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Engadget Experiences the Solidoodle 3 3D Printer
Engadget reports that former MakerBot employee Sam Cervantes has brought to market — or at least to Engadget headquarters in prototype form — a working, cheap(ish) 3D printer from his own company Solidoodle. Originally, the new Solidoodle 3 printer was announced at $500; the price has crept up to $800, but that still sounds like a bargain in the world of home fabrication. Unlike the current MakerBot, it has no built-in card slot, so a computer connection is required for the length of a build.
But can it print up a good site UI for engadget? Seriously, that site is hideous.
The top stories list on the right side is straight up illegible. Whoever chose that font over all those busy images needs to be taken out back and shot.
I guess that's what you get when you run a business using mostly unpaid intern labor...
Saw a makerbot being demonstrated with black ABS plastic at a conference last month. The parts made with it were STRONG. (Replacement components of the print head had been manufactured this way.) Also a sample was being made with internal, hollow, completely enclosed and sealed, honeycomb cells, which made it very light without substantially reducing its strength or dimensional tolerances. Should be ideal for things you need to float. (Try building THAT without a 3-D printer: You'd need to bond two or more pieces together.)
I understand one of the problems with the makerbot that metal-frame follow-ons like this are trying to address is that the wooden frame flexes and changes size with relative humidity, making tolerances lower than they could be with a metal frame.
Does anyone know how well ABS works for lost-"wax"-casting originals? Or same question regarding other "hot-glue plastic wires" that could be fed through these machines?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yup, sounds like your usual solid waste slang. Yes, it uses an extruder in the "printing" process but would I really want customers to remember it like that!?
I'll eventually get some sort of 3d printer in any case though. At some point I'd want to print out swag witches and staves and stuff to go with my ever-longer attempts to make a game. The experience (and money, and government regulations) would be fun.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
The problem with these ABS extruders is not building the frame. The problem is not building a 3-axis positioning system. The problem is that you're welding a hot thing to a cold thing. That's always going to be a marginal operation. Without a better welding process (I've suggested aiming a small laser at the weld point) this will continue to be a flaky technology. I've seen about five versions of this technology in action, and they all sort-of work, but don't yield consistently strong parts.
The ultraviolet stereolithography technology yields much better part quality, but still costs too much. Formlabs may succeed in getting the cost down to $3500 or so. They're demoing at CES.
That... Is the stupidest name for a company/product i've heard in a long long time.
If you object to stupid-but-cute names, why are you on "Slashdot?" B-)
(I'd have a four-digit, or maybe even a three-digit, i.d. if I'd been able to figure out the URL when first told about the site over the phone.)
As for "solidoodle" I think the name is great. Mnemonic, descriptive, easy to pronounce, and not TOO hard to get the spelling right. Google search for "solid doodle" (without quotes) spelling-corrects it to solidoodle and finds the company site and discussions about it, too.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I wish someone would make a companion 3d printer product that will recycle plastics into the plastic used to print things with some of these 3d printers. If you could turn most any plastic into a strong plastic ink source, then the cost of owning one of these printers goes down and gives people a reason to recycle with a fast gratification of making stuff.
This printer, like others of its ilk, is awesome. It is totally cool that they are making these at a price that is not out of reach of many people.It is fascinating to watch and amazing when the finished product comes out.
But, there is a lot of oohing and ahhing over the breathless 3D printer stories and it is creating expectations that FAR exceed reality. Even on the $20,000 printers, it is still just basically a computer controlled hot-glue-gun. That means the output models, and that's really all they are, are crude weak and course. Literally, their surfaces are course from layering molten plastic strings one atop the other. They are weak, can't take much pressure and have a low shear and tensile strength.
If you wish to create small crude models or sculptures, this is for you. If you fantasize about manufacturing usable parts, you've already been oversold.
What does it need a "card slot" to make a sound when done? What's wrong with a good old fashioned piezoelectric buzzer to make a beep?
Better known as 318230.
"Originally, the new Solidoodle 3 printer was announced at $500; the price has crept up to $800..."
The Solidoodle 3 was announced a month ago, for $800: http://www.solidoodle.com/2012/11/solidoodle-3-3d-printer/
The Solidoodle 2 has been shipping since last summer and still costs $500.
If you want the experience.. I had great fun building a Mendel90, a Reprap type printer. I recommend it :) Makerbot used to be seen as a good source of printers too, until their EULA rewrite on Thingiverse painted the whole company "ugly" in the eyes of the open source community. There's a few other commercial Reprap knockoffs you could look into, best to just ask around on #reprap on freenode IRC
Did you warn them?!
The Answer to Everything is ... wait a minute -- uhmm...
Article 1, Section 8: ..."To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
You'll note the intent is to create an exclusive right. It is obvious that during the period of that right, the inventor has control, which in turn encourages invention. It is also obvious that should party B attempt to use party A's invention during this period without in turn securing that right from the inventor, the phrase "securing... to authors and inventors" means the government is authorized to intervene.
You'll note the authors didn't say they were encouraging taking other's ideas without recompense, either.
If you don't like it, feel free to cobble up a constitutional amendment and see if you can make it fly. It's worked before.
I can't say I much appreciate the present length of the terms of patents or copyrights (although I make part of my living from them), or the muddle that's been made out of fair use and so on, but complaining about patents limiting distribution of an idea is to completely miss the point and intent of the system as envisioned by the founders. It's working at least vaguely like it was intended to, which is more than we can say for the rest of the constitution.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Don't hold back, tell us how you really feel.
Not stupid but too long. The most succesfull new companies or products tend to be have names that are short visually or when pronounced:
Facebook or even just FB
Twitter
Google
iPhone
Android
XBox
PS3/PSP
YouTube
YouTube is a stupid, grammatically incorrect name. But it the internal vowel "rhyme" between "you" and "tube" gives it more impact than "YourTube".
I'd prefer something vsually more creative for the name of a 3D printer though. How about "3Doodle" with the logo resembling something l33tish like 3D00DL3, or a visual palindrome like 3DOODE with the last two characters being a left-facing "D" and a curvy "E" made to look like a right-facing "3".
Very Monty Python-esque. Well done, Sir Troll.
No need for a fancy PC just a headless raspberry pi, you can remote in at any time and initialize a print and get an email/text when its done.
The S2 is still available for $500+. The new printer is an addition to their line for people wanting to make bigger prints.
Good thing I don't have you on my marketing team. ;)
"I'd have a four-digit, or maybe even a three-digit, i.d. if I'd been able to figure out the URL when first told about the site over the phone."
You are a fucking retard then. Why would you share that?
that's a clear argument for serial port use. since almost all motherboards have that, that is what should be used for machine control. just as serious department stores and restaurant POS systems use the serial and not USB, that "spazzing" behavior you mention is a problem
Check out this guys information on Lost ABS casting. Very interesting!
The main point of casting from a 3D print is to change the material from being "3D printed plastic" to being any other flowable thing: metal, urethane, transparent resin epoxy, silicone, plaster of paris, etc. What your 3D printer is bringing to the table is the shape. So the key feature you're looking for, if you want to do molding and casting, is getting the right shape out. Material strength is relatively unimportant.
ABS has an impressive material strength, but if you're planning on casting, you should look into PLA printing instead. PLA's material strength sucks compared to ABS, but man is it easier to make good prints with it! You can get better resolution on it -- PLA at 0.1mm vs ABS at 0.2mm -- and the warping and curling issues are greatly reduced. It's a lot more reliable to work with.
The other big reason to use PLA is that it dissolves away in boiling water. Stick your PLA mold and whatever you casted into it into a crock pot for a day, and the PLA's gone.
Any 3D printer that can print ABS can also print PLA. Check out the MakerGear M2: Metal frame, way cheaper than a Makerbot, and it beat the Makerbot and several other contenders in Make Magazine's 3D printer roundup recently. Good accuracy, speed, and print quality. Good business ethics too (Makerbot's not so popular around here these days since they suddenly changed to closed source.)
As a note, if you're truly obsessed with getting the right shape, you should be looking at milling machines, not 3D printers. Milling machines go down to more like 0.001mm resolution. The process is detailed here.
Last, this is an awesome set of pictures showing lost PLA casting (plaster of paris -> metal)
Like Makerbot, they went closed source for their latest printer - the M2 that you're touting.
I have an M2, and it's a great printer, but there's nothing Open Source about it, sadly. Well, except for the fact that Makergear looks to the community for help with support and such.