Reprap Forum - Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prize

BrickRap = My entry for the Gada(Uplift) Prize (if it is still alive ;) (2 replies)

Ediweber — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 19:28:16 -0400

Hi folks,

this is my first post in a forum ever.

I am fascinated of 3D printing since I discovered RepRap some years ago. After years of just watching I finally managed to get all parts for a WolfStrap. With this wooden printer I now start printing my first own design.

BrickRap shall be a ultra-low-vitamin-count and ultra-low-price printer.
Printing speed will likely be much lower than on the fancy new machines.
My development page is a stub, but you can already see some pictures: BrickRap on RepRap.org

Bye Edi

3D printing at home good for the environment (no replies)

msepr — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 10:37:34 -0400

3D printing products at home isn’t just cheaper, it’s also greener, as a new study from Michigan Tech has shown. We think this study will be of interest to members.

Release: [www.mtu.edu]
Full Study: [pubs.acs.org]

Uplift Prize Winner Announced (4 replies)

Kartik Gada — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 11:57:50 -0500

Hello All,

The announcement was made to key journalists on Wednesday, July 3. I will repost the same here :
__________________________________________

Everyone,

I am happy to announce that we have a winner in the Interim Personal Manufacturing Prize, initially conceived of in 2009, and in the amount of US$ 20,000. The Prize Specifications are here, under 'Interim Personal Manufacturing Prize' :
[kprize.wordpress.com]

So.......

The winner is : 'Morgan' by Quentin Harley.

Some links with more information about Morgan.
[reprap.harleystudio.co.za]
[reprap.org]

___________________________________________________________

Second Place : 'Simpson' by Nicholas Seward
[www.youtube.com]

Third Place : '3DPrintMi' by Chris Lau
[www.youtube.com]
___________________________________________________________

Thanks everyone for their interest and their participation. More details to follow on the websites of the Uplift Prize and HumanityPlus.

This sets the stage for a truly amazing Grand Prize in 2015.

Kartik

Piece on the Gada/Uplift Prize for 3Dprintingindustry.com (6 replies)

RealityIncCo — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 21:30:32 -0400

Hi folks,

I'm a writer for 3dprintingindustry.com and I'm doing a short write-up on the Gada prize. I've been doing a quick look around the forum and am having a hard time with the organization of things. I found a list of all of the teams that have entered the contest, but haven't seen many updates to their pages and designs. Did interest and entries sort of fizzle out after awhile? Or am I just having a hard time finding the serious entrants?

Is judging really already taking place?

Thanks!

Printing dentures (8 replies)

Tarakan — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 08:32:45 -0400

[www.youtube.com]

Has anyone thought of refining the precision of the 3D printing to the point when dentures can be printed very chaply?
Sounds like a great philanthropic mission.

I would set my goal that if I find all the appropriate materials tools to design a cheap 3D printer that will give the right surface finish, I will work on printing dentures with non-toxic plastics.

There are many places in the world where people eat refined sugar and lose their teeth but cannot afford dentures.

Free 3D Printers for Peace Contest (no replies)

msepr — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:05:20 -0400

Michigan Tech is trying to encourage the peaceful use of 3D printing technology with a contest where your members can win a free 3D printer for designing printable object that contribute to peace. Would you please share the attached release with your members?

Thank you!

Gada Prize (now called Uplift Prize) new Deadline and more Flexible Criteria (5 replies)

Kartik Gada — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 01:07:22 -0400

Hello everyone,

Yes, the prize is still alive. Due to an insufficient number of serious entries by the Dec 31 deadline, we have revised the criteria to make them more flexible, with a new estimated award date of June 30, 2013.

Guidelines here :

[humanityplus.org]

Submissions for the new deadline can be made as per the directions in the link.

Thanks again. It is hard to create a prize that estimates just the right level of difficulty in criteria, as it is easy to make the prize too hard, or too easy. But the new broader criteria may encourage more entries this time.

Gada Prize Still Alive? (27 replies)

MattMoses — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 12:46:44 -0500

Is the Gada Prize still alive? According to the guidelines document, which is linked from the Printrbot page, Interim Prize judging began yesterday. The wiki page has been pretty quiet for a while.

Is anyone actually working on this?

Impossible idea (3 replies)

Masimomo — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 01:48:51 -0400

Hy

I'm sorry for my bad English
I'm looking for someone to adopt my idea, I realized I do not have the ability to do this.

I look for someone really good in robotics preferably in contact with research or ability to patent or otherwise avid fans

The idea concerns an appliance for personal care very difficult to achieve if not impossible

Contact me if only for curiosity or to discuss morrisbit@yahoo.it
Liked the name and city

Forum closed. :D Reason: because you're all developers! (10 replies)

SebastienBailard — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 20:19:41 -0400

Hi All!

As an experiment, I'll be closing this forum in a couple days, to help make RepRap better. (:D

Since the Gada Prize is for development, and you folk are developers, you should do that
development where we do all the other development, in reprap-dev,
our friendly-but-technical and technical-but-friendly official mailing list for reprap development.

If you're reading this, you're an official developer, we would be honored if you join us:
:)-Dhttp://reprap.org/pipermail/reprap-dev/ :)-D

Ways for printing overheads with no support? (4 replies)

dubious — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 18:33:59 -0500

The only thing that prevents the mendel from printing overheads is gravity. On the other hand, mendel relies on gravity to get the heated goo in place.

What if instead of a print bed there would be a spit?
The spit will have three directions of movement: Moving along the mendel Y, rotating along its axis, and rotating along one of its tips. I believe that could be explained as: Forward \ reverse, roll, and pitch.
The print head will still move along the X and Z.

This should allow great freedom of design and very complex shapes.

It might be hard when it comes to proper syncing of the print head though. Pitch change will also require X and Z change, for example.
Also it means every design will have a hole going through it.

I think that the greater design possibilities outweigh the unwanted hole. Many designs probably won't mind it. And if the spit is optional and easily interchangeable with the print bed (perhaps the bed can clamp onto the spit), it will allow one to print without a hole when desired.

If the spit isn't perfectly round, it will prevent the design from losing grip and rotating freely along the axis.
If the spit is coated with some sort of thin plaster, it will prevent the design from losing grip and moving freely along the spit's length. Once the design is finished, the plaster can be softened and washed off with water in order to release the design.

Any thoughts?

Replacing the Z axis belt with printable linkage (1 reply)

MrJohn — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 18:37:47 -0500

I've been brainstorming the requirements for the contest and I think we could reduce non-rep parts with printed linkage. The first thing that came to mind was the belt for the z axis. I think it could be replaced by a mechianial linkage and cog, like a train's wheel. Could someone that already has a reprap start playing with this concept? Thoughts? Ideas?

I also have an idea to replace some of the threaded rods with printed braces but I'll post that in another topic.

Announcing the Gada Prize in Personal Manufacturing at Humanity+ (1 reply)

kanzure — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 18:44:52 -0400

Today, Humanity+ re-announced the Gada Prize [gadaprize.org]

Announcing the Gada Prize in Personal Manufacturing @ Humanity+

Quote
Humanity+
Humanity+ is proud to announce the Gada Prize (gadaprize.org) in Personal Manufacturing. By January 1, 2013, we will award $20,000 to the individual or team who demonstrates specific improvements to 3D printing technology. The prize was initially hosted by the Foresight Institute and is now hosted by Humanity+. Founded in 1998, Humanity+ focuses on human enhancement and emerging technologies. Desktop 3D printers promise a disruption in manufacturing technology, with improvements on price, productivity, and portability. We believe that a fully open-source 3D printer will herald a new era for both industrial manufacturing and individual prototyping-- allowing everyone to rapidly build and test their inventions.

The Gada Prize awards innovations applied to the RepRap platform, an open source 3D printer capable of printing plastic objects. Established in 2005 by Adrian Bowyer, the RepRap project has now grown into an international community of scientists, researchers, engineers and RepRap operators. The long-term vision of the RepRap project is an open-source self-replicating machine -- a 3D printer that can build copies of itself.

Interested? Everyone is invited to get involved! The teams are especially friendly, and you can always reach out to us.

Humanity+ is an international organization focusing on technologies that expand human capacities. We primarily engage in promotion, conferences, ethics, debate, publication, and sponsored projects. The goal of the Gada Prizes is to improve the lives of one billion people by 2020. After an incubation period with the Foresight Institute, the Gada Prize is now a welcome addition to our portfolio.

Resources:

RepRap wiki has a list of teams

RepRap.org prize forum

irc.freenode.net #reprap

irc.freenode.net #hplusroadmap

Contact:
Bryan Bishop
Asst. Director of R&D, Humanity+
bryan@humanityplus.org
phone: +1-512-203-0507

Just thought you guys would like to know :-).

Embedding 3D models into Team wikis (6 replies)

Isaac Olson — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:59:42 -0500

Does anyone know if there is a way to embed a 3D model into a wiki page? I was thinking that there is no better way to communicate what our teams are trying to do than provide a simple model for people to play with in their browser. Google makes it easy to embed any 3D Warehouse model into a normal web page (see my example). However, when I put the same code into my wiki I get:

[ sketchup.google.com is not an authorized iframe site ]

I'm not that strong with code, is there a way that the RepRap admin's can simply "add" sketchup.google.com as an authorized iframe site? Viewing any 3D Warehouse model requires the Google Earth plugin, an even better option would be something Java based so practically anyone could view the model without downloading anything, something like this might work.

Team Columbus (4 replies)

Isaac Olson — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 01:54:16 -0400

For the last week I've been slowly adding more info to my project page and am now officially announcing the creation of the Columbus team! Please stop by and drop me a comment in Columbus' discussion page or here.

Hephaestus: a Team Competing and Collaborating for the Gada Prize (4 replies)

cmchap — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 13:25:58 -0400

I am proposing a redesign of the RepRap from the ground (build surface?) up. I realize that this is a much larger endeavor than it might need to be to win the prize, but my thinking is this: if the spirit of the prize is to have people make a living off this device, we should design a machine that can fulfill the Prize specs without being hindered by any limitations of current RepRaps.

Follow the project here: [reprap.org]

Team Surface: Easy load/unload printing surface (5 replies)

VuRaL — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 05:33:47 -0400

Hey there.

A friend of mine complained about that it takes time to unload prints from surface and again it takes time again to make surface ready for another print.

I had an idea to make it shorter and easier. So our team which is me and my brother atm, has started working on that. Innitial design is simple and I will share it here very soon. When we get design to a point where we believe it can be tested, we will try it and take photos/videos of the results to share here.

I am keen to have comments about our idea. I wonder if loading/unloading prints is an issue for most users and if it would make mendel better if we would manage to make if easy and fast.

Regards
VuRaL
Team Surface

Adding a stepper driven lathe to print in 4D (9 replies)

rocket_scientist — Tue, 28 May 2013 12:42:51 -0400

I think it would expand the range of complex shapes that could be extruded if the reprap machine had the option of a stepper driven lathe to rotate a partially completed part and add more sections to it without the 60 degree angle limitation on overhangs. This is intended more to allow the piece to be rotated occasionally while extruding more plastic than to spin rapidly and make surface of revolution pieces. Thus it is more likely to make rectangular cross section pieces.

objects.reprap.org

If the stepper motor and gear reduction are at the edge of the reprap's working volume, you could build a square truss beam (cross bars and 'X's on all four sides) by starting with the bottom layer and end pieces, which is easy to extrude. Then, lift the piece off the bed and place between the lathe head and the tail stock, then start printing again. Now, you can build the two sides, then rotate 90 degrees and do the same process to build the top. Then, assuming a fiberglass extruder has been made, you can wind fiberglass strands not only along the four corner beams, but wrap around all four sides at each cross bar, and then spiral around to reinforce each angle in the 'X's. This would also make strong, stiff torque tubes, to which threads can be added to make plastic threaded rod to use to drive one or more reprap machine axes.

I recommend using a gear reduction between the stepper and the lathe head so that more torque can be applied. This will allow mild milling and lathe work if the extruder is replaced with a mototool with milling bit. Without a several horsepower motor, the lathe will never be strong enough to do normal lathe type cutting with a rapidly spinning piece and cutting tool, but at slow speed with a milling head, it should be possible to mill aluminium.

Mike

The V extruder project (no replies)

Prober — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 14:45:28 -0400

You can follow some of the research here:

[probersideas.blogspot.com]

or

[reprap.org]

(tu)

Personal Team, Polar Arm upgrade (2 replies)

Morpheus — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 12:49:03 -0400

Okay, I'll keep a Z axis that fulfills the reqs. I want to use a foldable arm that folds into a bullet-shaped tube, and unfolds. Servo controlled, worm gears locking it to prevent transfer of energy. Magnetic Encoders. A triple extruder: ABS, PLA, 3mm soder.

Granule Extruder (12 replies)

Pablo2m — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 06:57:15 -0400

This team has a objetive development a granule extruder, currently i´m working in a wiki [www.reprap.org]

Plaster Extruder to 3D print metal molds. (7 replies)

rocket_scientist — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:23:43 -0400

One option for building more reprap structural parts, and even strong fastners, is to print a mold directly and pour liquid metal into it to cast the parts. Aluminum melts at a low enough point that something similar to the extruder head could heat up rod or wire and pour the liquid into the mold. This technique is already being done by Zcorp. It would be very useful to work on a formula similar to Zcorp's of sand, plaster, and other stuff to make molds for reprap parts. This would not only be good for structural rods and all-thread/studing, but could also make bearings and ball or roller bearings for them. Casting resolution though might limit this initially to only structural parts.

Mike

Copper wire deposition (5 replies)

rocket_scientist — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:28:35 -0500

One of the possible ways to manufacture a PCB board using a reprap is to press heated copper wire onto a thermoplastic substrate. It turns out that this has been done before, and there is a US Patent for this technique, which has no expired. But it means that we can build on this technique if it turns out to be a good way to build the boards needed.

The patent refers to insulated wires going point-to-point with no concern for routing or layers. The insulation would have to be cut or melted off at each end, and the copper wire bonded to the pad. I believe that patent calls for plated through holes to be made first before the board is wired. This can be done with a drill (milling head with small diameter bit) and then a riveting type head that will make a through hole with a rim on both sides. The wire is likely very thin, at least for signal wires, so spot welding the end of the wire to the through hole rivet would provide the needed electrical and mechanical connection.

For SMD, I think we would need to press a 'pad' of hot copper onto the board, then spot weld the wire(s) to it. I am not sure what range of pad sizes that would be needed. It could be of a thin ribbon and have a cutter cut off a piece, then place the piece. Or a tape of pieces that would feed through the placement head like the old cap guns. The advantage to the ribbon approach is that it can be cut to different lengths, and may be a less expensive to make in bulk.

Mike

Team Open Air (2 replies)

rocket_scientist — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:23:04 -0400

I doubt that I will ever come close to being the prize winner, but I would like to declare a team and base design. I don't have a blog yet, (or even a working RP!), so I will add that later.

The basis of my design is a cubical structure, with a fixed bed and 3 axis gantry for the extruders. The fixed bed will allow the largest possible piece to be only the width of the extruder and gantry mount hardware smaller than the RP outside dimensions, instead of less that half with a moving X-Y table.

I call it open air because two sides and the corner between them will be open to allow pieces to extend outside the RP. I intend to experiment with growing parts. By this I mean making the first half of a truss column, then moving that piece out over the edge of the bed and hold it in place with arms/clamps that swing out from the sides. The edge of the bed would have holes to put registration pins into, and the first piece made would have holes for the registration pins to keep the alignment and positioning correct. Panels can also be made in quadrants, so that pieces larger than the largest dimension of the RP can be made.

The Z axis will be the main stage, and run off three vertical lead screw drives in the remaining 3 corners. The Y and X stages would use truss beams of plastic webs and steel strap on the top and bottom for prevent creep. The cross truss would be open on the bottom and back side so that the extruder head can be automatically swapped out.

There would be multiple heads, each with its own plastic feed, power and data cables along the back top. The Gantry would move to the storage location of the current head, a servo would unlatch it and move it into its storage position, where it would snap into spring clips to hold it in place and insure that the extruder does not drip/leak. Then the gantry would move in front of the next head and the servo would grab that head, pull it out of its spring clips and lock it into position.

The accuracy after exchanging heads would be improved by having a pair of laser pointers cross their beams at one spot in the range of motion of the head, with photodetectors on the far side to see when the beam is blocked. The extruder would then be moved slowly across one beam to fix X, across the second beam to fix Y, then positioned exactly over the intersection and lowered to fix Z. When a milling head is used, this process would fix the tip of the milling point.

The multiple extruders would contain different types of plastic, and different colors of the main plastic. One or more milling heads would be included for subtractive 3D prototyping. The milling head might also have a range of bits that can be swapped in and out like the gantry exchanges heads. This would allow small bits for detail work, larger ones for fast work, ones for metal and others for plastic.

The plastic extruders would have 3 or more orifices that can be slected by sliding a plate of the end of the extruder. This would allow very fine filaments to be used for details and edges, then after several edge layers have been built up, the coarser opening would be used for much faster fill.

A multi-color quad head might be used to provide more colors without using up lots of head slots. This would have four smaller stepper motors feeding separate plastic feeds into a single heater-extruder head. Each stepper, feed, control would be rotated 90 degrees from the others so that all the parts would be made in quadruplicate. It might even be possible to have all liquefied feeds go into a single extruder orifice and mixed at different rates to obtain a rainbow of colors.

The bead would be selectively heated to reduce warping and power consumption. A pattern of 16 by 16 small aluminum blocks would be bonded onto a thin stainless steel bed. The gaps between blocks would be filled with a high temperature epoxy or other stiff filler material to increase the bed's stiffness. Each block would have a 10 ohm carbon comp resistor bolted onto the underside, and wired in rows and columns. The heater control board would have 16 power MOSFETS for each row, and 16 for each column. Heat would be applied by powering an entire row with 12V, then allowing only the desired blocks to heat be grounded by the coresponding column MOSFETS. With a 0.1 ohm precision resistor in series between the columns and the column MOSFETS so that an analog mux would allow the controller to measure the resistance of the carbon comp resistors and use that to measure the heat of each block. The thin stainless steel will prevent heat from moving sideways, but still allow the heat to flow upwards into the plastic parts. The pattern of parts being made would determine which blocks are heated, so that the plastic deposited becomes insulation from the air to reduce the power needed to keep the plastic warm.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. When I actually get a Mendel working to make parts, I will see about exploring and testing these ideas.

Mike

Team Replicant (1 reply)

cephdon — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:48:40 -0400

Just announcing my presence and getting started on this. My Wiki location is at Team Replicant.

It might take me a bit to get everything up as I get going, but hopefully not too long.

Continuous print job (32 replies)

Benbo231 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:50:58 -0500

What if...You had a lot of time where you were at school, work, etc.
Suppose that even the biggest print jobs don't take the full amount of time that you're at work, your machine finishes and sits idle, It can't print because something's on its print bed already. What if...you had a conveyor belt as a print bed? While rubber is flexible, a plastic or wood sheet isn't. Let's get some modular tread like on this robot:
[www.solarbotics.com]
and put them paralell. Then wire up some motors, and superglue some plastic sheet to the top, in a way that, when flat, they make a single sheet. When going around the ends, they rotate free. So the Reprap finishes its print, spins the print floor, and moves the print off of the print zone. The reprap then continues to print, all we need is code that can have each model wait in line until its turn. I suck at arduino coding, anyone willing to try it?

Documentation and Registration? (7 replies)

SebastienBailard — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:58:15 -0400

Do we have to document our work and have it reviewed to stay in the running?

I think it may be best to insist on Full Documentation of the entire Stack on the RepRap wiki, starting the instant you register your team up here:
[objects.reprap.org]

Otherwise, we'll get lots and lots of RepRap development in Other Spaces, but none of it going up on the wiki unless or until someone receives a 20,000 or 80,000 dollar check.

This means that every part file and so on live at RepRap.org, as opposed to a proposed entry being a link to a constellation of off-site webpages, parts files, etc.

This would include subassemblies, firmware, electronics, most software, and so on.

Also, I would prefer to avoid "Dark Horse" or competitors working in secret or in Other Spaces and then registering and submitting at the last minute of December 31, 2012, but I'm the one who created the registration page. Disclosure: I'm also the one who registered (Team: Casainfo, Nophead) and put Forrest Higgs' name up there for the Recycler project.

Thoughts and discussion? The rules only say "Participating teams are expected to regularly publish and make available their technology on an ongoing basis." I believe it is reasonable to hope and expect that people will publish on RepRap.org? (I admit to a slight bias towards having people publish on RepRap.org.) :)

After we ponder this for a while, we may want to ask for the Foresight Institute to clarify the rules after we synthesize something that looks reasonable.

RBS Team (open call for new members) (1 reply)

SebastienBailard — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:25:13 -0400

I believe some of the RBS-based RepRaps and RepStraps like Eiffel and LeCorb we're designing will be sufficiently novel and functional to be worth submitting for the Gada Prize. This includes PourStraps, etc.

[objects.reprap.org]
[objects.reprap.org]
[objects.reprap.org]

This is an open call for new members for people who want to work on this with us.

Plastic team (2 replies)

Chris Parkinson — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:33:44 -0500

If anyone has already ventured into the area I apologize for a repeat.

It is very possible to make our own plastic for pennies. Back in late 1960's, my late father was a renowned polymer chemist and built a house out of LDPE for pennies on the dollar in the back lot of SRI International in Menlo Park, California. It can be done. If anyone would like to know more get in touch with me and I can fill you in on the details. This will be very labor intensive but can be done to making a RepRap capable polymer for replication to under the 10 cents per pound desire. Then all that has to occur is the interconnections and the electronics. I am good at getting samples but not that good.

To date the electronics alone has cost me about $250 even after making my own boards (No more stepper or extrusion boards to be had and had to make my own at a cost) I guess I will have to make these boards weigh a lot or maybe get an allowance where under 10cents per pound can mitigate over 10 cents per pound.

All in all this is very exciting. I am about 50% completed with my own RepRap Mendel made out of composites. That casting method is real cheap if using cheap materials but those stink and are cancer causing so I avoid styrene based systems where I can. It is possible to make the cast parts from other materials and for the birthing unit it is a great way to go. The molds are actually easy to make and not very expensive if you know what you are doing. Maybe I can sell the molds to interested parties. I also use a technique where I get one oversize allowance on perfectly spherical bolt ways. All in the mold and only light post machining. No teardrop pathways for the long bolts.

I can be reached at parky36@covad.net

How do you sign up? (3 replies)

Matthew — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:26:05 -0500

How does one sign up to be eligible for the prize? Do we have to document our work and have it reviewed to stay in the running? Cab we jut pitch up in 2011 with our finished product and say, here it is? so many questions...