Bamboo Printer
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This will eventually become a development page.
At the moment it is just to store a couple of ideas that I have that may allow the use of natural herbal supplements instead of vitamins. Basically I am thinking of using cheaper mechanical components to allow for building in less industrialised regions by making use of more parts from nature or the hardware hop. A couple of other components may become less standard but may become cheap if there is a little development added to them.
A specific drawback to this idea is that it is likely to be larger in footprint than a industrialised RepRap but there is room to make modifications especially if some of the parts are printed instead of found in the back yard.
This project cannot work at the moment as some of the ideas have never been tested and I do not have the personal skills base to do the development. I hope to make it so that just one or two people/teams might be able to complete the missing bits in this idea at which point it could become a viable development path.
I have decided to call this the Bamboo Printer not because it prints in bamboo but because innovative use of bamboo (or other flexible material) rods are used to replace much of the linear and rotary bearings of the present RepRap variants. The compliant nature of the mechanics may result in various non linear and other geometry issues but is ignored due to the position feedback system described below.
This design will not have a large portion of printed parts though the 'bamboo' bits could be partially printed I expect at a higher cost. It will however have a much loser expensive vitamin count (or that is my thinking).
The second part of the project that needs new development and is a bit beyond me personally at this time is the optical camera mouse position feedback system. It is possible that the software could be simplified in part if one were to replace the mouse cameras with a more expensive USB camera (especially for proof of concept testing) but the idea is to make use of the ubiquitous mice to do the tricky part of the project. In short there is a mouse looking up at the bottom of the build platform with a high contrast graphical pattern that is sliding on a sheet of plate glass and observes the motion and sending signals back to the controller to position the platform as per host commands. Absolute position can be established by having a second mouse camera (in debug mode taking pictures) looking at the high contrast pseudo random pattern on the bottom of the platform.
The position feedback arrangement will allow for use of salvaged or consumer motors, DC, brush-less, stepper, pneumatic, linear motor or what have you as long as the controllers can be found or developed.
A number of delta-bots have tested the use of 'spectra' line instead of timing belts and this would be the preferred mechanical transfer medium. Again the feedback will allow for simple coupling using capstans that may or may not slip a bit as this will be corrected automatically.
Finally similar to the ideas of the parallelogram idea for the Z-axis that is also proposed for the 5 link SCARA design that I saw being developed the Z axis would also be a compliant bamboo parallelogram and the sine/cosine error would also have to be corrected for in the one direction like in the 5 link SCARA system. I cannot recall where I saw this design developed just now but it was on one of the popular forums and it means that one more part will be worked on by other teams already.
