MRRF 17

8 Articles

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.

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MRRF 17: A Working MakerBot Cupcake

March 27, 2017 by 27 Comments

The Midwest RepRap Festival is the best place to go if you want to see the latest in desktop 3D printing. This weekend, we saw full-color 3D printers, a printer with an infinite build volume, new extruders, a fantastic development in the pursuit of Open Source filament, and a whole bunch of D-bots. If you want the bleeding edge in 3D printing, you’re going to Goshen, Indiana.

Of course, it wasn’t always like this. In 2009, MakerBot released the Cupcake, a tiny printer that ushered in the era of democratized 3D printing. The Cupcake was a primitive machine, but it existed, it was open source, and it was cheap – under $500 if you bought it at the right time. This was the printer that brought customized plastic parts to the masses, and even today no hackerspace is complete without an unused Cupcake or Thing-O-Matic sitting in the corner.

The MakerBot Cupcake has not aged well. This should be expected for a technology that is advancing as quickly as 3D printing, but today it’s rare to see a working first generation MakerBot. Not only was the Cupcake limited by the technology available to hackers in 2009, there are some pretty poor design choices in these printers. There’s a reason that old plywood MakerBot in your hackerspace isn’t used anymore – it’s probably broken.

This year at MRRF, [Ryan Branch] of River City Labs brought out his space’s MakerBot Cupcake, serial number 1515 of 2,625 total Cupcakes ever made. He got his Cupcake to print a test cube. If you’re at all familiar with the Cupcake, yes, this is a hack. It’s a miracle these things ever worked in the first place.

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MRRF 17: Laser Resin Printers

March 26, 2017 by 19 Comments

The Midwest RepRap Festival is the best 3D printer con on the planet. In the middle of Indiana, you’ll find the latest advances for CNC hot glue guns and the processes that make squirting filament machines better, more accurate, and more efficient. There’s more to 3D printing than just filament-based machines, though, and for the last few MRRFs we’ve been taking a look at resin-based machines.

While most of the current crop of resin printers use either DLP projectors or LCDs and a big, bright backlight [Mark Peng]’s Moai printer uses a 150 mW laser diode and galvos. This is somewhat rare in the world of desktop 3D printers, thanks in no small part to the ugliness between Formlabs and 3D Systems. Still, it’s a printer that looks fantastic and produces prints that are far beyond what’s possible with a filament-based machine.

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MRRF 17: True Color 3D Printing

March 26, 2017 by 43 Comments

3D printing has evolved to a point where dual extrusion isn’t really that special anymore. A few years ago, a two-color frog print would have been impressive, but this isn’t the case anymore. The Midwest RepRap Festival is all about the bleeding edge of what 3D printers are capable of, and this year is no exception. This year, we were graced with a few true multicolor filament-based 3D printers. The biggest and best comes from [Daren Schwenke] and the rest of the Arcus3D crew. This printer is a full color, CMYKW mixing printer that’s able to print in any color imaginable.

The extruder assembly, suspended from the top of the printer
The bizarre mixing hotend, powered by a brushless motor

The electronics for this printer are, to say the least, very weird. The controller board is BeagleBone Black plus a CRAMPS running Machinekit. The hotend is bizarre, feeding six PTFE tubes into a weird water-cooled assembly that mixes and squirts filament out of the nozzle with the help of a small brushless motor. Thanks to a clever design, the end effector of the hotend weighs only about 150 grams – about the same as any other delta printer out there – and this printer is able to move very fast.

Over the last year, we’ve seen a lot of improvements in the state of multi-material and multi-color extrusion for 3D printers. At last year’s Maker Faire NY, Prusa’s i3 quad extruder made an appearance alongside the ORD Solutions RoVa4D printer. These are two completely different approaches to multicolor 3D printing, with the RoVa mixing filament, and the Prusa merely extruding multiple colors. Both approaches have their merits, but mixing extruders are invariably harder to build and the software stack to produce good prints isn’t well-defined.

Even though we’re still in the early years of full-color filament-based printing, this is still an awesome result. In a few years, we’ll be able to look back on [Daren]’s efforts and see where our full-color 3D printers came from – open source efforts to create the best hardware possible.

[Daren] has been working on this printer for a while, and he’s been uploading all his project updates to hackaday.io. You can check out the build log here.

MRRF 17: E3D Introduces Combination Extruder And Hotend

March 25, 2017 by 25 Comments

Since the beginning of time, or 2006, the ‘hot glue gun’ part of our CNC hot glue guns have had well-defined parts. The extruder is the bit that pushes plastic through a tube, and the hot end is where all the melty bits are. These are separate devices, even though a shorter path from the extruder to hotend is always better. From Wade’s gear extruder to a nozzle made from an acorn nut, having the hotend and extruder as separate devices has become the standard.

This week at the Midwest RepRap Festival, E3D unveiled the Titan Aero. It’s an extruder and hotend rolled into one that provides better control over the filament, gives every printer more build height, and reduces the mass of a 3D printer toolhead.

 

The aluminum thermal block of the Titan Aero

The Titan Aero, revealed on the E3D blog yesterday, is the next iteration of E3D’s entry into the extruder market. It’s a strange mashup of their very popular V6 hotend, with the heat break coupled tightly to the extruder body. A large fan provides the cooling, and E3D’s thermal simulations show this setup will work well.

The core component of the Aero extruder is a fancy and complex piece of milled aluminum. This is the heatsink for the extruder and provides the shortest path possible between the hobbed gear and the nozzle. This gives the Aero better control over the extrusion of molten plastic and makes this the perfect extruder and hotend setup for hard to print materials.

Combine the Aero with a smaller ‘pancake’ stepper motor, and you have a very small, very light hotend and extruder. This makes it perfect for the small printers we’re so fond of and for printers built for fast acceleration. I can easily see a few end effectors for Delta-style printers built around this extruder in the near future.

E3D’s Volcano nozzle sock

Also at the E3D booth were a few prototypes of nozzle socks. Late last year, E3D released silicone nozzle covers – we’re calling them nozzle socks – for their V6 hotend. These are small silicone covers designed to keep that carbonized crap off of your fancy, shiny hotend. It’s not something that’s necessary for a good print, but it does keep filament from sticking to your hotend, and you get the beautiful semantic satiation of saying the words nozzle socks.

E3D’s other hotend, the Volcano, a massive and powerful hotend designed to push a lot of plastic out fast, did not get its own nozzle sock at the time. Now, the prototypes are out, and the E3D guys expect them to be released, ‘in about a month’.

MRRF 17: Lulzbot And IC3D Release Line Of Open Source Filament

March 25, 2017 by 15 Comments

Today at the Midwest RepRap Festival, Lulzbot and IC3D announced the creation of an Open Source filament.

While the RepRap project is the best example we have for what can be done with Open Source hardware, the stuff that makes 3D printers work – filament, motors, and to some extent the electronics – are tied up in trade secrets and proprietary processes. As you would expect from most industrial processes, there is an art and a science to making filament and now these secrets will be revealed.

IC3D Printers is a manufacturer of filament based in Ohio. This weekend at MRRF, [Michael Cao], founder and CEO of IC3D Printers announced they would be releasing all the information, data, suppliers, and techniques that go into producing their rolls of filament.

According to [Michael Cao], there won’t be much change for anyone who is already using IC3D filament – the materials and techniques used to produce this filament will remain the same. In the coming months, all of this data will be published and IC3D is working on an Open Source Hardware Certification for their filament.

This partnership between IC3D and Lulzbot is due in no small part to Lulzbot’s dedication to Open Source Hardware. This dedication is almost excessive, but until now there has been no option for Open Source filament. Now it exists, and the value of Open Source hardware is again apparent.

MRRF 17: The Infinite Build Volume Printer

March 25, 2017 by 54 Comments

Before we dig into this one, a bit of a history lesson is in order. In 2010, MakerBot released the Automated Build Platform for the MakerBot Cupcake. This build platform was like nothing seen before or since. It’s a combination build platform and a conveyor belt for a 3D printer, allowing the Cupcake to become a completely automated production machine. Start a print, let the machine run, and when the print is finished it’s rolled off the bed into a bin, allowing a second print to start. If you’re using 3D printers for production in a manufacturing context – like Makerbot was – this is a phenomenal invention.

The Automated Build Platform was released under an Open Source license, then quickly patented by Makerbot. Since 2010, the idea of an automated build platform has been dead. No one is working on a similar device, lest they draw the ire of a few MakerBot lawyers.

This year’s Midwest RepRap Festival saw a device that’s an even better idea than MakerBot’s Automated Build platform. Yes, it’s a continuous factory of 3D printed parts, but there’s an even better reason for you to build one of these things: this printer has an infinite build volume.

This printer – it doesn’t have a name; this is just a one-off project – is the work of [Bill Steele] of Polar3D. The core of the build is just a hacked up MakerBot Replicator, but with one important difference. This printer has an Automated Build Platform tilted away from the nozzle at a 45-degree angle. What’s the benefit of this setup? Continuous printing and an infinite build volume.

Despite being downright bizarre, the mechanics for this printer are actually pretty simple. The bed is a standard MakerBot heated bed, rotated 90 degrees in the axis you would expect, then rotated 45 degrees in the axis you wouldn’t. A conveyor belt made of Kapton-coated paper is strung between two rollers and connected to a motor.

To produce a print, this printer starts at the very back and the very top of this conveyor belt. The first layer is added, the conveyor belt rolls forward a bit, and the second layer is added on top. The effect for each print is that the layer lines are 45 degrees from what you would expect.

When the print is finished, the belt just rolls forward until the part falls into a bin. Of course, since there’s nothing stopping this printer from producing a meter-long part on this build platform. [Bill] has already produced a 3D printed chain using this printer that was four feet long. Each segment of the chain just fell off the end of the printer when it was done.

There’s still some work to do with this idea. There isn’t a way to tension the belt on this printer, and [Bill] is looking for a material that’s better than Kapton coated paper. Still, this is the most innovative printer you can find at the Midwest RepRap Festival, and it’s not encumbered by the MakerBot patent on the automated build platform. You can check out a video of this printer below.

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