This final project at MIT turned out quite nice. It is a CNC mill that cost under $100 to make. The tolerances are pretty tight as you can see in the pictures of the PCBs he has milled. He shows that he can even mill mild steel. It is a pretty brief writeup, but you can download build instructions and pcb files.
[via HacknMod]
[Webca] has made a 3D printed MakerBot with his MakerBot. Using five pounds of plastic, the design replaces all of the plywood used to create a regular MakerBot. This complements the existing designs for the 3D printed extruders, dinos, and other parts already on Thingiverse. An interesting mile marker in the history of 3D printing. We might make one after we make a Mendel and tons of Hack a Day Badges. We also look forward to improvements people will contribute to the design such as using less plastic or a parameterized design to make a really big (or small) MakerBot.
PartKAM is a Flash-based CAM production package created by [Jack Qiao]. There are a ton of computer aided manufacturing suites out there, this one is simple and requires nothing more than having your browser open. We played with it for a few moments and found it useful but still a bit buggy. Most notably, it lacks a ‘undo’ option. That being said, you can export as SVG or gCode for use when you just need to hammer out a few parts with that CNC mill you threw together.
Paintball as a large format printer? That’s exactly what facade printer is. A paintball gun was mounted with two controllable axes of movement. A computer reads in the image data and prints it out by shooting paintballs to form a dot-matrix display. There’s a couple of wins here, the paintball paint can be washed off, and this will work on coarse or uneven display medium. Check out a video of the printing process after the break.
If you already built your own paintball turret, give the other guys and chance and hack it to print instead of gunning down unsuspecting adversaries.
This table-top extruder was modeled after the Makerbot. Instead of laser-cut wood this is built from acrylic, uses salvaged rods from laser printers, some inexpensive stepper motors, and a homemade extruder. All said and done, [Peter Jansen] figures this build came in somewhere around $200-300. It may not look as nice, but at half the price of the Makerbot base kit you also get the fun of building from scratch. Hopefully your fabrication skills are up to the challenge. If so, you’ll be printing useful items soon enough.
Working with easy replication in mind, [Peter] is building a 3D laser printer. The majority of the machine is made from laser-cut acrylic held together by parts that are inexpensive and available at your local hardware store. In the end this will lay down a layer of powder, use a laser to fuse the powder together in the outline of your choice, then repeat. This is known as selective laser sintering which is sometimes used in commercial rapid prototyping and, like a lot of other cool technologies, came into existence as a result of a DARPA project.
Sorry folks, this is not a fully functioning prototype yet. [Peter] is searching for the right laser for the job and a source for the powder. If you’ve got a solution please lend a hand and let’s see this project through to completion.
[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/10479779]
Get a quick fix of CNC for the day with this plotter. [Francisco Dulanto] grabbed the cartridge carriage from an old inkjet printer and turned it into a gantry by mounting it on two drawer sliders. The optical head assembly from a cd-rom provides the Z-axis movement with the whole thing controlled by three RepRap boards. [Francisco] called his project a joke compared to the Turing Machine, but we like it and we’re glad he tipped us off. There’s something zen-like about the projects that are thrown together with what you have available. After all, he’s certainly achieve a clean-looking build that does what it’s intended to do.
