I am thinking about building this printer, but replacing the hot end with an E3D v6. I see I can print out the parts to connect the e3d to the extruder. I want to do this because I would love for this to be a project for my high school students next year and want to get some experience with it before throwing it to them to do. I know that there are better printers out there, like the makerbot or its many clones, but I wanted to know if any of you know if this is a decent design for the type of things we do around here. For example, would it be sufficient to print off the parts that would be involved in building an InMoov for example, or maybe the Jimmy type bot from intel. I have no experience with 3D printing and want to truly understand what is going on instead of dropping a box on my desk and saying Print This. Just the way I am I guess.
Is there anyone in this community that has experience with Prusa i3 printers that could tell me if the quality of the prints would be worth this project or not? I know that a lot of this has to do with setup and configuration, but once configured, were you happy with your printer? I don't want to go down a path that I ultimately would be disappointed in. Which opensource software should I be getting familiar with? Any other recommendations?
Thanks in advance. As you can see, I have just started scraping the surface of this and a lot of questions.
Do you have a Thingiverse account? That's a lot of cool info, thanks for sharing it. I didn't get a chance to look at the links so I want to ask, what motherboard did your printer come with? I'm only familiar with the Sang-somthing and the Printrboard. I'm just wondering what you got. It seems that the Printrboard is being used by alot of printers now.
Since I self sourced everything, the printer didnt come with anything
I purchased the Azteeg X3 Pro. It is like a ramps but far more options for expansion. Good stuff and worth looking at if you ever look to replace the controller. I also got the hot bed and the control controller from the same guy. I am very pleased with all of these items. My stepper motors are giving me some fits and I think they will be replaced soon. What can you say, they were made in the 80's in China. They work okay but they are just sloppy.
I do have to say that I have heard a lot of really good things about the beagle bone black cape too though. It looks really interesting.
So, here is the update. I took off the first two weeks of July to build the 3D printer and get it running reliably. This is my first 3D printer and for about the past couple of weeks, it was about to be my last until this morning...
First, let me say that this was not from a Kit and everything was sourced from different vendors. I did this to learn, and like the last 1965 Ford Mustang that I rebuilt from the ground up, this will be the last time that I self source all of the parts. There wasn't an issue really with any particular part. The combination of all of the parts, being completely untested, and the marlin firmware which was not tested with the combination of all of these parts, made for an eventful build. There are hundreds of different things to tweek to get everything printing perfect. This is where buying a prebuilt box, or buying a kit is going to get you way ahead of the game.
I have to be honest. Yesterday was my birthday and I had to work late. On top of that, someone else was a jerk and left upset during a deployment because they had to wait 10 minutes for an answer while we were researching the issue he was having. On top of that, everything that I tried to print yesterday (and over the past 24 days) had some issue. A couple of times, the computer that I am testing everything from had a memory issue. This computer has 32 GB of ram and is a new computer. I will be printing from the microSD so it wasn't too concerning. I have had the printer taken apart about 10 times to tweek one small thing or another over the past 24 days. Along with that, I have made many tweeks to the marlin firmware to fix issue after issue. This finally got to me last night and I was about to put the 90% working 3D printer up for sale for what I had spent in parts.
I am learning a lot about 3D printing and last night, I printed what I would consider my first very successful print. I started it at about midnight and went to bed. I woke up this morning to the Raprio face on my printer in ABS at .3mm layer height resolution. I had the printer heat set too high, so it I can see where it spit a bit, but there were not any jumps in any axis, it stuck to the hotbed through the entire print, it looks good for .3mm layer height, there was no layer smashing going on, there was no separation of any of the layers, and the face is really very usable. I needed this to work for a presentation that I am giving on the 16th of August about robots and 3D printing.
I did this to learn a lot about 3D printing and I did. I also did this to evaluate if it is better for a class of high school robotics students to build a 3D printer or buy one. Well, I have come to the conclusion that with the cost of the Solidoodle 4 and the cost of the parts to build a printer, we will probably do both. Mine may reside at the school next year for use in the robotics program also.
Would I recommend this to someone else? Well, that all depends. Let me restate that I will never build one again that is not a part of a kit. Kits have their own issues, but the combination of parts has been tested with the firmware settings that are being used. I didn't save any time or money self sourcing all of the parts. I could have if I had gone even further, but I didn't want to go all the way down to that level, but even then it would have been $200 saved AT THE MOST. IMHO, $200 wasn't worth the trouble of building all of the circuit boards from components, or cutting down longer lengths of solid steel and threaded rod. For that matter, I guess I could have made my own threaded rod... anyway, not worth the trouble. If you are the kind of person who loves a challenge, and loves working on something every night for a month straight to get to perfection, and don't calculate what your time is worth in other areas, well, this is a project for you. For me, it helped pass the time while waiting for the EZ-B to arrive.
I have always said that I think that every male should have been required to build their first car. This would have taught them what it takes to build and maintain a vehicle. I kind of take the same approach on the 3D printer I guess. It would be great for you to build your first one because you will truly understand what is going on with these by the time you are done. If you are not the kind of person who cares, and just want to drop a box on your desk and say print, stay away from 3D printing for a while. It isn't going to be to that point for quite a while IMHO.
I have experience with 4 3D printers. My Prusa I3 Rework (build self sourced), Makerbot Replicator 2, Makerbot Replicator 2X and a MakersToolWorks fusematic kit. This is the Self source route, Kit route and appliance route. All of these have their own issues. All have their own valuable contributions to 3D printing. I base my opinions off of these 4 printers and the research that I have done on many other 3D printers.
Lots of great info D
Thanks for sharing your experience. BTW it appears that all of the new Solidoodles coming out will have auto bed leveling. I big feature of Marlin and the PrntrBoards. Ill be picking up the $500 model as soon as I save up or tax refunds start coming around again. Thanks again for the detailed and informative post.
One more update here. I have made the printer into a dual head printer. It is taking me a while to complete this setup because my class starts on Monday had to focus more on my robot build and materials for the class than the printer. With school starting back a couple of weeks ago, I also have resumed my part time job as the network admin/server admin/storage admin/whatever else technical guy for the school my daughter attends.
I will post photos when I have it together and will post instructions and where to get the models for the extruders. I really think that I will like being able to print two colors for objects. I am not good at painting and this will reduce the amount of it I will be doing.
The only other thing that I can think of for advice is USE GOOD PLA OR ABS. Don't skimp here or you will want to pull your hair out
@D.C., I got my FlashForge Create to build robot parts. I spent 80 Hours trying to build the InMoov robot stuff. When I finally had enough to begin assembling some of it, I found that NOTHING fit together. Make sure that you calibrate it perfectly. I was so discouraged that I stopped trying to do it. My printer is just not accurate enough.
It's calibrated right. It took me about a month to get it right and every time I thought it was right over that month, I would start printing and discover it wasn't quite right. I printed probably 50 different calibration objects to check everything. The biggest issue that I had was figuring out what belt tension was correct. Every website says that it's important to get it right but It took me weeks to find out how tight was correct. It turns out that it is pretty dang tight, like strings on a base guitar.
It has been printing great for the last month or so, until I decided to make it a dual head printer. I just have been crazy busy with other projects to complete this one. Who knows, maybe this weekend it will happen.
This thread was mostly for anyone who was thinking about doing this for robot parts. It is defiantly possible and is something that I would have my students do in a high school robotics class. It's not something I would do again for home. I'm glad I did this, and it is working great. It was very frustrating at times and I wanted to paint a realistic picture of what building a 3D printer was like.