Misleading description in Hack A Day

Hack a Day gave a misleading reference to this project in a post today, calling another 3D printer appealing by comparison because "the entry cost is quit a bit lower than something like the reprap. 80/20 isn't that cheap, but you don't need a large commercial laser cutter to build the chassis." They're obviously thinking about Fab@home. It's a little depressing that they don't even know our name well enough to know what we do, but soi sentinel has already corrected the mistake in the comments (thanks).

I'm also quite disappointed that HaD said "To drive it, he's working on a custom microstepping board and hopes to eventually develop an Arduino shield to control the stepper drivers. That's right, it'll get an Arudino to act as the CNC control interface." - it would be nice to give some credit to Zach et al, who've been developing along these lines for months!

Anyway, looks like a cool project, and skimming his blog he's got his own custom extruder too that might be worth taking a look at for ideas. Not nearly as mature as the MkII though, certainly.

Link: [www.hackaday.com]

I wasn't sure what he was talking about either, makes sense for it to be fab@home though.

There's no way that project can come close to reprap in cost, as he's using that expensive aluminium box section stuff. It seems a little strange he wants to do everything himself too, when so much progress has be done already with reprap.

'fabr guy' here:
I originally started building a RepRap. After failing to procure parts from a local 3D print shop, I took to designing the super structure using 80/20 - which isn't that expensive compared to the cost of a commercial custom print job. Using the TeshShop's printer services it was going to cost $400 in printed parts alone, compared with $170 using 80/20 including the bearings. I'm sure once there is a working repstrapper in my area, the cost of the plastic will quickly plummet.

I was familiar with the Ardunio. Instead of building a reprap controller board, I figured it was more cost effective for me to use the Arduino and EasyDrivers (the custom shield is simply 3 easy drivers, with space for a 4th for the extruder electronics). It was only after I had quite a bit of progress down this path that I discovered RepRap had chosen to use the Arduino as well. This allowed me to dovetail my custom electronics with theirs.

I have tons of respect for the RepRap developers. I've looked at Fabr as a RepStrapper. While there were some departures in design (again, lacking a printer), my goal has always been to build a RepRap.

I tried to clarify this in the latest progress reports.

$170 for all that machined metal isn't bad! that's much cheaper than I thought it would be. Your Cartesian structure looks great, you should be able to do some milling with that.

When I said:

greenarrow Wrote:
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> strange he wants to do everything himself

I was really referring to the extruder, as you can get very cheap complete kits here : [store.rrrf.org]
Not very good use of the word 'everything'

Have you seen the CNC/fabber kit that lumenlabs are putting together? It's also 80/20 based

Thanks for the compliment :-)

The lumenlabs CNC bots look very sweet! I wish them very much success!

The extruder came about because the Darwin extruder had printed parts. I figured mine would be an experiment. rrrf wasn't available when I started my build, but have since found it a wonderful resource.