MRRF, the Midwest RepRap Festival, is in full swing right now. The venue is packed, attendance is way up this year, and the panorama is impressive:
MRRF is not really a trade show. Yes, there are companies here (Google is picking up the tab for Chinese food tonight), but this is assuredly a community-based event around open source hardware. That said, Lulzbot is here, SeeMeCNC is hosting, E3D, and Ultimachine are all here. This year, there are a few new printers.
Lulzbot’s Taz 6 – the latest update to their flagship printer made its first public appearance at MRRF this year. A product update from Lulzbot isn’t like a product announcement from a normal company. Lulzbot is using rapid prototyping for manufacturing (!). They can iterate quickly and release two new printers in the time it takes Stratasys to come up with a design. This also means the releases are incremental.
Click past the break for more photos and updates.
The new Taz 6 includes a tower of sorts, replacing the small box of electronics on the side of the Taz 5. This sheet metal tower holds all of the electronics, including the integrated power supply, LCD, and control boards. Lulzbot will be selling this tower separately, a very cool announcement considering they’ve caught a little bit of flak from making the Taz 6 a little harder to build at home from source.
Also from Lulzbot is an improved dual-head extruder. This new tool head has a metal frame that bumps right up against the x-axis rail. It’s extremely solid, and produces some very nice quality prints.
SeeMeCNC has been working on a small delta printer, the Eris, for a very long time. It’s finally done. The key design element of the Eris is that nearly all the parts are injection molded. While this is in direct contrast to Lulzbot’s philosophy of manufacturing their printers on 3D printers, the Eris is quite nice.
One innovative feature is bed leveling via accelerometer. The Eris has a small accelerometer board in the toolhead, allowing the controller board to sense when the nozzle hits the bed. The nozzle touches three points on the bed, and level correction happens in software.
E3D is out in Indiana again this year, and they have a lot of stuff to show off. Everything from an improved Wade’s extruder to custom dissolvable filament. We’re quickly approaching the time where dual extrusion should be standard on all 3D printers.
This year, E3D launched their own line of 3D printers to sell alongside the tens of thousands of hotends they ship every year. It’s called the BigBox, and yes, it’s a big box.
There will be further updates this weekend, this is just the mid-day roundup. Be sure to check out the live stream from the event.
Looking forward for the TAZ6.
I’ve seen reviews of the big box too, the only flaw in my eyes is that there is no option for a metal frame, only acrylic or wood.
Also, amazing price for the big box, considering it’s quality, and the fact that it’s from E3D, who i trust to understand what makes a good 3D printer. The dual extrusion model can be had for less than 1000$…
Anyway, i wish i could be there.
Perhaps i need to organize my own event in Guadeloupe, at a lower scale :)
Nice to see so much dimorphic diversity in the panorama! Looks like alot of fun.
As someone that doesn’t live in McMerica, I see more types of “diversity” than you. lol
WOOOOSH! right over your head. Let me rephrase that “Nice to see so many females interested in 3d printing”
Ooooh, sick burn! That’ll show ’em!
Can I be honest here Rob? No one is impressed with your lowest hanging fruit political observations. It doesn’t make you seem edgy or astute- as a matter of fact it’s about as douchey as spouting the latest GOP or UKIP claptrap. We get it, you read VICE. This isn’t your first year poli sci class, it’s a hacking site.
I’m really curious how SeeMeCNC is using an accelerometer for probing. I experimented with this a couple of years ago on my delta, and couldn’t distinguish noise coupled from the motors from hitting the bed. The machine in the video makes it look like there are rubber bushings between the bed and frame. Maybe that’s the secret?
Those aren’t rubber bushings, they’re nylon spacers. :)
Lol Geneb, looks like the seemecnc forum is spreading to hackaday :p
Naa, we’ve been here for years… ;-)
Maybe one trick would be to have the sensor attached to the bed, and use it more like a microphone that listens for a specific tap-signature signal, and not just use the raw acceleration value (amplitude) as indication of the event.
I’m confident a little MEMS-microphone and some smart dsp-filtering (thinking of a cortex M0+ here) could do the job just fine to provide a digital output signal indicating a nozzle tap to the bed happened.
It seems a name change is in order for the event. Midwest 3D Printing Festival, perhaps… Prusas, Mendels… Maybe some i3’s and Mendel90’s built from kit… Commercial Hotends and Filament but not commercial machines.
But maybe the issue isn’t the event but the perspective of the write-up.
http://s17.postimg.org/efl7pv43z/mrrf_panorama_2_2.jpg
Which 3d printer is this? Rotating arm deltas are awesome. Way faster than slidey railey deltas.
Here are a couple of examples of fast rotating arm delta robots. They are super cool.
https://youtu.be/Gv5B63HeF1E
https://youtu.be/vtAEIKJLHGw
This is the firepick delta: https://hackaday.io/project/963-firepick-delta-the-open-source-microfactory
The firepick delta is supposed to be a pick and place circuit building tool that can also 3d print.
There have been a few spinoffs that just do the printing bit with the same mechanism: https://sites.google.com/site/3dneludeltaen/3d-printer/delta-robot-nelu
That is one of the firepick delta prototypes: https://hackaday.io/project/963-firepick-delta-the-open-source-microfactory
Its a pick and place PCB assembly machine. It can also 3d print but some people have made their own variants that specifically only 3d print with the same mechanical configuration: https://sites.google.com/site/3dneludeltaen/3d-printer/delta-robot-nelu
It’s kind of a weird coincidence that this is going on at the sand time as I’m rebuilding my Prusa i3.
Wasn’t able to go this year after attending the past 2 years. I see a lot of familiar faces in the photo, hope everyone is having a good time!