The Spherebot is an open source machine capable of printing designs onto spherical objects, such as Xmas baubles!
The design is based on the ever-popular Egg-Bot, which we have seen derived into many other useful printers such as the Mug Plotter, and the Ping Pong Printer.
The Spherebot features two stepper motors, one servo motor for marker actuation, some cheap mounting hardware, and a whole bunch of 3D printed parts—all of which are available on Thingiverse. In this design they used a 3D printer controller board called the 3Drag by Open-Electronics, which is based on the ATmega2560 (the same microcontroller as the Arduino MEGA). The Spherebot doesn’t require all three axes or an extruder, so they only installed 2 out of the 4 stepper drivers on the board to save cost.
Once you have it all built, it’s a simple matter of uploading your design into the free Spherebot-Host-GUI provided on GitHub. Stick around after the break to see just what it is capable of!
[via Dangerous Prototypes]
I feel bad for the little spherebot sitting here without comments. It does a good job!
A dashingly good looking robot too.
Raise from the dead…
I don’t know why (I have built several 3d printers and a arduino laser engraver ((Frankenstein Laser Engraver))) but setting up this thing and get it running is a freaking nightmare. Firmware chaos. It’s like the Babylon of Firmwares. Crappy Gcode senders, even more crappy mac software, half baked documentation (despite the commerical exploited Eggbot variant)…. you name it. I want to smash mine.
Any luck with the firmware. I get compilation errors no matter whose firmware i use. And the 3Drag version even bundles the libraries. Very sad.
Anyone re-purposed a Raspberry Pi for this?