netfabb using a 0.08mm layer height and now they’re working perfectly. As far as free tools go, Slic3r is the new hotness for .STL to Gcode conversion and now that [Taylor] put the files up on Thingiverse, anyone can print a set of spare blades.

Check out [Taylor] comparing his printed blades to the stock ones that came with his awesome heli after the break.

Here’s something that may be of interest to all the reprappers, vacuum formers, and other plastic fabbers out there: ultrasonic welding of plastics. If you’ve ever wanted to join two pieces of plastic without melting them together with acetone or screwing them together, [circuitguru] is your guy.

Ultrasonic welder setups are usually reserved for companies that don’t mind spending tens of thousands of dollars on a piece equipment. There are smaller versions made for heat staking - melting plastic pillars into rivets on the work piece – and [circuitguru] was lucky enough a somewhat reasonable price.

Because the heat staking gun was a handheld unit, a rotary tool drill press was put to work. The end result is a relatively inexpensive way to join two plastic parts without screws, glue, or solvents. The bond is pretty strong, too. Check out the video after the break to see [circuitguru] join two pieces of a plastic enclosure and try to tear them apart.

If you’ve ever wanted to build an awesome tabletop game or model train layout scenery, you probably couldn’t do better than printing Minecraft worlds on a RepRap. This guide comes courtesy of [Nudel] who figured out how to use Mineways with his RepRap. While [Nudel]‘s landscape print doesn’t have the full color of something from Shapeways, he only spent $3 in materials. Not bad if you’d like to print out your server’s world.

We have to give a shout out to [erich666] for his amazing work on Mineways. He bills his work as a bridge between Minecraft and a 3D printer or Blender. You can check out [erich]‘s demo of Mineways after the break.

Of course the state of printing voxels wouldn’t be where it is today without the work of two guys at the MIT Media Lab and their work on Minecraft.Print(). If you manage to print out your base/castle/village, add it to the Mineways Flickr group.

3D printers are awesome, but boy are they frustrating. If you’ve built a RepRap Mendel, Prusa or Huxely, you know there’s nothing quite like trying to get a washer off of a threaded rod without disassembling the entire machine. This frustration in part sourcing, assembling and correctly aligning a printer is where printers like the Makerbot find their niche. There’s a new printer on the block that promises a 45 minute assembly time and less than 2 hours from starting the build to first print. It will do all this for under $500, electronics and motors included.

From the Flickr photoset, we can see that the Printrbot has 2 motors for the z-axis, uses sanguinololu electronics, and uses a derivative of Wade’s extruder – all proven design choices. Unlike the RepRaps, most of the frame is actually printed, and not built out of threaded rods. This drastically reduces the assembly and calibration time.

The inventor of the Printrbot, [Brook Drumm], has a Kickstarter up where he’s selling complete kits (electronics, motors and vitamins) for $499. This beats the very inexpensive SUMPOD in affordability. We haven’t been able to find the 3D design files for the Printrbot (although you can buy these printed parts for $75), and there’s no word on the build volume of the stock printer. That being said, the printrbot does have pretty good resolution. Check out the video of a Printrbot in action after the break.

[Bart] built a couple dozen Pololu compatible relay drivers.

If you have a Reprap, you’re probably familiar with the Pololu stepper motor driver. These tiny pieces of kit provide stepper motor control for Gen 6, RAMPS, or Sanguinololu Reprap electronics. There’s a small problem with all these boards, though; there’s no way to control any high-power devices from these boards except for stepper motors. Controlling a spindle for a home-built CNC router would be great, but apart from attaching a Dremel to your x-axis, you’re just about out of luck.

[Bart]‘s relay driver takes the step and direction inputs from the stock Pololu stepper driver and connects each of those to a MOSFET. From there, a relay can be hooked up to the driver to control the spindle for a router, or a whole bunch of fans for a homebrew laser cutter.

The schematic and Gerber files are up on [Bart]‘s webzone. The part count is very low, and the entire board could easily be built on a piece of perfboard. Check out the demo on the other side of the jump.

A few nights ago, [Chris Fenton] was hanging out at NYC Resistor putting in some time on his electromechanical computer project. You might remember [Chris] from his tiny Cray that he’s putting an OS on. It seems [Chris] is going back in time about 150 years and has set his sights on a 3D printed version of [Babbage]‘s Analytical Engine.

The Analytical Engine was is a remarkable feat of engineering and machining. It was the first programmable computer. Shame, then, that it was never built in the 1800s. [Chris] isn’t building a glorified calculator like [Babbage]‘s polynomial-computing Difference Engine – he’s going all out and building something with conditional looping.

[Chris] calls his device an electromechanical computer, so we’re assuming it won’t be crank driven like the version in the British Science Museum. Right now, he’s constructed the decade-counting gears that are vitally important for the ALU of his design. All the parts were printed on a Thingomatic, so we’re betting [Chris] is going to be relying heavily on the MakerBot automated build platform for the thousands of parts he’ll have to fabricate.

Check out the video from NYC Resistor after the break.

Behold, another RepRap springs into existence! Well, springs might not be the best choice of words, it took a while and there were many bumps in the road. But [NBitWonder's] self-built RepRap is now finished and you can read his 14-part build log to see all that went into the process.

We checked in on the project at one of the early stages. At that point he was just beginning to assemble the hardware and we mused that the calibration stage is where we thought things would get exciting. The project didn’t disappoint, as he had many follies getting the extruder heads to work. At first some issues popped up when figuring out what diameter filament would work for the print head he was using. Once that was worked out, a less-than-precise PID controller led to the clogging and eventual destruction of the extruder tip. He goes on to assemble and test a heated build platform only to discover that the resistors shipped with the hardware are shockingly underrated for the task. We could go on and on, but that would ruin the fun for you. Bookmark this one for the weekend and enjoy!

[Rich] couldn’t find any instances where RepRap owners had used polycarbonate as a 3D printing source material. He’s filled that knowledge gap by running multiple polycarbonate printing tests. Polycarbonate is a plastic that is highly resistant to shattering yet it’s still rather soft. With enough effort it can be bent and stretched, but it’s fairly difficult to break the material.

The test spool of polycarbonate was special ordered for this project. [Rich] sourced 1.6mm filament since 3mm material would have been difficult to spool. It melts at a temperature range of 280-300 degrees Celsius, which he reaches with a hot-end extruder design. The printed material comes out a bit cloudy, which may be due to the heating process itself, or due to extruder reversals (he’s not quite sure what’s causing it). But as you can see above and in the video after the break, it’s certainly a viable printing medium.

[Thanks Marnargulus]

[Mark] wrote in to share a little creation that he is calling the first solar-powered 3D printer in existence. While we can’t say that we totally agree with him on that title, we will give him the benefit of the doubt that this is the first solar-powered RepRap we have seen thus far.

You might remember [Mark] from his previous exploits, but rest assured that there’s little possibility of anyone losing an eye with this one. He has taken his RepRap outdoors, and with the help of a solar panel plus a few batteries from Harbor Freight, he has the world’s first solar-powered RepRap*.

The trick behind keeping the RepRap running for such a long time with the sun as its only power source lies in the RAMPS board [Mark] uses. He has the 1.3 revision of the shield, which enables him to print objects loaded from an SD card rather than requiring a computer to be connected at all times.

So, if you happen to need the ability to print 3D objects where an extension cord cannot possibly reach, check out [Mark’s] setup and get to building!

* Maybe. Perhaps.

Like most of us, [reonarudo] isn’t satisfied with the current methods of homebrew PCBs, so he put a laser on a reprap and started burning some boards.

The basic procedure is to cover a copper clad board with matte black spray paint. A laser was installed on the X carriage of the reprap. [reonarudo] used cad.py to convert the board files into g-code and fired up his laser. The quality of the boards is highly dependent on the accuracy of the laser so after working through some mechanical problems [reonarudo] managed to make some passable boards.

We’ve seen just about every manufacturing method imaginable applied to PCB production. Etch resist and toner transfer do the job and a reprap milling machine is pretty neat, but lasers are so much cooler. While it may not be perfect (yet), printing PCBs with a laser shows a lot of potential. Check out a video of [reonarudo]‘s bot burning some copper after the break.

Well, if we ever need something huge built on a RepRap, now we know who to call. [Jim] over at Grass Roots Engineering wrote in to share a large 3D print he just finished, which was extruded by an equally impressive home-built 3D printer.

The part he built consists of a bunch of hollow green tubing in a criss-cross pattern and was printed in just under 2 days. He never mentions what the part is going to be used for, but at 376 x 376 x 250mm (14.8 x 14.8 x 9.84in), he estimates that this is the biggest single part printed with a DIY 3D printer.

The printer itself is based on the RepRap, but is obviously far larger. It prints using ABS plastic utilizing a maximum build area of 403 x 403 x 322.7mm (15.86 x 15.86 x 12.7in). Built over the course of 3 years, it was fully operational in 2010 but has undergone several improvements as [Jim’s] needs have changed.

It’s a fantastic looking machine, and it seems to print quite nicely. We would sure love to have one of these in our workshop.

Continue reading to see [Jim's] 3D printer in action.

Sometimes, not all our builds work out the way we hoped. That’s what happened to [Rob] and his attempt at a Delta robot that does stereo lithography. A Delta robot is capable of very fast and precise movements, so [Rob] slapped a laser module on the end of the arms. After putting some UV curing resin in front of the laser, he was left with a blob of goo and we’re trying to figure out why.

[Rob] thinks the admittedly terrible print quality was due to diffraction and the reflective build plate. If this were the case, we’d agree with the assessment that adding some dye to the resin would help. Some commentors on [Rob]‘s blog have suggested that he’s running the laser too slowly. It’s a shame [Rob] scrapped his build and turned it into a plain-jane X & Y axis build. Delta robots can be really damn fast, and adding a printer to one might mean prints that take minutes instead of hours. There are a few people working to get a Delta RepRap off the ground, but this project still has another prototype or two before that happens. Check out [Rob]‘s attempt at Delta robot stereolithography after the break.

Thanks to [techartisan] for sending this one in.

[Charles Gantt] and a few others were having trouble burning the Sanguino bootloader to an ATmega644 chip. With some help from the [Nils Vogil] via the RepRap IRC [Charles] got it worked out and wrote a guide for burning the bootloader using an Arduino as an ISP programmer.

We’re not familiar with the specifics of the Sanguino bootloader, but [Charles] mentioned that he was unable to flash it onto the AVR chip without a resonator. The resonator serves as an external clock source for the chip. We’d bet the programming process changes the fuse settings on the chip to use an external source. Without that source, you won’t be able to communicate with the chip afterwards.

The solution just adds the resonator to the programming circuit. This should be useful when burning any bootloader using an Arduino. But it does make us wonder if there isn’t an alternative method that would let you draw the clock signal from the Arduino itself?

Hey everybody, [Nbitwonder] is building his own RepRap 3D printer. What’s special about that? Well, not much and and lot all at the same time. The art of building a self-replicating 3d printer still has a lot to do with luck and forum-crawling to make all of the decisions that go into this complicated project.

Back in March [Nbitwonder] did a collaborative project over at Thingiverse and scored himself a set of printed parts from a guy who already has one of these printers. He then order a set of the non-printable hardware and has since been assembling it. If you’re interested but haven’t already taken the plunge, there’s enough pictures and information in this set of posts to satisfy your craving… for now.

We say this build is an art because it goes beyond just plunking the pieces together. Take the print head, for instance. Instead of going with the extruder that is considered the default for a Mendel build, [Nbitwonder] is working on a variation called Greg’s Hinged Accessible Extruder. We can’t wait until the hardware assembly is done, because it’s the calibration that really interests us.