2011-08-13 » Get ready for plastic

RepRap Logo

For a while now I’ve been talking about making a hexapod.. I even went so far as ordering some parts and putting together servos and a server controller and making some stuff move. The problem I soon ran into though was that building a hexapod requires either buying or making a lot of parts. Each leg needs several brackets for the servos in order to make joints. When I started looking into these I found that most of these were either expensive, or complicated for me to build myself.

I’ve heard of RepRap before, but never actually seen one in person. Earlier this year when I went to the Mini Maker Faire in Vancouver, there were several people with both CNC and plastic printing machines. These were actually even more cool than I realized. I then started thinking about making the servo brackets for my hexapod using printed plastic. Which led me to read a bunch about the current state of these printers. I found the amazing hydraraptor and many other sources. It seems that with enough work you can get pretty decent quality prints.

The next stage in making a RepRap, after deciding you’re going to do so seems to be investigating all the options. There are a lot of different options when building a 3d printer. Even among RepRaps there are several variants in both metric and SAE, there are all sorts of different options for electronics to drive things, different extruder designs and different print beds. After reading about these different options, I decided that to start with I’m going to try to choose the most common options so I can get up and running as fast as possible. Then I can work on tweaking the setup and potentially print myself the parts to make another variant if I want. It seems 3d printing is a hobby in itself.

The decisions I made at this point are to go with the:

I wanted to order more of the electronics parts in components so that I could assemble them, but it seemed like it was cheaper to just buy those pre-assembled which will I guess leave me more time to get the rest working properly. So, at this point I’ve ordered what I hope are all the parts I need to actually get started printing and am waiting for enough of them to arrive for me to get started putting things together. The plastic parts I ordered from some random guy on Ebay have arrived already, which is nice. They seem to be “ok” build quality though I’m hoping I’ll be able to do better eventually. Then maybe I’ll sell the parts myself.

Anyway, that’s it for this post. Expect future posts to include more details on how construction is going.