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.
Congrat. d. cochan, I've built mine Prusa i3 at the begining of this year :-)
The first printing with a little help of my son
http://vimeo.com/86364200" target='_blank' rel="nofollow"> http://vimeo.com/86364200
And now it looks a little bit different
and has autocalibration on table (Z axis )
Great delta construction and big challenge with calibration
Will you make any parts by yourself or it is construction out-of-the-box?
I know someone in my makergroup who built one of these and really likes it. They did say that they went with the beagle bone black cape on it and had really good results.