Printrbot has Arrived

Printrbot in the Box
The Dayton Diode membership pooled our resources to help fund the Printrbot Kickstarter. The magnitude of the response to that Kickstarter was pretty amazing (and I think unexpected by the Printrbot folks). It took them a while to scale up to meet that demand, but we've finally received our Printrbot kit!
The exciting thing to me about this printer is the quality of parts that are achievable with these pretty inexpensive devices (the big unknown to me right now is how much calibration and tuning is required to get to that level). I was really impressed with the quality of the RepRapp'd parts that Rockett got for his Prusa Mendel printer. These Printrbot parts are at a similar level. Just for fun and out of my idle curiosity, a while back I requested a sample part from Stratasys, and these parts seem to be of equivalent quality as far as I can tell with my Mk-I eye-ball.
Printrbot FDM Parts
Stratasys FDM Parts













Watch the mailing list and the meetup for a build event announcement. We'd like to get plenty of folks involved so we can do a proper job of documenting our build.
Update:
We (Joe, Rockett, Dan and I) got the first plastic squeezed at an open house. It's supposed to be a 20mm cube. Our x-axis is slipping. One of the optional steps I skipped was 'flatting' the shafts on our stepper motors to give the set screws a better interface: do it! NOT OPTIONAL.
By at

7 comments:

  1. Joshua StultsSaturday, June 30, 2012 at 5:47:00 PM EDT

    Joe and I got through build video's 1-8 this afternoon. I didn't have any kapton tape for the thermistor; we also need a 6x6 inch piece of glass to finish up the build platform.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Joshua StultsSaturday, August 11, 2012 at 4:55:00 PM EDT

    Got through build videos 8-14; missing a piece needed to finish; most likely will order custom print from fabbr.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. Joshua StultsWednesday, August 15, 2012 at 12:13:00 PM EDT

    Got missing parts from fabbr; missing two 6-32 nuts! We only had metric in the space...

    Just about ready to load software and start calibrating.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Joshua StultsSunday, August 19, 2012 at 3:49:00 PM EDT

    All the nuts and bolts are done; ready to hook up the electronics and load software.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Joshua StultsSaturday, September 1, 2012 at 12:51:00 PM EDT

    Software (linux, I'm using Fedora)
    Printrbot Getting Started Guide
    STL to Gcode: Slic3r
    Printrun: pronterface, pronsole, printcore

    Install for dependencies:
    yum install pyserial wxPython pyglet

    Using Slic3r with Printrun:
    How can I integrae Slic3r with Printrun?

    Slic3r settings:
    150x150mm bed size
    0.5mm nozzle diameter
    3mm filament diameter
    210 C extrusion temperature
    70 C bed temperature
    195 mm/s travel speed
    0.35 bottom layer speed ratio
    80 mm/s infill
    70 mm/s solid infill
    50 mms/s top solid infill
    2 skirt loops

    ReplyDelete
  6. Joshua StultsSaturday, September 22, 2012 at 8:12:00 PM EDT

    "You have very good copy protection... you wrote it in Perl." -- Josef Prusa

    RepRap Interview w/Slic3r dev Sound

    ReplyDelete
  7. Joshua StultsSunday, October 21, 2012 at 12:41:00 PM EDT

    On our first print / calibration attempt we found the bed is not very parallel with the x/y axes. Here's a good fix: using small pieces of flexible tubing as adjustable shims for the print bed.

    ReplyDelete

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