RA 3D Printer Controller Board Does Everything, Has Disco Lights

July 10, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

3D printers are getting far, far more complicated than a 4-axis, plastic-squirting CNC machine. These days, you really haven’t earned your geek cred unless you’ve hacked an LCD and SD card interface into your 3D printer, or at least experimented with multiple extruders. There’s a problem with the controller boards everyone is using, though: most boards simply don’t have enough output pins, greatly reducing the number of cool things a 3D printer can do.

Enter RA. It’s a new 3D printer controller board with IO for any imaginable setup. Going down the feature list of RA, we’re wondering why we haven’t seen some of these features before. A 24-pin ATX power header is soldered directly to the board, giving RA users a stupidly easy way to power their printer. Of course there are outputs for LEDs, camera triggers (printer time-lapse movies are really cool), light rings, buzzers, an LCD/rotary encoder/SD card control panel, and support for two heated beds for gigantic printers. If printing in one color isn’t good enough for you, RA has support for three extruders

Compared to other 3D printer boards such as RAMPS or the Sanguinololu, the number of outputs on this board is simply amazing. If you’re planning to build a huge, feature-laden 3D printer, you probably couldn’t do much better than what RA is offering.

3D DLP Printer Builds An Orange TARDIS

July 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

This micro-sized TARDIS is the latest print from [Ron Light]’s Sedgwick 3D DLP printer. Yes, it’s orange, but the print quality for such a small object is pretty astounding.

The Sedgwick 3D printer is currently available as a kit on Kickstarter. For five hundred bones, the Sedgwick provides all the parts – minus a DLP projector and resin – to make your own miniature Type 40 with a broken chameleon circuit. There’s a lot more this printer can do, from miniature cathedrals to hollow geodesic spheres.

This is the latest in what will be a long line of DLP projector / resin 3D printers, and the most affordable one to date. The last one we saw was an awesome $2400 machine that included a projector and resin. At $500 for a projector-less kit, the Sedgwick still handily beats even the cheapest option we’ve seen so far.

[Ron Light] is from Kansas City, and our boss man [Caleb] ran into him at the KC Maker Faire a few weeks ago. You can check out that little interview and a few videos of the Sedgwick doing its thing after the break.

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Printing Mounting Boards And Boxes For Hobby Projects

July 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

That’s a great base board for these Gadgeteer components. [Rob Miles] has been designing and printing mounting boards and enclosures for several of his projects. He just got into printing parts with the Ultimaker last week, and we’d say he’s found his stride. The board pictured here features nubs that act as stand-offs, and on the underside there are countersunk spaces for the bolt heads used as fasteners.

He started designing with Autodesk 123D but the interface didn’t really suit his working style. He switched over to FreeCAD and that experience fit him like a glove. He starts out with the sketch view to draw his parts, then extrudes that into the 3D model for further refinement before having the printer turn the digital into the real. This is the third board he produced in just one day of experimenting, but he is also showing off an enclosure he made for his thermal printer.

If you’re not working with boards that have nice mounting holes like these, don’t fret. We’ve seen 3d printed mounting systems that cradle the board, like these Raspberry Pi enclosures.

[Thanks Peter]

Printing And Programming A Self-balancer

June 25, 2012 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

The Hackaday staff isn’t in agreement on 3d printers. Some of us are very enthusiastic, some are indifferent, and some wonder what if they’re as widely useful as the hype makes them sound. But we think [Jason Dorweiler’s] self balancing robot is as strong a case as any that 3d printing should be for everyone!

Don’t get us wrong. We love the robot project just for being a cool self-balancer. Seeing the thing stand on its own (video after the break) using an Arduino with accelerometer and gyroscope sensors is pure win. But whenever we see these we always think of all the mechanical fabrication that goes into it. But look at the thing. It’s just printed parts and some wooden dowels! How easy is that?

Sure, sure, you’ve got to have access to the printer, it needs to be well calibrated, and then you’ve got to make the designs to be printed out. But these hurdles are getting easier to overcome every day. After all, there’s no shortage of people to befriend who want nothing more than to show off their Makerbot/RepRap/etc.

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Salvaged Robot Arm Makes A Big 3d Printer

June 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

Wow, building a precision 3d printer is amazingly easy if you can get your hands on an industrial-quality robot arm. [Dane] wrote in to tell us about this huge extruder printer made from an ’80s-era SCARA robot arm. It is capable of printing objects as large as 25″x12″x6.5″.

This 190 pound beast was acquired during a lab clean out. It was mechanically intact, but missing all of the control hardware. Building controllers was a bit of a challenge since the it’s designed with servo motors and precision feedback sensors. This is different from modern 3d printers which use stepper motors and no feedback sensors. A working controller was built up one component at a time, with a heated bed added to the mix to help prevent warping with large builds. We love the Frankenstein look of the controller hardware, which was mounted hodge-podge as each new module was brought online.

You can see some printing action in the clip after the break. A Linux box takes a design and spits out control instructions to the hardware.

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Finally, A 3D Printer For Burritos

June 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

[Marko] created a robot that prints burritos. Truly, we’ve reached new heights as a species.

The Burritob0t is based on the ORD Hadron 3d printer with a pair of air compressor/syringe-based extruders based on the Makerbot Frostruder. All the ingredients – rice, meat, salsa, and molten cheese – will be printed onto the surface of a tortilla heated by a Makerbot heated build platform.

[Marko] has some pretty neat plans for his Burritob0t such as an iPhone app for ordering your burritos and some sort of social commentary thing using burritos. We’re assuming [Marko] hasn’t yet got this Burritob0t up and running for the lack of any action shots or demo videos. That said, there’s a wonderful Flickr gallery and an about page that covers the artistic statement behind the Burritob0t.

If you want to get your own Burritobot, [Marko] hopes to have a Kickstarter up sometime in July.

Calculating With 3D Printed Gears

June 11, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

Here’s a 3D printed electromechanical computer built by [Chris Fenton] over at NYCResistor. It uses plastic registers printed on a Makerbot, a bunch of pogo pins, and business-card sized punch cards capable of storing 32 bits of instructions and data.

In case you’re wondering, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen [Chris]’ FIBIAC. Since the last update, [Chris] managed to get a program that walks through the first three digits of the Fibonacci sequence. There’s really no limit to what the FIBIAC can theoretically do, but with only three registers he’s limited to calculating the first three digits of pi.

With more registers, [Chris]’ computer could be expanded, but each register takes about 8 hours to print. We’re sure [Chris] would gladly accept any donations of additional 3D-printed registers, so if you’d like to make a few of these gear registers you can get the files on Thingiverse.

As a proof of concept, [Chris]’ FIBIAC is amazing, but it doesn’t live up to its intended design. The punch card format [Chris] created is capable of storing 8 registers, and the registers themselves can be expanded far beyond their current 3-digit width. Still, it’s an incredible build and has the bonus of being easily expandable thanks to a very clever design.

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