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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.
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
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.
It needs a card slot to store the print instructions on, so you don't need a computer to be on, active and not-disrupting-the-usb for the duration of the whole print. Trust me, it can be immensely frustrating if your print is halfway done and suddenly your computer goes "welp don't need that usb anymore oh hey that's a usb let's recognize it again!"
Then again, that computer was always a spaz.
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
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.
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)