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RepRap Morgan Receives $20,000 Gada Prize For Simplifying 3D-Printer
An anonymous reader writes "South African Quentin Harley has picked up the $20,000 Gada Uplift prize for making the open source RepRap 3D printer design easier to build, cheaper to construct, and — most importantly — capable of printing more of its own parts. Lots of background on Harley and his RepRap Morgan are available on his website."
A further goal of the RepRap Morgan project is to replace the Prusa Mendel as the default RepRap model. And they are on track to hit less than $100 in parts, excluding the printing bed. You can grab the hardware design and the controller firmware over at Github.
This is how SkyNet becomes self sufficient. Take me to yuah tonah. Do eet now!
when machines start building parts to repair themselves fully, it will be akin to humans procreating..
Yeah, Microsoft and Apple* make printers... :rolleyes:
* yes I know they did in the past, but not today.
I also can't understand why it's so complicated? Isn't PCL supposed to be standard?
We don't need drivers for keyboard, mouse and some webcams anymore, it's standardized. Why aren't printers and scanners the same way?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
P.S.: VGA should have died years ago. We have digital video cards and digital monitors but we're still using analog signals like it's a frickin' TV from 1960.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
P.S.: VGA should have died years ago. We have digital video cards and digital monitors but we're still using analog signals like it's a frickin' TV from 1960.
who is? unless your monitor is older than 10 years it's pretty likely you shouldn't be connecting it through vga..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What's even more ironic is that inexpensive monitors only have VGA. they would be even less expensive if they had DVI (or HDMI) since they could skip the A/D part. But they want you to buy the more expensive ones for digital inputs.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Probably for the exact same reason it still takes fucking drivers and patches and configuration settings to set up a regular video card and make it function?
Isn't PCL [wikipedia.org] supposed to be standard?
Although many printers support some variants of PCL6, it's actually a HP thing...
We don't need drivers for keyboard, mouse and some webcams anymore, it's standardized. Why aren't printers and scanners the same way?
Anytime there are new features involved, it takes a while to shake things down to a standard, sometimes that never happens. For example, you might ask why your IR remote for a TV isn't standardized yet. Fortunatly for most users many "universal" remotes have "drivers" for many of the TVs built-in to do the standard thing (e.g., channel up/down, volume), but of course any new feature can't be controlled with the universal remote unless you can "download" them into the (learning) remote. Similarly, nearly all printers and scanners can be run with the in-the-box OS driver, but you don't get to access any of the nifty new features that way. Even the mouse-scroll-wheel feature needed some driver TLC when it first came out...
There's very little incentive for companies to just come out with "standard" devices unless they are total crap. You can just look at the quality level of the "vanilla" keyboard, or the "vanilla" webcam that doesn't need drivers to see what is available in that category: cheaply made and barely functional. That's not to say that the companies that opt for a more premium market are much better (e.g., HP printers), but some manage to do okay (e.g, Canon printers).
Buy laser. Toner does not dry out, an unused ink cart does.
I am at work right now using VGA. Dell is selling VGA only computers right now.
I got lucky we ordered mine with dual video outputs to run two monitors. one runs from HDMI to DVI, the other is straight VGA. Talk about a complicated setup with stupid adaptors. but if say thunderbolt were standard then it wouldn't be a problem. but vendors don't like making products better only more money at the products they sell.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
My 20+ year old Panasonic dot matrix printer still works just fine. Never a problem printing text.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I got an HP DeskJet 500 on the floor right here, ready to be taken apart for its smooth rods and stepper motors, parts that will be used to build a desktop CNC.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I tried to put together a B.O.M. @ kitbom.com: http://kitbom.com/WillAdams/reprap-morgan and it currently prices out @ $274.26, not including the 3D printed parts and some things we've not found good sources for.
Also, free software for 3D CAD/CAM still needs a lot of work --- I've listed everything I could find here:
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/CAD
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/CAM
and people still over-whelmingly choose commercial software:
3D CAD 9/15 --- http://www.shapeoko.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1783
3D CAM 19/37 --- http://www.shapeoko.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1785
(by way of comparison the commercial stuff is listed here: http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/Commercial_Software )
Please tell me I missed a fabulous opensource solution, or some much less expensive parts....
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
A Delta-based printer: http://reprap.org/wiki/Simpson
I'd really like to see the best of both worlds (the Simpson build instructions are quite nice, while Morgan's is a wall of text...)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Interesting. I have been reading about these, do you have some plans you are following?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The ShapeOko is a well-documented, opensource and affordable hobby-levek CNC router:
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
And it's perfect to acclimatise your ears to the next heavy metal concert you attend, too.
I got an HP DeskJet 500 on the floor right here, ready to be taken apart for its smooth rods and stepper motors, parts that will be used to build a desktop CNC.
Save your time and hear my 3 words: "The office" movie.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Yeah, 'cause no thesis contributes anything to human knowledge --- here's a better guide:
http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Awesome! But how does it print the part you need if it is broken and you need that part to make it work?
I like microcars
You can buy a Chinese made X-Y table with actual screw drive for about $200. Save your effort, belt drive is double plus ungood. Especially when combined with stepper motors and no-feedback. You 'table' will be hammering on the zeros to reset the count like an old floppy drive.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Got a link for that? I've been considering a second smaller machine for metal-working.
Screw drive machines aren't easily expanded to 1.2m x 1.2m --- it only cost ~$60 to extend my Y-axis to 1m, and double up the MakerSlide on the X-axis --- much more solid, but admittedly, still a bit fiddly, but for the price, it meets my needs thus far.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Actually, my guitar gets WAY louder. I've got an amp that can pump up to about 110dB.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I guess you haven't seen the Big 4 tour that was going on a couple years ago.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This is a great and worthy project especially since 3d printing is turning into a complete ripoff/get rich quick business everywhere else.
There are 3d printer projects popping up on kickstarter every day that never deliver, sites are selling power resistors for $5 ($0.7 on digikey), $100 hotends that don't work, printers that cost at most a couple hundred dollars to manufacture are sold for multiple thousands. And we thought Apple's markup was outrageous...
The reprap core team has to correct course.
Well, my graphics card has digital out, and my monitor has digital in, but I still run it with VGA. Why? Because the format of the digital out (DVI) doesn't fit with the format of the digital in (HDMI). Yes, I guess I could pay a premium for an adapter, but hey, why do so if the VGA connection works?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker
"Code of the Lifemaker (ISBN 0-345-30549-3) is a 1983 novel by science fiction author James P. Hogan. NASA's Advance Automation for Space Missions was the direct inspiration for this novel detailing first contact between Earth explorers and the Taloids, clanking replicators who have colonized Saturn's moon Titan."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Ditto. I print a fair bit more so occasionally need to buy toner, but for me the reliability and quality are the biggest things (not to mention reduced cost). The last time I owned an inkjet it seemed like anytime anybody needed to print something I got a call to help them clean the heads and such, and of course that burns through tons of ink. Printout was never optimal - 99% of the time you were printing text and it just wasn't sharp. Sure, you could print photos, if you don't mind paying 3x as much as the local Walmart for a photo that would have slight defects.
I moved to a color laster and told everybody to just get their prints at Walmart. Way cheaper overall, and it always just works. I do refills but if I wanted to get cartridges it would take all of 2min to change them once every 1-2 years. Every page looks as nice as when the printer was brand new, and I never get phone calls at work to talk somebody through tinkering with the thing. It is networked so the whole house can use it, and it is way faster than an inkjet. Plus my current one is Postscript, so it just works on anything without fussing with drivers (at most I install a PPD file - even on Linux).
You were lucky. There quite a few printers come with toner cartridges containing an e-fuse. They start counting how many pages you've printed and refuse to print more unless you change it (or fake another e-fuse destruction).
Mind the frickin' laser...
Lathes are used to make lathe parts, each stage incrementing the precision. Oh wait, it involves the internet, so patent it already.
it doesn't exactly involve the internet and it's not under patent..
the big deal that it's a ready design if you want to build a scara arm robot.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Why does it still take fucking drivers, patches, and voodoo to fucking hook up a regular printer and make it function?
You don't run Linux do you... your right, it sounds like a nightmare over there in WindowLand.
Can a person program a new solution to a problem? Why should anyone be able to stop such a thing? -Richard Stallman
Because printer manufacturers want it to be this way. Although there's also a tone of stuff that's not standardized - e.g., computer-printer communication protocol (e.g., how is a printer supposed to announce its capabilities? Remember that the old parallel interface (emulated by USB) consists of 8 data lines and 5 return status lines. It was assumed back then that printer drivers knew everything. It's also why printers have a set of "defaults" that exist in the printer driver and on the printer itself.
PCL is a page description language and a bit of printer control protocol. A page description language describes how to put things on paper, while a printer control protocol describes how the printer should work.
The former describes what's on the page, the latter how the pages are laid out. So something like duplexing, paper type, which tray, color settings, color correction, etc., are printer control while things like what font to use and how to rasterize it are page description.
It's only recently have full two-way communications between computer and printer been available that let us query printers for capabilities and such and actually lead us to one universal driver because printer control is typically a two-way protocol while page description is one-way.
In fact, Apple's been trying to push driverless printing through AirPrint to allow devices to print to printers directly (if they support AirPrint) or through an intermediary (legacy printers).
It looks like it's actually a modified version of CUPS since Linux can support it natively.
Except it's generally an all-in-one chip that does it all - A/D, scaling, and panel interfacing.
Also, DVI gets complicated with stuff like HDCP (which requires keys and such) and layout (DVI does require high-speed layout since the bits are coming at it fairly fast). VGA can be fairly tolerant as long as the three lines reach the chip at around the same time.
Why does it still take fucking drivers, patches, and voodoo to fucking hook up a regular printer and make it function? Shit, I can plug in a VGA 13" or a 42" flat panel and the computer runs that just fine. Printers, I guess, are beyond the average PhD at Microsoft and Apple.http://bastcomputer.blogspot.com/">please visit it