Article on Home Rapid Prototyping

Hi all,

Just another article I found. Boring day in class so I was searching stuff.

[crnano.typepad.com]

Cheers!

... thank you very much, a very interesting discussion!

On the other side i wondered too, why reprap and fab@home wasn't more cooperative ...

I found fab@home first, then some weeks later reprap - now i'm focused on reprap, because of the a bit more active comunity and distributed ideas, i can test or dispute with others (and because it's not so US-centered )

For me the basic-concept and hardware is not the point, i'm more in optimizing the application, and here the accuracy and materials must be overworked a lot ...

Viktor

Actually I think it might have been one of CRN's earlier posts that got me interested in RepRap in the first place.

I'm coming at this from the point of view of trying to give a helping hand to the gestation of the Desktop Nanofactory that CRN estimate is 10-15 years away (See the link in their sidebar labelled Nanofactory Video for a cool animation of how it might work).

I'd love for history to trace back the lineage of a desktop nanofactory to our humble selves (OK maybe that means I'm not so humble after all).

Plus, I might actually find a use for a Darwin. Even if I don't, I know others that would, so the whole replicating part would be great so I could make another 5 for the various friends and family that are interested but not quite interested enough.

Hi reece,

... yesterday i had a short discussion with my 9 years old son, what he would do, if we would have a capable reprapper.

He grumbled a bit, then said, he would build lego-bricks for his actual favorite sites, or maybe a cool shaped pencil-sharpener ...

Then i self thought around, what sort of needs i have.

It sorted out, that my home-reprapper must be able to build with thermoplastics and air-hardening or in the oven sinterable pastes of then free selectable powdered materials with an accuracy of 0,01 millimetres.

That means, my home-brewed capability of manufacturing products would be in the same liga, as actual technics in companies!

Actually i'm on collecting and developing the parts and software-bits for an tripod-micro-reprapper, which should be capable of submicron accuracy, but this way is a bit to complex for the public, so it's maybe a try to seed nano-fabbers for research and special purposes ...

Viktor

VDX Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi reece,
>
> He grumbled a bit, then said, he would build
> lego-bricks for his actual favorite sites, or
> maybe a cool shaped pencil-sharpener ...
>
> ...It sorted out, that my home-reprapper must be able
> to build with thermoplastics and air-hardening or
> in the oven sinterable pastes of then free
> selectable powdered materials with an accuracy of
> 0,01 millimetres.

What are the neccessary tolerances for lego bricks? I remember having lego bricks that had gotten worn our from overuse, and didn't stick together well. A lego brick could turn out to be very difficult to manufacture without machined tooling.

... for building fitting lego-bricks you need an accuracy near to 10 microns, but the problem is more the material and the smooth surfaces, you need ...

My prototypes and giveaways from commercial high-end 3D-printers have accuracies from 0,2 to 0,01 mm (STL-epoxy), but none of them is capable of building 'real' lego-bricks, because of the surface-finishing or the durability of the material.

One goal ist the resolution - i can easily achieve 1 micron resolution and 5 micron repeatability in a limited workspace of a cubicle-inch (i have some piezo-leg-linear-motors and linear stages with resolution of 150 nanometers per step and 20 mm traveling range).

But the target point is the material!

I have some examples from dimension printing - they are build from dispensed ABS in the same manor, as reprap, but with a 180 micron extruder (150 micron is ready for market, 120 in development).

The parts are very stable, but you can see the slices and some cavities in corners and overhangs, but it's very nice. Not so smooth, as lego and playmobile of course, but the parts have the stability of normal usable plastic-parts, as mobile-housings or household-hardware.

A very cool FDM-tool is the handheld injection-molding-gun from orbi-tech/drader [www.orbi-tech.de]

I didn't think, i have to build lego-parts with my reprapper, to fit the needs of the people, i think it's better to give them the freedom to creative universality ...

And here i see the real potential: not to produce a reprapper capable of selfcopy (this comes with time), but have the ability to mix and interchange methods, hardware and material as i need and with the size and accuracy i want.

Maybe i have a micro-reprap this year, maybe a nano-reprap in 5 or 10 years, but the idea of personal fabrication is evolving very fast, so in some years there should be massive changes in our living and acting ...

Viktor

... as appendix to the discussion with my 9-years old son, what to do with a reprapper, we found some very expressive samples.

One is building separable slices of a human body with coloured inner parts from gelatine (slices separable with sheets of wax-paper).

The other project would be a birthday-cake in form of a castle with interieur and some action-figures, made from chokolade, melted shugar and gelatine too ...

If someone is interested in this kind of stuff, then i can look for 3D-data and converting them to STL.

Viktor