The award for the coolest new thing I saw at MRRF this weekend goes to the Kitten 3D printer. It’s aptly named, this tiny tantillus-like printer is so cute, and was getting great results (especially considering the fact that it uses printed PLA linear bearings for X/Y). For scale, those are NEMA14 motors and 15mm aluminum extrusions. Print area is about a 100mm cube. Another interesting feature is that they were able to over-drive the motors a bit by putting thermal pads on them to allow them to use the aluminum frame as a heatsink.
I hope they start printing the parts out of something other than PLA. It’s pretty cold around here, but those PLA motor mounts definitely won’t survive in a warmer climate.
I agree that those printers were very sharp looking. But while I am sure they were priced fairly, for what they were asking you could get two PrinterBots or a nice larger printer.
@John-Paul_Hopman Yeah, the price did seem high, but none of the printers you mentioned will give you the print quality these guys were getting. Honestly, I’m more interested in getting one of the Z plates from them and self-sourcing everything else. An option for a kit where you print your own RP parts and bring your own controller would be really popular, I think.
@Whosa_whatsis I did like how they were planning on individual parts kits too for a more diy option.
I will admit to not paying attention to the overall detail and quality of the resulting prints. Was distracted by how clean the lines of the printer were.
Couldn’t agree more. All three of the printers looked wonderful and the prints coming off it were great. Very compact design, and the fact that he kept the wiring so clean made me more mad than anything
I can’t get my wiring looking that clean in the printer multiple times its size
The embedded hall effect sensors were a really nice touch. Some really elegant design choices were made. I love the tantillus and this is very much a rebirth of that. @Nick_Winters had a very nice mini corexy direct drive right next to the kitten folks, if nick was printing 30mm/sec .12 like the kitten I’m sure the print quality would have been similar
I’d put the Printrbot Play up against any fdm printer, bar none, on detail, finish quality, and overall finish quality. The prints my customer service guys have put out on it the last few weeks have blown me away. Carl prints at .02mm layer height on a simple. I’m not that patient, but every printer manufacturer out there has no excuse not to do a fantastic job of at least .1mm layer height, these days.
I love the looks of these printers and applaud any open source company catering to builders! Price is hard to scale at $400 or below, and do a good job. The play has thin margins that a start up can’t achieve w/o huge pre sales or investment. I’m happy to see that the small size has really become appealing… As has the extra large. But achieving either with a low price will be the bar companies have to get over for wide adoption.
We should have a contest/prize for the smallest and biggest RepRap design with the best final result taking into consideration: size, build cost (materials), build time/complexity, weight, print time for parts to make, beauty (design, wiring, etc) and resulting print speed and quality. An independent Make magazine style panel of judges from the community! Identical standard sanctioned parts might be cool, like the robot competitions or race car circuits to even the playing field. There are such talented people out there not attached to a company! The prize should be a production run of kits with a set margin all going to the winning team.
I’ve wondered why RepRap doesn’t sponsor / endorse their own competition for goals like this. It could bring unknown designs out of the woodwork and shed ew light on RepRap.
@Brad_Hill They were printing closer to 45mm/2 (30mm/s with a feed rate multiplier) when I talked to them, but you’re right, even that was pretty slow.
@Nick_Winters had a great machine too, and his was probably more practical, but it didn’t have the polish of the kitten.
For those interested: https://github.com/woolfepr/Printer-Kitten
It isn’t currently up to date though, they plan on updating it with the April 1st release date of their kits afaik.
@Liam_Jackson yeah, I’ve always hated when bots use an extra belt (requiring a small, closed loop) or gears for that purpose instead of doing something like this. I did tell them that, from my experience, it’s better to use a bare bearing as an idler rather than adding rims by putting a printed cover over it. If the geometry of the cover isn’t perfect it will have a (usually small) negative effect on print quality. It’s easy for a layer transition seam to make one of those eccentric.
I looked at the excel spreadsheet from that website for the part. Some of it is not at the current price for some of those parts. There is a lot of parts that can bought from China if you can wait three weeks to get the parts. Band good dot com. My question is that that vendor does have new RAMPS 1.4 Controller 2560 R3 Control Board A4988 Driver Kit For 3D Printer. Can this be used?
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I’ve always used the belt method they use going back to 2011. It used to save on belt cost but that’s not really the case at volume anymore. I use it for space savings. You can even save a little more if you use a Z pasty for the belt- one motor with a pulley and one roller bearing. It offsets the belt onto two planes and looks asymmetrical but you still can get maximum purchase on the pulley.
