Foton 3Dprinter
Release status: unknown
| Description | All-plastic intergrated mechanics
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| License | unknown
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Contents
Overview
The foton 3D printer's is a redesign of the origional Mendel printer currently being developed byFoton labs
The primary goals in the redesign to this date have been to:
- reduce assembly time
- reduce the time and materials demanded in production
- build upon the printers esthetic value.
- reduce the entry barrier to domestic 3D printing
All of which have aimed at making the Mendel printer more accessible to a wider group of people both economically and technically.
Materials
The mechanics of this this printer are almost entirely made from a single polyurethane liquid plastic, whilst the fasteners and threaded bar are made from nylon and bearings of stainless steel. Having simplifying many of the mechanical parts it is possible to use more commonly found materials such as MDF or plywood for the making of parts, which makes this design well suited for those on a very tight budget with good DIY skills, for those interested images of the parts with their dimensions can be found here.
Production process
The majority of the parts are made from an open cold
casting process, which is both time and cost efficient and opens the printer up to the possibility of mass production, with production time of parts currently down to as low as one hour.
Assembly
Intergrating many of the mechanical parts has led to a large reduction in assembly time and complexity, with assembly time currently bellow five hours. One of the primary aims has been to create a design with as few parts as possible resulting in a quick and easy to assemble printer suited to the no technically minded person.
Distribution
This design is primarily aimed at an "Ikea style" form of distribution, easy to mass produce parts that can be made into a flat pack for shipping and assembled by the average person. This is a classical form of distribution current in the world to day and has many advantages most notably economy of scale. The other form of distribution that this printer also lends its self well to is the self-replicating model and is a medium to long term goal of this design with the possibility of making the frame scalable currently being developed.
Electronics
The mechanics of this printer are designed to work with the standard set of electronics used on a Mendel print,
being on a 1:1 scale with the stranded Mendel in size means that there should be no addition alterations to the software or electronics needed.
Current development
There are a number of redesigns that are currently being developed among them are:
1. Redesigning the bearing system of the extruder and print bed, this design involves creating a grove in the plastic for a single large bearing to run along instead of the original design with two small bearing
This is a relatively small alteration but would simplify the assembly whilst also increasing thier strenth.
2.This is one possible design for making the printer self-replicating based around being able to scale parts of the frame, that is being able to enlarge it from it´s current size to one big enough to be able to print it´s own parts. The design looks at cutting the frame to create a number of joints where in a strong re-enforced plastic threaded bar would be placed that could be adjusted to the desired length, this would create the advantage of a much larger print area. There are a number of challenges to realizing this namely the fact that all axes need
scalable which would increased the complexity and time of assembly and production.
3.This is a design that continues with the aim of streamlining the mechanics by stripping them down to the most basic requirement, this design
would essentially do away with the frames vertex and adding support to the threaded bar at the base with the added advantage of greatly reducing the quantity of materials, the overall weight, the assembly time and complexity, there are
many advantages to the design that would work to streamline the mechanics. The disadvantage to this being that it would break the integrity of the printers form, thus greatly reducing it´s esthetic value
whilst also compromising it´s overall physical robustness particularly with regards to the z axes.
These possible re-designs and any other ideas can be discussed on the forum thread
