Resources for learning 3D printer design?

mcdanlj
Wed, 14 Oct 2020 02:11:38 +0000
3D Printing

Please help me put together a resource list.

I have a friend who has done some electronics in the past, some years ago, but doesn’t have recent experience, and is interested in learning practically at a hobbyist level about microcontrollers, mechatronics, robotics, kinematics, and such, and asked me about available resources for learning more. 3D printing seems like the most accessible “gateway drug” to this area. Reasonably cheap to get started and experiment, can start with a kit and branch out, learning as you go, the sky’s the limit, and pretty soon you are shooting things with lasers. Safely, of course.

Seems like it would be great to collect resources for different ways of learning.

For published books, it seems like @Ryan_Carlyle’s 3D Printer Engineering Volume 1: Motion Platform Design would be the classic starting point. (Not to mention volumes 2 and 3 if/when Ryan publishes them)

For finding answers to specific questions, searching this forum and reprap.org are both good resources. (On the other hand, the reprap.org wiki hasn’t been a consistently useful resource for me.)

There are a few people whose blogs and other posts I’ve learned a lot from; Mark Rehorst (The_Digital_Dentist) is one who has done good engineering work—he was originally an engineer before he turned dentist, after all. I also find it enlightening to keep an eye on what he posts on reprap.org too.

I don’t watch a lot of videos (though I make a few exceptions for machining content.) I do know that there is a lot of misleading junk videos about 3D printers recommending stupid things as “improvements” from people who don’t know much more than their audience. There are lots of videos about 3D printing things, but less about the technology itself. I can list names I’ve heard of, but I don’t know who is consistently helpful. Who do you trust to have decent technical content?

Thomas Sanladerer has covered topics in making 3D printers, including some topics on designing and building your own. You kind of have to search through his prolific video output to find those though.

Richard Horn (RichRap) is cited as having videos experimenting with 3D printing, but what I see is about experimenting with techniques rather than learning about how the printers themselves work.

I can find plenty of other prolific sources of information on what you can do with a 3D printer, like Joel Telling. But coming up kind of dry on design theory and practice side.

That’s by way of priming the pump. What resources do you like for understanding concepts required for 3D printer design?

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