Rapid Prototype Blog

Posts Tagged ‘reprap’

This video is an introduction to the RepRap self-replicating 3D printer.

This episode is a journey in prototyping tech. Watch as a Darwin RepRap 3d printer makes a child Mendel printer capable of printing it’s own children. The power of this technology has yet to be realized. – Season 1 : Ep. 2 For more episodes, visit: tv.onshoulders.org For more information on the technology, visit reprap.org If you like the music, start coding in ChucK at chuck.cs.princeton.edu

Build your own 3d printer

This video is an introduction to the RepRap self-replicating 3D printer.

I’ve designed this part to fit a PTFE tube onto. To download this part yourself, follow the link below: www.thingiverse.com It is being printed on a reprap open source 3D printer. This machine is designed so that the majority of the parts can be printed. The entire design is digital and available online for everyone to improve. Everyone with a working reprap can create upgrades and share them with other reprappers, extending the open source principle from software to hardware! Everything, including the circuit boards used, CAD files, documentation and software is open source. More about this part: This is a holder for a 5 mm PTFE cable that serves as a guide for the filament. The PTFE tube has such a low friction, that you can hardly attach it to anything. The plastic feedstock will travel from a driving mechanism to the extrusion head, through this flexible tube. The PTFE, aka Teflon, a very low friction. This solution will allow you to have multiple extruders on your machine without the moving mass becoming too heavy. The lighter it is, the quicker you can move the heads, eg when you’re not extruding. The machine will need less current to run the motors, it reduces stringing when not extruding. Even more so, it reduces the weight of the X-axis so much that a much simpler and lighter Cartesian bot is possible. The steel rods wouldn’t necessarily be needed, allowing a much larger ratio of self-replication. The Bowden cable itself could be printed in several modules that …

Dr Adrian Bowyer of the reprap project reprap.org shows us around his lab at Bath University.