Difficulty level

For (I think) a couple years now, I've been coming to this website every now and then trying to figure out if anything is going on. Now I see the front page claims that RepRap 1.0 is basically done, i.e. it replicates.

I find this very exciting, but gathering information from this website is pretty hard (it's disorganized, and things are sometimes repeated many times with certain seemingly important details changed each time). I think I'm starting to piece together a vague idea of how this works though.

After spending hours perusing, I think I have come to the conclusion that right now, even if you can figure out how to get the parts, it takes a LOT of work and mechanical skill to build one of these. I mean, it's not something just anyone can do; you have to be a real tool-man with a workshop and plenty of experience building stuff. Right? I notice that one of the items that pops up in the confusing parts lister when you ask for the RepRap 1.0 is a drill press! Also, power drills, hacksaws, PIC programmers, etc.

I'm an electrical engineer and I am extremely NOT good with my hands. I can solder (quite badly), but that's about it. So far it looks hard to believe that the "self-replication" process is even any easier than just building one out of wood. Can I safely assume this isn't quite ready for people like me yet?


And BTW, I winced a little to see that someone has put the dubious claim on the front page that the RepRap may someday be able to make transistors. I can't imagine that you guys really intend to suggest that this is possible.

I haven't found it to be too difficult so far, though I haven't gotten to the extruder yet and I am buying machined parts for that from one of the other members who is offering a kit.

Electronics wise I have ordered the kits from the store and they have been fairly straight forward.

There's starting to be an ecosystem for this and it will just be getting easier.

I am not doing a Darwin yet but starting with linier slides that I bought off of e-bay so while the X & Y bolted right together, getting the Z put together did involve the three power tools that I did have; small band saw, drill press and belt sander.

But if you do enough reading you can find techniques that people have discussed that you can get by with a simple electric drill.

But hey tools are a lifetime investment and if you check with your buds you can generally borrow or get the supervised use of their tools.

Some of us go the easy(er) rout and build a rep(s)trap first. The rep(s)trap will in tern allow us to print the darwin parts. The only hard part about building the reprap or rep(s)traps seems to be making the extruder barrel reliable and not failure prone. While I am no where near the point of printing anything I am well on the way to having the mechanics done.

I have been building things since I was 5 and am very mechanically inclined. My grandfather owned a large construction company and I learned a lot from him. He was also an accomplished wood worker and also machined metal as a hobby. His last hobby was drag racing and that is one of the hobbies he passed on to me. I also was on the robotics team in high school and in college I was in an electronics club. So I guess I am very good with my hands.

With that said I find this project to be very simple. It will take some time to organize everything and to plan your build. Every ones build is different but all are very similar. There is no need for pic programming now that the electronics kit is arduino based. All it takes is copying and pasting some code. The electronic kits are all through hole and quite easy to solder with a temp controlled iron. Silver bearing solder tends to flow out better on pcbs in my experiences. With you being an EE I assume that you can read schematics and know how to read the pcb and place the components. The soldering will take care of it self if you use a half decent iron and good quality rosin core solder. The trick to soldering that many people miss is to feed the solder onto the pad and not the iron tip.

I do admit that information is scattered and that is one of the big problems with a Wiki style knowledge base. But it is what we have to work with and very intelligent and distinguished people built this site and gave the information to us for free. So we might as well be thankful.

If you build one from the two kits (electronics and the bitsfrombytes mechanical kit) then you remove all the machining and tooling problems, for a bit more cost.

I'm a software engineer and I've managed to assemble a complete reprap and electronics. It moves and works, just waiting for some spare time to configure and calibrate it properly so I can build stuff.

In difficulty, the electronics kits are easy : nice clear instructions and clear PCBs. I re-learnt to solder (last time was at school) and all my kits work, you should have no problems.

The BfB kit is more like a complex meccano kit. The instructions are OK, but sometimes need a little thought to work through. I'd rate it similar to building a RC car from a kit - take it careful if you're not too confident and you'd be OK.

My toolbox contains:
needle files
hex keys
small pliers
jeweller's screwdrivers
electrical size screwdrivers
sharp knife.

My workshop is basically my front room, or the dining table, with an old curtain over it.

It's certainly possible to save a lot of money by manufacturing the parts yourself, but that's what takes the time, access to lathes, etc. If you're in a similar position to me then I'd use the kits.

I've blogged about it at [renoirsrants.blogspot.com]

Yeah, what he said :-)

The problem seems to be the success of the project at the moment i.e. things are changing quite rapidly, but if you get all the parts in one hit from the online stores they come with links to instructions for the particular versions of the electronics etc.

If you've got the money you may want to get a few additional parts as I've found I always seem to break something and have to order another one and then by the time I do, the plans have changed slightly.

I studied biochemistry in college and I'm building a repstrap, so it can totally be done with just about zero previous experience. Things were rather confusing actually, since not every little thing is documented and like you say, there's out-dated info here and there. But I wanted to do it and the desire made all the difference. This forum has been very helpful (thanks everyone!) and I'm just about done with my strapper save for some tweaks -- it's taken me about 6 months thus far in my free time.

Benefits that I've had though that others may not have include a full scale machine shop where I could learn tools on my own time, and knowledgeable, accessible people I can ask questions to. I cannot overemphasize desire and curiosity, because armed with that, you will find a way and will be able to do just about anything you want to accomplish.

Given that you're a EE, you have more programming experience than I do, and you should be able to read the firmware code alright (though not totally necessary, but it is helpful).

Hope that helps you along.

Thanks for the responses. OK, congratulations to all of you with the spare time and ingenuity to get it working, but it sounds like it is indeed more work than it's worth to me for now. I hope it will get more user-friendly with time.

Of course, the other major open-source project I'm familiar with, Linux, has been around for years and still hasn't become terribly user-friendly. In fact, it has arguably just become more complicated, less unified, and harder to comprehend over time. So I'm a little skeptical.

Regardless, I guess the technical community will need to be completely saturated with these before anyone starts trying to make them usable to non-technical people, if anyone does.

Yeah, you definitely need either a strong motivation or technical ability to put one of these together. I had very little electronics experience before I got started researching for this project, however I do have a strong understanding of the theory of electronics. I have done a ton of research before taking the plunge and getting parts. I already have the electronics soldered and working, which was actually very easy. The pre-made PCB's from the rrrf are very cheap, and you can either get the electronics bits ordered from them as a kit or get them separately from a place like digikey or mouser.

It took quite a bit of research for me to figure out exactly how I wanted to build it, there are no clear-cut instructions yet.

Mechanical aptitude is a bonus at the CAD product design phase, as well.