Research and Development in Self-Replicating Open-Source 3D Printing
We have been experimenting with 3D printed Ravigneaux epicyclic gears to get a high-reduction-ratio gearbox in a compact space for making robots. They work if you drive them with a high-torque from an already geared-down motor, but they suffer from
A while ago Naomi Wu 机械妖姬 very kindly sent us one of Creality‘s infinite-Z belt printers. Lots of people have printed long I beams on this type of machine, but we thought that we’d write a Python FreeCAD program to
For an introduction, all the documentation on this project, and to read what we did up to this point see our Github repository here. After a year-and-a-half gap (caused, inter alia, by the Covid pandemic) we have come back to
This is a project to create a painting robot. But this is a tricky thing to do, so we will do it in stages hoping that each stage on its own will be useful. Background A while ago any half-decent
In our previous blog post on this topic we finished with a joystick design that had two degrees of freedom: rotation about the X and Y axes. We have now added rotation about Z to that to create a device
A Project to create open-source 3D printed 6 DoF input devices Following a discussion on Twitter the general consensus was that a 3D-printed open-source spacemouse that anyone could make would be a good idea. These are used for input to
The idea for this work and this blog post came from Youtuber Skyentific. So hat-tip to him, and do take a look at his channel. Ravigneaux epicyclic gears are a compact way to make a gearbox with a large
It’s often the case that you need to 3D-print objects that must slot together, like the grey and red parts slotting into the white central hub in the picture above. (It’s a design for a 3D-printed BLDC motor that we’re
RepRap is the technology on which Josef Průša built his company, Prusa Research. A while ago, in recognition of this, he very kindly gave Adrian a Prusa SL1 – one of his open-source stereolithography machines – and we have been
RepRap (and other) FFF 3D printers have had heated beds to ensure prints don’t peel off for a long time. I think they were invented by Chris Palmer (Nophead) in 2010. They have also had magnetic beds to hold