printer

161 Articles

LEGO Printer Built Without NXT parts

June 2, 2010 by 28 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY]

[Squirrelfantasy] built a printer using LEGO pieces. It’s not a Mindstorm project but instead depends on some type of development board and some auxiliary components on a protoboard. We couldn’t get a good enough look to tell exactly what makes up the electronics so start the debate in the comments. We feel this is a printer and not a plotter because the stylus moves on just one plane while the paper feeds past it but that’s open for debate as well.

Guess this answers the question of why aren’t we building our own printers? Some folks are.

[Thanks Haxorflex and many others, via DVICE]

Multiple Material 3D Printing

May 9, 2010 by 60 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4Yq3glEyec]

It’s no surprise that we’re wild about 3D printing, especially [Devlin]. Now we’re absolutely out of our minds for this multi-material polyjet machine that is featured in the video above. Before we go any further it’s worth mentioning that this post is not advertising, we just think this machine is unbelievable.

It is capable of printing 600 dpi in 3D using multiple materials at the same. Two types of rigid material, one like ABS and the other like polypropylene, as well as seven levels of a soft material all exist on the same print head. They can be deposited along with a support material at the same time. In the video you can see enclosures that come out of the printer with rubber-like padding already mounted in the hard plastic shell. They even show a bicycle chain that is fully assembled after printing. Cost for these machines? We don’t want to know, it’s just fun to dream about having unrestricted access to one.

Continue reading “Multiple Material 3D Printing” →

Paintball Graffitti

May 4, 2010 by 26 Comments

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.

Continue reading “Paintball Graffitti” →

Makerbot Clone

April 19, 2010 by 9 Comments

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.

3D Printing On A Much Larger Scale

March 15, 2010 by 44 Comments

The end goal of this giant rapid prototyping machine is to print buildings. We’re not holding our breath for a brand new Flintstones-esque abode, but their whimsical suggesting of printed buildings on the moon seems like science fiction with potential. The machine operates similar to a RepRap but instead of plastic parts, it prints stone by binding sand with epoxy. This method is not revolutionary, but hasn’t really been seen in applications larger than a square meter or so. It’s fun to see the things we dabble in heading for industrial production applications.

[Thanks Juan]

Why Aren’t We Building Our Own Printers?

January 26, 2010 by 59 Comments

We’ll ask it again, why aren’t we building our own printers? We’re building 3d printers, CNC mills, and hacking the ink cartridges on commercial printers. What does it really take to build say a 300 dpi black and white printer? Something that lets you clean and service the print head rather than throwing it out when the ink reservoir is empty?

Someone has set out to answer these question with the Openprinter project. If this interests you, join up and start the revolution. RepRap had simple beginnings and maybe it’s time to take the army of self-replicating 3D printers and use them to print parts for 2D printers that don’t drive us crazy.

[Photo credit]

[via LostScrews]