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== Costs ==
== Costs ==


You may describe your costs here.
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Revision as of 02:14, 26 November 2015

Sample photo caption.
Creating a cheap and easily reproducible large scale RepRap 3D printer with a parallel string-driven design.


Background

The RepRap project first showed the world cheap small scale 3D printing in 2006. Their design was intentionally not very well thought out. The idea was that a 3D printer that could print its own parts would be improved through evolution like iterations, no matter the quality of the first design. This turned out to be quite correct, as a large community quickly grew around the first few RepRap designs. RepRap users started to experiment and remix all parts of the printer, including its Cartesian coordinate system.

Understanding the market

Early non-Cartesian 3D printer designs were the Tripod-Repstrap[1](2007) and its geometrically similar successors Rostock (2012)[2] and Lisa Simpson (2013)[3][4]. Other non-carthesian RepRap designs include GUS Simpson (2013)[5], Morgan (2013)[6], Wally (2013)[7] and Feather (2013)[8].

All these printers tries to trade heavier geometrical computations for getting rid of hardware requirements or time consuming build steps. They all have frames, and there's still spare clock cycles left in their Arduino CPUs. The idea of Clerck is to skip the hard custom frame altogether and instead rely on wire-connections to already-built rigid structures, like insides of houses.

Making this work would lead to potentially enormous print volumes for prices down to ca $400. Competitors prices are:

Name Price Print volume
Big Rep ca $40,000[9] 1 m^3
Gigabot XL ca $13000[10] 0.27 m^3
X1000 ca $16000[11] 0.48 m^3

Other large scale experimental printers include the Wasp's Big Delta Printer[12] and the KamerMaker, a scaled up Cartesian design[13].

The presented competitors are very expensive and not very self reproducing, many of them are not even free design hardware. They don't satisfy the needs of for example the Open Source Ecology project, who wants to print structural plastic components like car body panels and redworm towers with OSHW tools.

Project goals

  1. Low part count
  2. Easy to print, assemble, install and distribute
  3. Huge build volume
  4. Cheap
  5. Able to print many of its own parts

Design

  • Put all the hardware (except AC/DC-converter) in one single unit.
  • Only one force vector upwards, compensated with counter weight.
  • Over-constraining allows flexible compensation of slack lines.
  • When printer is idle, one could retract all the strings. Enables elegant storage solutions. Could make it popular in big cities, where indoor area is scarce.


Costs

What Qty Total price
E3D V6 Valcano hot end 1 $150
Nema17 stepper motor 5 $60
Arduino Mega 1 $10
RAMPS 1 $5
drv8825 stepper driver 5 $10
623 bearing 10 $2
623 bearing v-groove 5 $5
608 bearing 4 $2
JY-MCU Bluetooth Transceiver RF Module 1 $6
220V AC to 12V converter (power supply) 1 $16
2.7mm Eyes Inside Dia Fishing Rod Part 9 $9
Hobbed drive gear 1 $2
Set of M3 screws, nuts and nyloc nuts 1 $5
Non-elastic fishing line (dynema) 15 m $1

Discussion

Your discussion.

Next steps

The next steps.

Conclusions

Your conclusions.

References

Contact details

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