reprap

[RepRap] First complete replication!

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Milestone achieve by Adrian and Vik of the RepRap community, they’ve replicated entirely a Darwin machine, and this child is beginning to print itself another printer!

Adrian (left) and Vik (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.

[RepRap] Stepper motors ready

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Sorry for all the people who couldn’t watch the Reprap move in 3D last friday in Bilbao, it’s finally working tonight!

The code to control the robot is really elegant, and it was not really hard to find the missing part to make it work properly.
I’ve also add a setMax() method on the axises, so the hardware opto-endstop are not needed anymore. but it’ll be cool to keep them just to use them to set the print-header home. I think I’ve seen some example like this somewhere, but I’m not usre yet how it works.

People interesting in downloading/cloning/forking the Arduino firmware for Reprap can go to the project page on Github.

[Textmate] Arduino Bundle

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After first days with the Darwin machine, it became clear that something was needed to replace the current Arduino software and upload the RepRap firmware directly from Textmate.

So here comes my first Textmate Bundle, thanks to the elegant work of Arduino team to make it easier to upload program from command line:

Arduino.tmbundle

Once installed, only one shortcut is available to make and upload your program on the Arduino board: Command-Shift-A

You can clone/fork the project from Github too, make your own repository and I’ll be glad to add your patch to the current simple bundle.
And come back during the week, you’ll surely see some update during the intensive RepRap hack session!

[RepRap] Mechanical machine and Wii hacks

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Great news today for RepRap at Las Indias: the mechanical machine has just been ordered from BitsFromBytes, and it should arrive in Madrid in 3-4 weeks.

Ian Reprap

Fully assembled and tested, in a wooden crate for easier transportation, I’ll hope to have the time to make some demo at the end of the month.

What’s missing:

  • electronic: we already have all electronics, but it has became a bit obsolete over the last few month, it would be great to upgrade it to Arduino platform;
  • experimenting: we’ll need to melt stuff then, and see how it reacts. Faboroni, another fabbing project, has made a recent experiement with various cooking material (chocolate, cheeze, …). And I’ll need to find a source to buy some plastic polymers, or make our own.

Then, will it be possible to plug your wiimote in RepRap?

Johnny Chung Lee has release a lot of really cool wiimote hacks, and the Reprap Forum is now looking how they could be used

[RepRap] Moulded parts ready

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Moulded parts

Reprap parts are now available on www.bitsfrombytes.com and ready to order!

From the Reprap Builder blog post, a complete kit with motors will be available in next days for a 300£ + VAT price, it’ll surely help a lot of reprappers who already have all electronic ready and just need all these parts to finish the cartasian robot.

There are some interesting options if you choose to buy the moulded parts kit: you can ask them to be prepared if you do not have necessary tools to drill the holes, and you can choose the resin color to customized your own reprap.
The scope of supply provided for each kit will be a great help too for people who already have some parts (like the extruder) from the RRRF store, and just need to order the cartasian robot parts.

Order will be placed this week to Madrid, hoping it’ll arrive next week to build it before Christmas.

[RepRap] Mould parts arrive soon

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ReRap moult parts

The above RepStrap is made entirely from moulded parts or off the shelf items for the couplings and timing pulleys. I intend to do mouldings of the pulleys to further drive down the cost but thought I should get something up just to let people know it was still happening!

The above RepStrap does not have the Extruder parts fitted but these are as posted before.

On Friday we will have a web site up so people can order any or all of the moulded parts, I’m still figuring out what the bits actually cost in resin and silicone mould! But expect a full set to be in the region of £100 to £120.

More on RepRap Builders blog…

[RepRap] Completed Shotbot at Metalab

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Few people in Vienna have just finished a RepRap Shotbot:

« This was a collaborative effort with a lot of people at the metalab, grl vienna, and monochrom! »

This machine will print out shotglasses this weekend at roboexotica.org

This is near the RepRap Holy-Grail, I hope it would print some RepRap parts soon! The hardware in use is 2 Arduino Board, and the new electronic parts from parts.rrrf.org.

Photos by Brex

[RepRap] Extruder Kit mounted

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Closing screw I’ve just arrived few days ago at Madrid, and I’ve had the joy to received the RepRap Extruder Kit built this summer by RRRF!

The pieces are well cut, and there is some neat mechanical design (I’m new in this domain) helping to put pieces together.

The only issue has been the middle part, containing the driving screw, with one of the part just a millimeter short. It looks one-sided, if put on the wrong side, there’s a gap at the bottom of the piece near the plastic part.

Now, I’m just missing « 40mm length of 3mm braided steel wire », some « JB Weld high-temperature epoxy glue » to finish completely to assemble this extruder kit. Thanks to Fernando from Barcelona who gave me a ferreteria address to visit in Madrid to get this kind of pieces.

The next missing part is the PIC programmation, I’ve got some issue with the Olimex PG3B pogrammer and pkp (under Ubuntu), they seem unable to communicate, and the programmer board is stuck with PRG1 led once parallel port is open… Hope to solve this during the week before to leave to Berlin with everything connecting, and come back soon with all mechnaical parts!

RepRap-Fab@Home convergence

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RepRap and Fab@Home are doing a great job to build an open-source solution to get a cheap fabbing solution for everybody, each one at various stage of production, each one with amazing ideas to continue the adventure?

Yesterday, it was proposed to build a bridge between the 2 communities, mainly because RepRap members need some parts to build first Darwin machines (which would be able to replicate themselves after), and Fab@Home might be able to produce these parts quickly. That’s the beginning of a faster way for everybody to generate more ideas:

Have a look at Fab@Home Ideas Gallery to see what’s possible today with fabbing!