Modified ink printer churns out electronic circuits

A link I picked up from the Fab@Home forum:

[www.newscientisttech.com]

just
AWESOME!

That's what makes homemade circuitboards easy to build

doing that on a penplotter should reduce passes to ONE,
A Penplotter can be made out of any reprap ...

That's what this project needs, making it's own circuits.

Only a mill and a lathe to homebuild the steppers, and it can FULLY rebuild itself!

'sid

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/19/2007 09:47AM by sid.

sounds like someone is catching the bug... :^)

I did not that in the article they talked very briefly about the resistance of the circuits that they are presently creating as not being what it should be.

However, once we can use a reprap machine to print circuits, here is the type of motor we need to be looking at.

[www.me.berkeley.edu]

Replace those permanent magnets with printed electromagnets and we start really pushing the envelope on replication. :-D

now THAT is cool!

It gets better than that. The real strength of printed circuit board motors, also called "pancake motors" is that compared to just about any other electric motor you can think of they have good torque and extremely low inertia. That means you can stop them on a dime and reverse direction a LOT easier than you can with, say, the little Solarbotics gearmotors that I'm currently using in Tommelise.

One of the problems with any reprap is that it has already become obvious that making very small gears like the sort that you find inside a Solarbotics gearbox is not going to happen any time soon, if at all.

That's why way up on my "to build" priotity list is a takeoff of a old Meccano (erector set) project for a gear cutter. This bad boy can cut solarbotics sized gears a treat and will fit in a shoe box. You can also run it with a solarbotics gearmotor.

[edwards.web.users.btopenworld.com]

There are a number of second level machine tools that we should make a priority to reprap and perfect as soon as we have a few machines running reliably.

i agree with you wholeheartedly. if we cant make them directly with the reprap machine itself, we should design the machines that make them to be made on the reprap machine.

to draw the analogy to linux again... the RepRap machine takes the place of the kernel (or perhaps gcc?), and the secondary machines take the place of helper programs that run on top of it (ls, mkdir, ps, etc...) the goal here would be to emulate the unix style of writing a program that does one thing and one thing only. except it does that one thing, very well. for example... a gear cutting machine.

I really like that analogy and i couldn't agree more!

Good analogy.

I'd mentioned this one before as well. Here's a shoebox sized lathe that you can make out of parts you can buy from the hardware store. It would be perfect for making those extruder barrels that you're battling with right now.

[www.lathes.co.uk]

I intent to reprap this one, too. I'm trying to find half a dozen little reprappable machine tool designs that will fit in a shoebox and live under a kid's bed. I want kids to be able to make real things again. I figure even a poor kid living with a single mom ought to have a 3D printer and a bunch of little secondary machines to exercise his or her imagination. Getting kids to work with their hands and their heads again is a major goal of what I want to accomplish Tommelise. That's why I'm pushing for a $150 machine rather than a $400 one.

Yes Forrest, I really agree with you on that one. I wish I had access to just some of the kinds of things we are working on creating now. I aspired to building an oscilloscope which I have seen done cheaply today with modern electronics and even the crt on Make. I think a lot of us here come from the "love to make things" group. Even if we mainly were able to just take things apart. I would love to see what kids across the globe can do with this kind of technology and sets of tools that could be made from it.

Hi Forrest...

I guess what you "need" is an emco unimat (the system was sold to cooltool in the late 90's afaik)

here's a link [www.hobby.uk.com]

for gbp200 you'll get a mill (horizontal or vertical) a drill press and a metal turning lathe, just puzzle your tool as you need it.

All in the size of two shooeboxes

take a quick watch at ebay, they're sold recently for less than 100

Okay, what was the topic?
Yeah circuitprinting...

Well, maybe I got the article wrong, but the problems are due to the "dots"
but as i mentioned earlier a penplotter doesn't create any dots (except you want dots )
So that shouldn't be a problem, or am I wrong?

'sid

Sid, that's a good looking system there. It makes me wish that I had space for a workshop. Sadly, I'm in a flat with the Pacific ocean nearby and I'm not going to trade that for more space. Even so, I've nearly broken down and bought a good lathe half a dozen times. I'm gritting my teeth, though, and aiming to make one that you can make for around $20-30.

then I don't say a word about the new metal-line system they have including a cnc controled system [www.thecooltool.com]

uups... sorry

Oh this thingy doesn't need any space, under the bed is enough (or on the table if you want to work)

Never mind.

that's also a neat way to repstrap i guess..

'sid

owww...... that thing looks so fine!! but it does seem expensive, innit?
I suppose my guest room will soon change name and purpose...

For the helper-tools, this is what I picture:

Reprap is an additive type of machine. It uses deposition and in some special cases, casting.
So i guess any helper-machines should be of other classes.

Lathes, drills and such are substractive tools: they remove surplus material from a piece.

Another type of process could be handled by ovens, microwaves and heaters, wich are material transforming machines.

UV lamps are another class of material transforming machines, and they can easely be combined with the reprap. So can any other source of safe to hande radiation like IR.

There's 3D scanners, wich could also be integrated if we build a turntable around the reprap cartesian system.

What other types of helper machines can we think of? Can we join several types of processes in a single one? How can we build those helper machines modules, starting from a reprap?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2007 01:19PM by Fernando.