This Weekend: The East Coast RepRap Festival

June 20, 2018 by 10 Comments

Are you around Philly, Baltimore, or DC, and looking for something fun to do this weekend? Great news, because Saturday sees the start of the first inaugural East Coast RepRap Festival in Bel Air, Maryland. Eh, we’ll grab some Bohs and boil up some crabs. It’ll be a great time.

Regular readers of Hackaday should have heard of MRRF, the Midwest RepRap Festival, and the greatest 3D printer convention on the planet. There’s a reason it’s so good: it’s not a trade show. It’s simply everyone in the business and a ton of cool people heading out to the middle of Indiana one weekend per year and simply dorking out. All the heavy hitters were at MRRF last year, from [Prusa], to E3D, to [Brook] of Printrbot. The 3D Printing YouTubers made it out, and the entire event was simply a thousand or so people who were the best at what they do just hanging out.

Want evidence a highly unorganized conference of 3D printing enthusiasts can be great? Here’s a working MakerBot Cupcake. Here’s full-color printing with cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white filament. How about an infinite build volume printer? There are roundtables, demos, and talks. This is the state of 3D printing, and it inexplicably happens in the middle of nowhere every year.

This weekend, the East Coast RepRap Festival is launching. This is not an event organized by SeeMeCNC, the hosts of the Midwest RepRap Festival. This is an independent event, and we have no idea how it’s going to turn out. That said, the schedule of events looks great with 3D printed pinewood (douglasfirfill?) derbies, and of course, the event space will be filled with strange and exotic homebuilt printers. The big names will be there, and it looks like this may be the beginning of something great.

Hackaday is going to have some boots on the ground this weekend, and we’re going to be showing off the greatest and the best from ERRF. Tickets are still available, and it looks like this is shaping up to be a great weekend.

Cutting Edge Of 3D Printing Revealed At Last Weekend’s Midwest RepRap Festival

March 26, 2018 by 47 Comments

The last three days marked the 2018 Midwest RepRap Festival. Every year, the stars of the 3D printing world make it out to Goshen, Indiana for the greatest gathering of 3D printers and printing enthusiasts the world has ever seen. This isn’t like any other 3D printing convention — everyone here needs to take the time to get to Goshen, and that means only the people who want to be here make it out.

Over the weekend we covered some amazing hacks and printer builds from MRRF. The ‘BeagleBone On A Chip’ has become a complete solution for a 3D printer controller. This is a great development that takes advantage of the very under-used Programmable Real-Time Units found in the BeagleBone, and will make an excellent controller for that custom printer you’ve been wanting to build. E3D has announced they’re working on an automatic tool-changing printer. It’s a slight derivative of their now-defunct BigBox printer, but is quite possibly the best answer to multi-material filament printers we’ve ever seen. There’s some interest from the community, and if everything goes well, this printer may become a kit, or something of the sort. Filament splicing robots also made an appearance at this year’s MRRF, and the results are extremely impressive. Now you can create multi-color prints with the printer you already own. Is it expensive? Yes, but it looks so good.

This wasn’t all that could be found at MRRF. There were hundreds of printers at the event, and at last count, over 1300 attendees. That’s amazing for a 3D printer convention that is held every year in the middle of nowhere, Indiana. What were the coolest sights and sounds coming out of MRRF this year? Check out the best-of list below.

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Join Hackaday At The Midwest RepRap Festival This Weekend

March 22, 2018 by 7 Comments

What time is it? It’s Midwest RepRap Festival time, and it’s happening this weekend in beautiful Goshen, Indiana. It’s free, it’s open to everyone, and it’s the greatest 3D printer convention on Earth.

What’s so great about MRRF? This is where the latest products in the 3D printing space are launched. A few years ago, E3D announced their dual extrusion head at MRRF. This is where the world first got a look at the Bondtech extruder. This is where E3D announced their Titan extruder, and this is where the world got its first look at the Lulzbot Taz 6. If you want to check out the latest 3D printing gear, this is where you go.

How about showcasing what 3D printing can do? Well, how about 3D printed molds for resin casting? There will be 3D printed droids from Star Wars. Want to learn about bioprinting? Sure thing. How about non-Nerf guns? How many filament changes are too many? This is not the limit.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a RepRap festival without the latest new designs for 3D printers. [Nicholas Seward] usually makes it out to MRRF, and he’ll probably be bringing a few of his weird innovations. There are strange RepRaps built for STEM-driven curriculum. Last year, we saw what is probably the greatest advancement in 3D printing in years. The infinite build volume printer is exactly that — it can print an infinitely long beam in one axis. How about a color mixing, CMYKW filament-based printer?

The Midwest RepRap Festival is the greatest 3D printer convention on the planet, and I’d say one of the top two or three cons I go to every year. It’s a fantastic time that you can’t miss. Join us!

Hackaday Prize Entry: RepRap Helios

May 7, 2017 by 30 Comments

Did you know that most of the current advances in desktop consumer 3D printing can be traced back to a rather unknown project started in 2005? This little-known RepRap project was dedicated to building Open Source hardware that was self-replicating by design. Before the great mindless consumerization of 3D printing began, the RepRap project was the greatest hope for Open Source hardware, and a sea change in what manufacturing could be.

While the RepRap project still lives on in companies like Lulzbot, Prusa, SeeMeCNC, and others, the vast community dedicated to creating Open Hardware for desktop manufacturing has somehow morphed into YouTube channels that feature 3D printed lions, 3D printed Pokemon, and a distinct lack of 3D printed combs. Still, though, there are people out there contributing to the effort.

[Nick Seward] is famous in the world of RepRap. He designed the RepRap GUS Simpson, an experimental 3D printer that is able to print all of its components inside its own build volume. The related LISA Simpson is an elegant machine that is unlike any other delta robot we’ve seen. He’s experimented with Core XZ machines for years now — a design that is only now appearing on AliBaba from random Chinese manufacturers. In short, [Nick Seward] is one of the greats of the RepRap project.

[Nick] is designing a new kind of RepRap, and he’s entered it in the Hackaday Prize. It can print most of its own component parts, it has an enormous build volume, and it’s unlike any 3D printer you’ve seen before. It’s a SCARA — not a, ‘robotic arm’ because SCARA is an acronym for Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm — that puts all the motors in the non-moving portion of the base. Its design is inspired by the RepRap Morgan, a printer whose designer won $20,000 in the GADA prize for being mostly self-replicating.

Improvements over the RepRap Morgan include a huge build volume (at least three 200x200mm squares can be placed in this printer’s build volume), a relatively fast print speed, high accuracy and precision, and auto bed leveling. Despite being more capable than some RepRap printers in some areas, the RepRap Helios should wind up being cheaper than most RepRap printers. It can also print most of its component parts, bringing us ever closer to a truly self-replicating machine.

You can check out a few of the videos of this printer in action below.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: RepRap Helios” →

The Midwest RepRap Festival Spectacular

March 28, 2017 by 4 Comments

Every year, nestled between a swine auction and beef auction at the fairgrounds in Goshen, Indiana, the world’s greatest 3D-printing meetup happens. The Midwest RepRap Festival draws the greatest minds in 3D printing from around the world, with teams flying in from Prague, Oxford, and Hong Kong. This year was bigger than any other year. Over 1,000 people ventured forth into the sticks to attend this awesome festival dedicated to DIY printers.

What did we see this year? The PartDaddy, SeeMeCNC’s 18-foot-tall delta printer made an appearance. We saw a new extruder from E3D, and an announcement that Open Source filaments will soon be a reality. True color printing with a five filament CMYKW system is weird and cool. DIY resin printers using laser diodes and galvos are now a thing. An Easy Break Oven isn’t broken. Printers with an infinite build volume now exist, and it skirts around a MakerBot patent, too.

There was more to see at MRRF than a single weekend would allow. [Jason Kridner] from BeagleBone was there talking about the latest in fancy single-chip Linux computers. Hackerspaces were there talking about their coolest builds and doing the calculations necessary to strap model rocket engines to 3D printed rockets. A few local colleges sent teams out to talk about their efforts to bring additive manufacturing to their programs. YouTube personalities were there. Check out the rest of the goodies we saw below.

Continue reading “The Midwest RepRap Festival Spectacular” →

Run A RepRap On An ESP8266

September 6, 2016 by 17 Comments

What can’t the little $5 WiFi module do? Now that [lhartmann] has got an ESP8266 controlling the motors of a 3D printer, that’s one more item to check off the list.

What’s coolest about this project is the way that [lhartmann] does it. The tiny ESP8266 has nowhere near the required number of GPIO pins, the primary SPI is connected to the onboard flash memory, and the secondary SPI is poorly documented and almost nobody uses it. So, [lhartmann] chose to use the I2S outputs.

I2S is most often an audio protocol, so this might at first seem like a strange choice. Although I2S sounds like I2C, it’s really essentially an SPI protocol with a fourth wire that alternates to designate the right or left channel. It’s actually just perfect for sending 16×2 bits of data at high data rates.

[lhartmann] takes these 32 bits and feeds them into four shift registers, producing 32 outputs from just the four I2S data lines. That’s more than enough signals to run the stepper motors. And since it updates at 192 kHz sample rate, it’s plenty fast enough to drive them.

The other side benefit of this technique is that it can work on single-board computers with just a little bit of software. Programming very complicated stepper movements then becomes just a matter of generating the right “audio” file and playing it out. [lhartmann] demonstrated this earlier with an Orange Pi. That’s pretty cool, too.

The code for turning the ESP8266 and a short handful of 74HC595s into a 3D printer controller are up on GitHub, so go check it out.

Thanks [CNLohr] for the tip!

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Numerically Controlled RepRap

June 4, 2016 by 14 Comments

The story for permanent storage for computers begins with the Jacquard loom. Hackaday commenters that are less clever than a Wikipedia article may argue that it was the earlier Bouchon and de Vaucanson looms, but either way we owe permanent storage methods to loom designers. So the story goes that punched cards for weaving brocades and damask patterns in cloth turned into punched cards for tabulating a census, calculating artillery trajectories, and ends with hundreds of gigabytes of storage in a thumbnail-sized micro SD card.

This story glosses over one important fact. The automated looms of the 17th century were simply a way to make a manufacturing process faster. These automated looms were the forebears of numerically controlled machine tools. These machines, first a lathe, followed by mills and all sorts of metalworking tools, first appearing in the 1950s, used punched tape to store the commands required to mill a part out of metal. Just like the SD card on a modern 3D printer.

For [will.stevens’] Hackaday Prize entry, he’s going back to the roots of automated manufacturing and building a punched card reader for his 3D printer. Is the idea sound? Yes. Is it going to be easy? No, [will] is creating his punched card reader on his 3D printer. It’s the ultimate expression of the RepRap philosophy of self-replication, and an interesting engineering challenge, too.

[will]’s idea for a punch card print controller uses relays. It’s a simple control system that encodes the individual steps for the X and Y axes, along with a length of a line. This printer won’t be able to create lines that go in every direction, instead, there are only 48 possible angles this printer can use out of 360 degrees. At large scales, prints and plots will have the jaggies, but at smaller scales, this control system will be able to print something resembling a circle.

[will] has a PDF of his proposed control system, and he’s already hard at work creating the 3D printed relays and solenoids. [will]’s goal for this year’s Hackaday Prize is to create a 2D plotter – just one axis short of a 3D printer, and he’s well on his way to printing off his own punched cards.

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