[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ES61MbSmpc]
The Motori plotter is fast and high precision. One image shows that it is drawing lines at .5mm. Like others in the flickr set, we keep thinking of how we could apply this to PCB creation. Great job [svofski]. If you want one that’s not as precise, but might have a much cooler drawing mechanism, you might want to check out the lego arm plotter we posted back in May.
Is this the beginning of a new trend? We’ve seen case modding in computers for a while now, but are we going to start seeing extreme case modding for our CNC machines? This is Kali. Kali eats plastic and pukes parts. Nice.
After the recent announcement of the re-release of the candyfab, [4volt] had to give a run at melting sugar with a laser. It turns out that a 40w co2 laser works great. They don’t currently have a method of layering, so everything is one layer currently.You can see the results of different speeds and power ratings on the site. The next party they throw will have some pretty fancy tasty treats.
Forget about machines that can replicate themselves, what we want is a machine capable of making an 8 inch wide hollow torus out of sugar. The CandyFab project has been around for a while, but with the release of the new machine, the CandyFab 6000 they are reinventing the project. Built from the ground up to be a candy constructing beast, the CandyFab 6000 might be a little smaller than the previous version, but it’s much better designed. You can get more details on the new wiki site.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x24ESDCkmN0]
Ok, there aren’t any usefull applications we can think of for this one, but we want one really badly. This is a combination of a miniPOV, some UV LEDs, a CNC rig, and some glow in the dark paper. The Ghost matrix works similar to a dot matrix printer where it flashes the UV light to activate the paper. The final effect is very nice. Great job on this one.
[via Laughing Squid]
Purple Crayon is a new entry into the home fabricating arena. Shown above, with it’s makers [Konrad] and [Aaron], it’s set to compete with RepRap and Cupcake. It looks to be bigger than Cupcake, but smaller than the reprap. There aren’t many details available on their site, but we’re sure there will be soon. They do state that it should retail for less than $1,000.
[Rhys Jones] has been working with the RepRap team to develop a way to print circuit boards. The machine first prints the plastic substrate with channels for the metal to be deposited into. They adapted their pinch wheel feeder to work with solid core solder (flux creates a mess). The extruded solder’s specific heat isn’t hot enough to melt the plastic. They made a video (embedded below) of their test piece: an optical endstop. The team has also been experimenting with decoupling the feed mechanism from the extruder.
