Hello all! Newbie to 3d printing here and looking for answers,..be patient

Hello all my name is Joe and I am from Austin, Tx. I have been cruising Thingiverse for months now and checking out all of the new RepRap printer versions as they come out and I am anxious to start building my own. I am an Electrical and Avionics Technician and I am pretty handy so I think that with some guidance from you experienced builders and users I will be able to successfully build, calibrate, and use my very own printer. When it is all said and done I plan on using my macbook pro to print my objects. Will I run into any problems finding a program to print my models or will I have any problems calibrating my printer with OS X? I have AutoCad for mac will I be able to use this program to print my models? I am very interested I am making a Rostock or Mini Rostock, preferably the mini as I plan on taking it to work, and to family functions so that I can print out cases for electrical projects or keychains, and bottle openers as mementos of parties that we so frequently have. Has anyone here built a Mini Rostock and if so what is the exact print height, width, and length that it is able to produce. I want to build this on the cheap if possible and have heard heard good and bad things about Sanguinololu boards Vs Ramps. Is one easier to work with given that I will be using OS X? Sorry about the flood of questions buy I am very anal about anything I build or mess with and I want to make sure that I do this as professionally as possible. This build will be kinda slow but I will post pics of my progress once I get going. I really am excited about this and cannot wait to start building, printing, and donating to the 3d printing community. Thank you in advance for any and all help that is given. Also I would not mind building a full size Rostock or any other printer I am just kinda gunning for a Rostock Mini but any and all suggestions will be considered as I am not just stuck on one idea or another.

Hi Joe, good to see another Austinite interested in RepRap.

Rostock is a fairly new design, and while a lot of people have made them I'm not sure it's a great first printer. Also they're pretty tall in comparison to their build volume, so even a mini Rostock might not be that portable. If you have access to a laser cutter you could go for a Tantillus, which is compact and fairly cheap to source parts for, though a little tricky to get calibrated. Printrbots are somewhat portable too, and there are a bunch of kits out there. Emmanuel hasn't yet released the FoldaRap, but that seems the best option for something you can haul to events and just plug in.

From a compatibility standpoint, Sanguinololu and RAMPS are going to be the same in OSX. They both are Arduino based and just show up as a USB serial port. I believe they don't even need drivers for OSX, though someone can correct me. RAMPS is a more robust board, with extra outputs to control fans, an extra extruder, and easier interfacing to a front panel and SD card reader to print stuff without a PC. Sanguinololu doesn't require a separate Arduino and can be easily built from the ground up by hand. But some of the design decisions that make it easy to build also limit it to one extruder, no fan controller without resorting to some (simple) offboard hardware, and a harder time wiring up a front panel and SD card at the same time. If you don't need the front panel or 2nd extruder, a Sanguinololu is fine and will save you about $50 if you source the parts yourself. The fan can be worked around with this or this.

Thank you for your advice I will research the Tantillus and see what I will be needing. At this point based on what you said I think I am wanting to use RAMPS because it has more features that I want already available. I do not think I will use an extra extruder for my first build but I do like having the option to add one, also printing directly form an SD card would be something that I will want to do right away. It is good to see another Austinite on here as well, I may be hitting you up on weekends to help me build the printer and adjust it. I think that adjusting it is going to be the trickiest part for me but hey I am willing to give it a go anyways.

Well i checked out the Tantillus and it is really small lol. I read that the print area is about 3.9X3.9x3.9. I am looking for something portable but I wanted to still be able to print Rasberry pi cases and some slightly bigger objects. It will work fine for printing out battery enclosures for projects but I also wanted to print cases for some SNES games I have laying around. I will keep looking at some printers and see what I like although I am going to measure a majority of the things that I want ot make off the top of my head and see what I decide on, and hey so long as I can make parts for other printers I dont see why I cant put it to good use.