Yet another 3D-printer - Origo

Found this today on a Finnish tech-blog that i follow:

[www.origo3dprinting.com]

It's not in production yet and the site does not contain any useful information about it, other than it's ready to print straight from the box and is aimed at 10 year olds. Blog stated that the cost is 800$, but i didn't find any info on the site itself.

In the prototype pictures you can see that Arduino is used to control it, so there's even hope that this could be open source.

3D-printing business seems to be booming, since these things are starting to pop up everywhere.

Nice, did you notice they went for a SCARA type design?

I've always wondered why nobody went after the advantages it brings yet.
Most importantly it could increase the replication factor substantially, the arms could be fully printable as opposed to threaded rods in the reprap.

... a scara design is better only then, when the arms are made of a really rigid/stiff material.

Much better is a design with two parallel arms - read here:[forums.reprap.org]
... and here: [forums.reprap.org]

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Also Scara require Servos not steppers to drive them. (Servo= any type of motor+encoder) Adding two joints makes homing the machine harder as well. The machine needs to know exact center to be able to convert Gcode into arm movements.

... you can build scaras with steppers too - but you need really high resolution motors or gearboxes, and maybe optimized with high resolution encoders ... but this is then nearly the same asss servos

I have stepper+driver-combinations with 1000 steps per rev in fullstep and 10000 spr in microstepping modes - or 1/256-microstepping drivers, which makes 51200 steps per rev. vith a normal 1.8deg/200-step-motor.

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

While the actual printer doesn't make me excited,.. the concept of making the software simple enough for a 10 year old is exciting.

Reprap is brilliant,.. but there is a steep learning curve & you really do need some previous skills to get into it. If it could be simplified to this extent it would almost certainly aid in bringing 3d printing to the masses that much sooner.

VDX Wrote:
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> ... a scara design is better only then, when the
> arms are made of a really rigid/stiff material.

Well, there is much we can do about rigidity, at first there is the geometry and the infill orientation which could be tweaked to make it rigid along the axis of rotation (We wouldn't need it anywhere else so that gives us an advantage.

Lets assume that commercial scaras are made from fiberglass epoxy and aluminum, we could have a similar effect with pla/abs strands of the infill and laminate the plastic with sheets of metal.

Also it depends on the load we are using. I could imagine a design which uses a separate z axis (like they, the origo people have done) plus a bowden cable extruder. Then if the first axis is driven by a belt less gear in the base and the second axis by single belt and a motor at the top of the base it would only have to move the hot end and the mass of the arms themselves.

We can probably get the load under 100g total which would totally be not an issue and give us plenty of room to max out the printing speed to as much as the hot-end can handle.

I'm going to hold off on any judgement whatsoever until I can see it print. It's easy to have ideas that 'will work' but I've noticed very few make it to that point.