Robox: How good could a sub-£1k 3D printer be? It seems like the Robox has been talked about for such a long time, with a subsequent build-up in hype and publicity. So, is it all justified? Originally funded through a Kickstarter campaign and slated for release earlier in 2014, it has now finally appeared, and is drawing attention. Being placed in all the right sales …
I've had excellent results with a Duplicator 4S, which is basically a £700 clone of the Makerbot Replicator Dual. This will print ABS, which is "strong enough", as well as PLA. I've printed functional stuff like replacement curtain track clips with it, as well as prettier stuff like these Raspberry Pi cases & stuff, here.
Can't imagine I'd have been much happier if I'd spent 4x more on a machine.
"Can't imagine I'd have been much happier if I'd spent 4x more on a machine."
Indeed - the better-known "brands" of 3D printers today are at least as obscenely overpriced as certain top-level smartphones (compared to what it actually costs to make them, as easily evidenced by lesser known clones which all do pretty much the same thing - perhaps sans a few frills - but can be had for no more than 500$: yes, that's dollars).
The other thing I have issues with are all those "huge improvements": aside of adding more and more heads for more colours or materials, the last five years have seen precisely zero improvements in either capabilities or precision of the mainstream 3D printing technology - it's pretty much as good now as it can ever hope to get, unless some radically different materials or process get embraced instead of the current one...
I'm not sure they will ever be ready for the (home) mainstream - the 3D printing technology can be perfected, but the fundamental restriction in home use is that spare parts or duplicates are very occasional needs, and for anything original, preparing a design pattern requires creativity and technical skill, as well as some application.
Most of us couldn't be arsed to work out and remember how to program a VCR - can you see this same market sitting over AutoCAD Home 3D to produce a unique, well, anything? Anybody who's done any (pencil) technical drawing knows that software only automates the dragging of a pencil, not the thinking. I suppose it's a ready market for those who want to 3D scan and print some more Warhammer figures (you'd get your money back quickly enough on those), but that seems a bit of a niche market?
"Well, anything over zero has to be huger, right?"
Starting point won't matter, will it? With my stem cell 3D printer I will be able to do all manner of cool stuff, like a 12"er with two bell ends (haven't considered whether these would be mounted in series of parallel, but it'll be nice to have the choice). Obviously I'd I either need a "direct to meat" 3D printer, or a surgo-bot to attach it and get it all working, but with the pace of technology I'm sure that will be along anytime soon.
SLS is the way to go frankly. The materials used are simply a question of laser power - if you're wanting to print plastic a lower power model will do you fine, if you want to move to metals you just need to upgrade the laser. You end up with effectively a sponge - if you're happy you can dip the object in an epoxy and away you go.
There are projects around but there's a question of size/cost but these will inevitably come down.
The school I work for have bought a Cube3D. It cost about £800, and it "just works". The kids (5-13) knock up some objects in Google Sketchup, we export them to STL, then plug them through the printer software (which adds a raft to the bottom so you don't break the item removing it, and cleans up the internals so you don't waste plastic, and puts "spur" supports on anything that's overhanging) and out it comes.
The problem, as always, is what are you going to use it for? It's the same problem as having a £1000 injection moulding press in the design department... sure, you can make some cheap plastic things with it but quite what are you going to do with them? In schools, the kids can print out models, even print parts for their drone aircraft club to make them look cool, and it all looks very impressive. Hell, I have a 3D-printed nameplate on my desk.
But when you get into the list of single-colour, cheap plastic items that you might want to spend 2 hours printing out (not counting design time, mistakes, etc.), it's quite a short list.
The items aren't flimsy, but you couldn't step on them.
The items aren't rubbish, but you wouldn't want to ship them as part of an expensive board game.
The items aren't "expensive", but you wouldn't want to sell them in a £1 Christmas cracker.
Unfortunately, it requires people to use them in order to generate the next generation of 3D printer/scanners, which can photocopy an object (near enough), which print quicker and more accurately, which can mix and match multiple colours, and which are cheap enough to print out ten goes at getting it right, or a missing hotel for your Monopoly set.
To me, that suggests we really need multi-jet printing (for multi-colour / simultaneously jetting on both sides of the object to speed it up) and in-built scanning (easily possible, but add the price of a Kinect and a moving platform to the cost of the printer) before they'll actually become mainstream. And then you have to ask yourself, quite how many Monopoly pieces am I going to lose this year.
I'd be VERY worried if I was, say, Games Workshop whose product line is basically high-detailed models that could easily be replicated "good enough" to be slathered in paint by the people who spend a fortune on them. But otherwise, I can't see much of a market at the moment.
I'd say the next market for 3D printers will be the ones where you want short-run or low quantity plastic items which would be too expensive to get injection moulded.
An example would be small Board Games producers who want custom pieces for their games (rather than just coloured wooden blocks/ discs etc) but may only be producing a couple of thousand units.
As always, this may start off as a solution in search of a problem, but almost inevitably people find uses that you would never have thought of.
I was thinking almost along the same lines, as a DM I'd love the ability to churn out an army of orcs on demand (well a few days before the game). Then there's the customisable main characters "what do you mean his main weapon is a frying pan?"
Amazing how many times the elf rogue's character was actually the halfling's model
>But when you get into the list of single-colour, cheap plastic items that you might want to spend 2 hours printing out (not counting design time, mistakes, etc.), it's quite a short list.
>The items aren't flimsy, but you couldn't step on them.
>The items aren't rubbish, but you wouldn't want to ship them as part of an expensive board game.
>The items aren't "expensive", but you wouldn't want to sell them in a £1 Christmas cracker.
All the more reason I'd be very happy with a mere 2-Axis laser cutter or router - anything capable of cutting through 12mm plywood would allow a lot of very useful objects to be made easily. The 2D drafting aspect is easy to pick up, and would hold anyone in good stead for moving on to 3D modelling.
>I'd be VERY worried if I was, say, Games Workshop whose product line is basically high-detailed models that could easily be replicated "good enough" to be slathered in paint by the people who spend a fortune on them.
If I was Games Workshop, I'd be investigating the use of Augmented Reality - think a Kinect and a projector aimed down at the gaming area - and physical models that the system can recognise and track (opportunity for official models with DRM?). Example- a player places their hand on a game piece, and a green circle is projected to show how far that piece can be moved in that turn. Various visual effects are projected during 'combat'.
What Games Workshop add is their 'universe' and associated mythology, so they could survive perhaps though video-game licensing.
"If I was Games Workshop..."
...I'd be investigating the prospect of printing some more nerdy customers to buy my overpriced plastic trinkets? Or offering the patterns for sale, but keeping the designers producing new designs that the "committed" have to keep forking out for.
When you think about it, Games Wankshop are in the same place as physical music retailers were fifteen years or so ago. They don't need the distribution channel, nor even the manufacturing, the product potentially could be sold purely as printing patterns. Keep the shops but instead of selling stock just have a 3D printer for those not willing to make the investment, and with a primary function as nerd meeting chambers to keep the Warhammer brand alive (or perhaps undead).
GW plan to solve the problem by investing heavily in lawyers.
But you are exactly right, this is just like digital distribution of music. The "current" manufacturers will insist they need to continue to charge the prices they do because its necessary to support the infrastructure and to create the super-stars. Whereas the truth is we do not need the infrastructure and the "super-stars" are merely a function of the restricted environment.
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I bought a 3D printer a few years ago.
Bit of a waste, for exactly the reasons stated here. It 'just worked' & the only thing it needed was a bit of a tweak to the hotbed - some blue tape was crap, upgraded it to Veroboard and it grips stronger than the model.
But what do you make with it? The dimensionality of it isn't big enough for big parts, which would take hours and hours, & small stuff has a pretty good finish, but you'd be hard pressed to do a really nice Warhammer figure, so you are left with the middle - stuff over 3 to 4cm and below 15cm, & that's a pretty small region.
If it was possible to do friction fit parts, you could do some impressive stuff, but as far as I know none of these can.
Strength though? Non-issue. You use ABS and flood full with cheap cyanoacrylate (superglue) at ten tubes for a £. It becomes almost unbreakable.
It mostly stands idle though. Haven't printed anything this year bar, obviously, parts for other 3D printers!
(Can you ever actually edit a post on ElReg? Or is it just not possible on mobile? )
We're getting there.
I'd like to see one that can use that two part metal glue without self destructing. I used that to fix and strengthen one of those paper-metal bog handles you get these days and it takes one hell of a pounding and still works. It was that or redesign the whole bathroom...
This is one reason that makes me think that anyone who makes a viable 3D printer will be bought out and silenced - half the world sells self destructing shit and disruptive technology is not allowed anymore...
>I'd like to see one that can use that two part metal glue without self destructing.
Why? Just print a 'female' mould, spray it with silicone mould-release agent, and use the mould to shape your epoxy resin into your desired shape. Or, print the shape you want and create a flexible mould from that.
Either way, you'll have the opportunity to place a metal insert (to interface with the square-section rod protruding from your cistern) into your part, which you wouldn't if your printing the end-use part.
I like your paranoid. Just like robot cars, this is too disruptive for those in power. They'll find a way to execute in public it using legal paper cuts. No last cigarette up against the wall "think of children!!! BANG".
And let us not forget the displaced manual labour currently supplying the "self destructing s**t" which is supplied by China, India and many other developing countries. Think of *their* children.
P.
Seems bloody expensive for such a tichy tiny build volume.
As I write this my Kossel delta is chuntering away by my side, all the features of this machine (except the marlin bed levelling works much better) and Im not locked into some gimmickey 'auto detect filament' almost certain con. (you should always measures filament first anyway and adjust the extrusion rate to get good prints)
half the price and a build volume of 250*250*300 in PLA, ABS, Bridge Nylon, Ninjaflex, & Polycarbonate with an option to use PVA support
(not to mention the awesome satisfaction of seeing a machine thrown together from bits scavenged from the net and assembles with these two hands leap into life and work perfectly)
interesting article tho :-)
Came across the iBox printer today (http://www.iboxprinters.com/ibox-nano-1/) which also looks very interesting at only $300. UV resin based rather than extrusion which seems to give build results on their product page, I don't know how the strength of plastics compare and the ibox has limitted build area.
The iBox Nano not only has a small build area, but the resolution isn't all that good, either.
(I still backed it... We'll see if it arrives in April or is hit by the usually Kickstarter Delay)
Talking about cheap...
The Peachy Printer (sub $100) resin printer is now nearly a year late...
Another interestng printer is the Overlord 'kossel style' 3D printer.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1122205541/overlord-3d-printer-multi-color-smart-stylish
This one even has a backup battery built-in.
The name should be perfect for most TheRegister readers...
It's even available in 'Black Devil' colour scheme...
(Still 8 days left of the KS)
Done it already, but with a 400 quid printrbot simple metal. I don't have the optional heated bed yet (crap xmas post), so ABS bends like a banana but I've ran about 7 to 20kg of pla though it depending on if you ask my wife or not and I am waiting for my heated bed plate to arrive, along with a axis expansion kit to push the build volume up.
What do I use it for? well first my house, office, workshop etc are covered with plastic printed parts, everything is on hooks in here including my leather jacket, I have wall mounted 3 16" hanspree monitors on a home printed vesa mount, one wall is dedicated to a spool feeding system so I want a different colour its already sat there on bearings threaded to all but the last bit so changing colour is what 15 seconds work. I got a AR drone for chrimbo and already printed off the hanging hook for it from thingiverse, along with a gimble for underneath it to carry a small payload (though it flys like a whale with more than 300kg on it), my son's heli is on a special heli bracket, speaker brackets for my pc sounds system etc ec.
Domestically we've ran the usual 3d trinkets off for the kids, mlp's, olaf from frozen, some nintendo stars for the top of the xmas tree's etc, and I scored brownie points when I modeled the broken washing machine knob, which is part of an assembly costing 120 quid + vat and only available as a unit, and the replacement is working great 3 months later thanks mr washing machine manufacturer but no thanks. I also used it when putting up some of those plasterboard wall plugs to hang a picture, and something went wrong and it tore out, you know the result, big oversize hole in ruined plasterboard wall. Take plug to printer, model in cad, print off 110% size version, screw into oversize hole, day saved without having to get involved with jamming plaster into the hole or other major eyesores!
Also I do some rc modelling with my kids, and we have rebuilt some vintage tamiya rc cars, with home printed wheels, chassis repairs etc. Its fun to have a bash round then when the oops moment as you stove a 25 year old embrittled plastic car into a wall is followed by a measure up with some calipers and a sketch of the piece in cad, wazz it out as a stl and print it, and be back out in a hour with stuff that doesnt break as easily as the fragile original, and more importantly my kids are learning they can make stuff, not just be consumers.
Then we get to the real reason I wanted one, I metal work (build cars and bikes) in a serious way as my real hobby, I have a lathe, mill, cnc mill project, wire edm etc. All full sized industrial stuff. I print off plastic pieces for the machines, and also I run a part off on the printer to get a quick prototype, eg before wiring it out of hard material on the edm, because the real machines cost real money to run whereas a couple of pence on pla as a quick test is painless. I also do a spot of metal casting, and now I print off mould parts for greensand casting of parts. Then dotted round my workshop, all the tooling and other holders are all done in PLA, ran off the little printrbot.
Now friends are noticing the output, and theyre asking me to make limited runs of parts, I get them to give me the original, model it up and give them the first one off the 'bot free. But I have ordered for repeats by owners clubs having seen my free one, and meanwhile I'm building up a cad library of hard to find vintage car and bike parts should I ever knock IT on the head (and I'm getting ready to do a logans run, being over 40), but I'm waiting until I can sucessfully do ABS before getting too far ahead with that side of things.
Its not for everyone, and the printrbot is a tinkerers special, you have to keep tweaking it, replace the build surface when it gets spaffed up trying to lever the parts off afterwards (cold, hot its still a fight on some parts, I use masking tape and hairspray for adherance) and every so often it goes out of calibration as it wears. But, I'm used to dealing with machines already so its easy for me to tinker when it starts feeling or sounding "different". Consumer ready? god no, I'd hate to see grandma trying to deal with the z going out slightly and it refusing to adhere to the bedplate and having to reset the sensor heights to the bedplate. And the idea of something covered up hiding its innards away just sounds like a recipe for disaster when something does go wrong, which it will.
Software, I use the same toolchain as for all my machines, but stuff the stl file into Repetier Host running under linux (mono), and slice it with Cura. It just works but I have played round with various parameters and got a feel for how each material and colour etc likes to be set, and source plastic varies by supplier too. Theres a raspberry Pi "print server" that you can use instead of a pc being on, but the Pi's are so crap I'd not trust it to have not corrupted its sd card by the time a long print had happened. You can print from sd card too, or theres some lcd controller on the printer itself as a upgrade, but I just leave my office linux box on with it attached permanently.
Oh and I do a lot of big prints, but I just leave it running overnight and wake up and go in the office and its done waiting for me. Once the first layer has adhered, mostly things will be fine.
One last tip, you can print multi colour on a single colour printer, you can put a pause in at a layer, and swap the colour, and only draw the features you want in that colour in a certain layer range. Its not true colour, but its good enough for name plates, keyrings, birthday badges for the kids etc etc.
I'm also thinking of upgrading my printer to 4 nozzle configuration with a kraken hot end though I am mightily tempted by the latest new printrbot metal printer with its two column design which eliminates the sag on the print arm my model suffers from slightly...
If, your a general hacker/tinkerer type, the printrbot is a great little printer, not quite the full blown stand in the field thrashing yourself for months before using experience of a reprap or similar, but a good plug in and go then tinker away when you have time. I like linux, I like machines, I don't want a Up or a Robox to hide it all away from me.
couple of things...
you might want to rethink your filament delivery system with abs... it's a bastard for absorbing water from the air and it spits and farts when you print, if it's not on the printer you need to keep it in a ziplock bag with some dessicant.
and for the next machine... get the bits for a delta. I wouldn't recommend it to a schoolkid or a granny, but with all the other stuff you do you'll find it a doddle. And it's a much better behaved system, none of that cobblers with linear bearings and rods that flex and wildly differing masses on each axis.
plus watching it work is better than telly!
This is merely the first wave of 3d fabricators that started to appear when several patents expired about the time the iPhone appeared. Many more are soon to expire and detail will increase hugely when the resin and powder printing machines come out of the litigation grey-area. Having said that, the main bottle-neck is model generation and google's Project Tango MIGHT lead to a 3D scanner in everyone's pocket, so people might see the value in having a printer for that fancy 3D photo/sculpture that exists in their phone. When we get to a society where all our needs are met and all we do all day is add to "culture" then the creative everyone will love this stuff.
Lowering the barrier to getting kids feeling like they can actually make stuff of their own is pretty powerful stuff, but I have to say, a decent laser cutter is probably a better way to go - material is structurally tough and it's your design that can make it weak, rather than the limitations of the machine. Plus it's a heck of a lot faster to use (almost always fewer that 20 minutes). About 10x the price though. I'm about to do some pewter casting into laser cut wood molds with my high school students, which is pretty exciting for them - mmm molten metal.
Literally plotting getting a laser cutter as I sit here. The 3D printer is good for playing at stuff, but a laser cutter? That's a hundred times faster, & scales directly from plywood and acrylic to mild and stainless steel, & production runs from a single or maybe ten off items up to thousands, on demand.
So if anyone wants to donate one to a hackspace (fizzPOP: The Birmingham Makerspace) in exchange for mega kudos... Please get in touch!
I have been looking at lasers too to complement the other stuff, butyou are into the 500 quid range for just the laser module itself and 3w before they are capable of cutting anything but very thin materials, and even then you are not going to be cutting any substantial sections with one (read anything above about 5mm plate). I have a cunning plan to mount it on the edm and run the control in dry run mode but with the laser active as the code generated would be the same motions if I put the cam processor in 2d mode only.
Most of the people I know who have the 2.5w chinese units expecting them to cut sheet metal have been very disappointed in their performance and ended up using them as engraver/etchers and similar. If you have the power in your mains supply a waterjet seems a good option too but I'm limited to a 30amp 3phase supply so its out for me. If you know different on the lasers from actual experience and have a supplier, I'm all ears.
However that aside, laser and waterjet have the same problem as my edm or the cnc mill, its dangerous to operate when done wrong and not something I'd be comfortable handing to my kids to let them get on with it. The 3d printer may be slow, but its pretty hard to hurt yourself worse than a tiny burn on your finger when you touch the hot end by accident.
The resin hardening and powder stuff looks interesting, but you can get smoothing compounds now (XTC-3d to name one) to improve appearance and reduce striations. When I've printed ninjaflex parts, they are porus, but I haven't tried to seal them up with rubber solution or similar but I consider that a limit of my printer's technology.
ABS & PLA rut to about 15 quid a kilo, which i think at 1.75mm dia is 300+ meters or so. A phone case would take a couple or three meters. which at fourpence-ha'penny a meter comes to... two bob?
'Bridge' Nylon is about 50 quid a kilo, ninjaflex (bendy!) about the same, polycarbonate about 30 a kilo
The machine runs off the equivalent of a bog standard PC power supply, so not much in the way of leccy.
You do/can get a fairly high failure rate while you learn the wrinkles of the system.
You can of course make your own filament from granules and that's a lot cheaper, and the kit is nothing special.
don't know about powders and resins, but I have heard the they can run dear
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