RepRap Morgan Receives $20,000 Gada Prize For Simplifying 3D-Printer 67
An anonymous reader writes "South African Quentin Harley has picked up the $20,000 Gada Uplift prize for making the open source RepRap 3D printer design easier to build, cheaper to construct, and — most importantly — capable of printing more of its own parts. Lots of background on Harley and his RepRap Morgan are available on his website."
A further goal of the RepRap Morgan project is to replace the Prusa Mendel as the default RepRap model. And they are on track to hit less than $100 in parts, excluding the printing bed. You can grab the hardware design and the controller firmware over at Github.
Self-replicating 3-D printers... (Score:1)
This is how SkyNet becomes self sufficient. Take me to yuah tonah. Do eet now!
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If the terminators are built of this kind of plastic then I am not afraid. all you have to do is tell your kids there is candy inside and they will be torn to shreds in seconds with no one hurt.
Seriously we are a long way from being able to do this with metal, or even circuit chips.
Heck all I want is to be able to do it with various types of rubber and silicone for gaskets, and other simple parts.
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Heck all I want is to be able to do it with various types of rubber and silicone for gaskets, and other simple parts.
You want sex toys. No sense in keeping up the charade.
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As with all revolutions of this type, it's what we haven't thought of that will be the game changer. Someone, somewhere, will make something incredible using a device like this and then we'll all look back and wonder why the hell we hadn't thought of it ourselves.
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You know.. (Score:2)
Re:You know.. (Score:4, Funny)
when machines start building parts to repair themselves fully, it will be akin to humans procreating..
What are you trying to say? That soon 35% of internet traffic will be videos of machines building parts?
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What are you trying to say? That soon 35% of internet traffic will be videos of machines building parts?
Videos of machines building machines....... Machine Porn!
Code of the Lifemaker by JP Hogan (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker [wikipedia.org]
"Code of the Lifemaker (ISBN 0-345-30549-3) is a 1983 novel by science fiction author James P. Hogan. NASA's Advance Automation for Space Missions was the direct inspiration for this novel detailing first contact between Earth explorers and the Taloids, clanking replicators who have colonized Saturn's moon Titan."
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when machines start building parts to repair themselves fully, it will be akin to humans procreating..
No... that would be regeneration... what you describe is more like the "ability" to crap out a finger or arm.
Why Not Regular Printers? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Why does it still take fucking drivers, patches, and voodoo to fucking hook up a regular printer and make it function?
Shit, I can plug in a VGA 13" or a 42" flat panel and the computer runs that just fine. Printers, I guess, are beyond the average PhD at Microsoft and Apple.
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Yeah, Microsoft and Apple* make printers... :rolleyes:
* yes I know they did in the past, but not today.
I also can't understand why it's so complicated? Isn't PCL [wikipedia.org] supposed to be standard?
We don't need drivers for keyboard, mouse and some webcams anymore, it's standardized. Why aren't printers and scanners the same way?
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Isn't PCL [wikipedia.org] supposed to be standard?
Although many printers support some variants of PCL6, it's actually a HP thing...
We don't need drivers for keyboard, mouse and some webcams anymore, it's standardized. Why aren't printers and scanners the same way?
Anytime there are new features involved, it takes a while to shake things down to a standard, sometimes that never happens. For example, you might ask why your IR remote for a TV isn't standardized yet. Fortunatly for most users many "universal" remotes have "drivers" for many of the TVs built-in to do the standard thing (e.g., channel up/down, volume), but of course any new feature can't be controlled with the universal remo
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P.S.: VGA should have died years ago. We have digital video cards and digital monitors but we're still using analog signals like it's a frickin' TV from 1960.
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P.S.: VGA should have died years ago. We have digital video cards and digital monitors but we're still using analog signals like it's a frickin' TV from 1960.
who is? unless your monitor is older than 10 years it's pretty likely you shouldn't be connecting it through vga..
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I am at work right now using VGA. Dell is selling VGA only computers right now.
I got lucky we ordered mine with dual video outputs to run two monitors. one runs from HDMI to DVI, the other is straight VGA. Talk about a complicated setup with stupid adaptors. but if say thunderbolt were standard then it wouldn't be a problem. but vendors don't like making products better only more money at the products they sell.
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Well, my graphics card has digital out, and my monitor has digital in, but I still run it with VGA. Why? Because the format of the digital out (DVI) doesn't fit with the format of the digital in (HDMI). Yes, I guess I could pay a premium for an adapter, but hey, why do so if the VGA connection works?
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What's even more ironic is that inexpensive monitors only have VGA. they would be even less expensive if they had DVI (or HDMI) since they could skip the A/D part. But they want you to buy the more expensive ones for digital inputs.
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Yeah, 'cause no thesis contributes anything to human knowledge --- here's a better guide:
http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ [might.net]
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Buy laser. Toner does not dry out, an unused ink cart does.
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Ditto. I print a fair bit more so occasionally need to buy toner, but for me the reliability and quality are the biggest things (not to mention reduced cost). The last time I owned an inkjet it seemed like anytime anybody needed to print something I got a call to help them clean the heads and such, and of course that burns through tons of ink. Printout was never optimal - 99% of the time you were printing text and it just wasn't sharp. Sure, you could print photos, if you don't mind paying 3x as much as
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You were lucky. There quite a few printers come with toner cartridges containing an e-fuse. They start counting how many pages you've printed and refuse to print more unless you change it (or fake another e-fuse destruction).
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My 20+ year old Panasonic dot matrix printer still works just fine. Never a problem printing text.
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I guess you haven't seen the Big 4 tour that was going on a couple years ago.
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Actually, my guitar gets WAY louder. I've got an amp that can pump up to about 110dB.
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I got an HP DeskJet 500 on the floor right here, ready to be taken apart for its smooth rods and stepper motors, parts that will be used to build a desktop CNC.
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Interesting. I have been reading about these, do you have some plans you are following?
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The ShapeOko is a well-documented, opensource and affordable hobby-levek CNC router:
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page [shapeoko.com]
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You can buy a Chinese made X-Y table with actual screw drive for about $200. Save your effort, belt drive is double plus ungood. Especially when combined with stepper motors and no-feedback. You 'table' will be hammering on the zeros to reset the count like an old floppy drive.
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Got a link for that? I've been considering a second smaller machine for metal-working.
Screw drive machines aren't easily expanded to 1.2m x 1.2m --- it only cost ~$60 to extend my Y-axis to 1m, and double up the MakerSlide on the X-axis --- much more solid, but admittedly, still a bit fiddly, but for the price, it meets my needs thus far.
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I got an HP DeskJet 500 on the floor right here, ready to be taken apart for its smooth rods and stepper motors, parts that will be used to build a desktop CNC.
Save your time and hear my 3 words: "The office" movie.
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Why does it still take fucking drivers, patches, and voodoo to fucking hook up a regular printer and make it function?
You don't run Linux do you... your right, it sounds like a nightmare over there in WindowLand.
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Because printer manufacturers want it to be this way. Although there's also a tone of stuff that's not standardized - e.g., computer-printer communication protocol (e.g., how is a printer supposed to announce its capabilities? Remember that the old parallel interface (emulated by USB) consists of 8 data lines and 5 return status lines. It was assumed back then that printer drivers knew every
Still a long way to go (Score:1)
I tried to put together a B.O.M. @ kitbom.com: http://kitbom.com/WillAdams/reprap-morgan [kitbom.com] and it currently prices out @ $274.26, not including the 3D printed parts and some things we've not found good sources for.
Also, free software for 3D CAD/CAM still needs a lot of work --- I've listed everything I could find here:
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/CAD [shapeoko.com]
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/CAM [shapeoko.com]
and people still over-whelmingly choose commercial software:
3D CAD 9/15 --- http://www.shapeoko.com/forum/view [shapeoko.com]
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pretty much everyone uses eitehr slic3r or skeinforge as the CAM portion of the sw for reprap/oss home 3d printing.
you might shave off 10-15 bucks by going j-head for the hot end.
also, are you missing the atmega for the electronics? you need that in addition to the shield.
btw some of the parts are available through dealextreme nowadays.. like the ramps shield, atmega, stepsticks..
Simpson (2nd place) is also very cool (Score:1)
A Delta-based printer: http://reprap.org/wiki/Simpson [reprap.org]
I'd really like to see the best of both worlds (the Simpson build instructions are quite nice, while Morgan's is a wall of text...)
Can Print its own parts? (Score:2)
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Two options:
1. Pre-emptive printing of spare parts;
2. Ask a friend to print it on his RepRap, and buy him a beer;
Woosh, right? :)
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Some parts like gears are best printed in advance, the less critical parts can be held together with tape and glue for the duration of the replacement print.
Congrats! (Score:2)
There are 3d printer projects popping up on kickstarter every day that never deliver, sites are selling power resistors for $5 ($0.7 on digikey), $100 hotends that don't work, printers that cost at most a couple hundred dollars to manufacture are sold for multiple thousands. And we thought Apple's markup was outrageous...
The reprap core team has to correct course.
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Lathes are used to make lathe parts, each stage incrementing the precision. Oh wait, it involves the internet, so patent it already.
it doesn't exactly involve the internet and it's not under patent..
the big deal that it's a ready design if you want to build a scara arm robot.
VGA (Score:1)