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Which 3D Printer should you buy?

If you were to ask me today “Hey Pete, what 3D Printer should I get?” and you didn’t really provide me any more info on what you want to print, or what your budget is, I’d rattle off a bunch of my own 2 cents, or maybe even 4 cents. So that’s what I did below.

Consider this my opinion as of February 2014. Oh, I should also note that if you really want a ton more info, maybe too much info, check out what my pals at Make did with their Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing 2014 Edition. (Note: You might even see me on page 17.)

Printrbot

Printrbot – printrbot.com
Printrbot grew from a (very) successful Kickstarter campaign, and the original goal was to get more 3D Printers out into the world, and they’ve definitely done that. Their offerings include kits and fully assembled printers, ranging from a few hundred dollars up to about $1,000. The Printrbot machines have been made with laser-cut wood, but they’ve just announced a new printer with a metal frame, which should help improve quality a bit. The default print volume of the Printrbot machines isn’t too big, but if you want cheap, Printrbot is an option.

Deezmaker

Deezmaker – deezmaker.com
Deezmaker also grew from a Kickstarter campaign, and I’ll admit, much of my respect for Deezmaker comes from the super-smart Whosa whatsis and his involvement. If you’ve been around the 3D printing / RepRap community for the last few years, that name may mean something. Did I mention he’s super-smart? I totally trust Diego and Whosa to make high-quality printers and be awesome dudes when they do it. Prices range from $800 to $1,500, a bit more than Printrbot, but I think the price is warranted, as you get a better machine.

LulzBot

LulzBot – lulzbot.com
Moving on up, it’s the LulzBot folks! With the new TAZ 3 they’ve created a damn impressive printer. They’ve had impressive printers before as well, and they’ve had a program that included giving hackerspaces free/discounted printers, which is pretty cool. If you’re looking for a bit of a more established company, LulzBot (despite the name) may be a good choice. You’re now in the $2,200 price range though, and they really only have the one model, but from all I’ve heard, it’s a damn nice machine.

So the three companies mentioned so far all have one great thing in common, they’re open source. They’ve all made a commitment to release the files and documentation needed to build your own version of their printers. Without this sort of commitment you would not see 3D Printing being where it is today. The open sharing of knowledge, tools, software, and best practices is what got us here, and that’s important to remember, because…

Oh yeah, there’s also MakerBot!

MakerBot

MakerBot – makerbot.com
MakerBot was the poster child of 3D printing when I first got into it years ago. They did a lot to bring 3D printing to the people, and then they went closed source, and got acquired by Stratasys, a company which holds a lot of patents, and while they do some amazing things in the world of 3D printing, they also threaten to slow the growth of 3D printing through lawsuits, which I’m not a fan of. If your eyes glazed over reading that last bit, a MakerBot may be right for you. To be honest, they make pretty good machines, and you might consider them the “IBM” of 3D Printers. If you need one for work and you want support and a company to call/blame/etc. MakerBot might be right. You’ll probably spend $2,200 or more, though they did just announce a “mini” at $1,400.

So there ya go, my recommendation for buying a 3D Printer as of February 2014. Now, if you want to build a 3D Printer, that’s an entirely different story!

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Hand to Hand

Cyborg Beast

About eight months ago I mentioned the Robohand project, and said that 3D printers could change the world for the better, and not just be a way for people to make guns.

The future is now! No, really, it is! It’s February 2014, and through a series of events involving the group E-Nable (also see Google+ and Facebook) I had a small part to play in helping a Milwaukee-area girl get a prosthetic hand.

Nick from E-Nable contacted me because I’m a “3D printing guy” in Milwaukee, and asked for my help. I ended up asking everyone at Milwaukee Makerspace, and while many members jumped in to offer help (either with printing, or donating cash, or both) our pal Frankie Flood at UWM’s Digital Craft Research Lab took the project and ran with it. And yeah, he’s the best guy I know to take a project and run with it. The results have been amazing.

Shea

Shea just got the first version of her new hand. She met with Frankie at his studio to have a mold made of her hand, and to meet with Frankie and his colleague Adream and discuss the process. Frankie then spent a lot of time with other of the E-Nable members trading files, tweaking files, printing a lot of parts, and coming up with new ideas on how to design and assemble a prosthetic hand. It’s been amazing to watch it all unfold. You can get a taste of it by checking the out the prosthetic category on Frankie’s blog.

The next time someone asks you what you can do with a 3D printer, just casually mention that you can change someone’s life for the better.

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RepRap Report #3

MG Plus HotEnd

It’s been quite some time since the last RepRap Report. I guess 2013 was pretty smooth as far as 3D printing goes. But don’t worry, things went wrong eventually, so here’s another update.

I hit a problem with extruding, as in, filament would not extrude, which was a new thing for me. I know a lot of other people with printers, either at Milwaukee Makerspace, or through the Milwaukee 3D Printing Meetup, and I hear stories of extruder jams that require taking everything apart, torching the nozzle, soaking things in acetone, etc. I managed to go over 18 months with no issue. And then I had an issue.

Filament would not extrude. I raised the temperature, and still no luck. I moved the RepRap to a warmer room, and still no luck. It looked like the thermistor on the nozzle was a bit loose, so I reattached it. Still no luck. Finally I decided a teardown was in order. I pulled things apart, and eventually cleared out the barrel and the nozzle with some help from a torch and some acetone. I made sure I could see light through the nozzle. All good, right? I put things back together and was about to push some filament through when… the high temperature wire that was embedded in the ceramic broke off. That was the end of that!

There was pretty much no way to reattach it. I asked around online and people were like “You’re still using a MakerGear hot-end!?” And yeah, I was, because it just worked. For 18 months it worked fine. People kept telling me to get an all-metal hot-end from E3D, I didn’t feel like plunking down $75 nearly $100 USD for one, especially since I assumed it was really just a new heating element I needed.

I ended up finding the MG Plus HotEnd on Thingiverse, and just ordered the Heater Block Assembly from the ebay shop of RP One Labs for about $20. I managed to do a minimal amount of damage getting it installed but… it worked! I was extruding again! (After I had to solder together the thermistor wires I accidentally sniped. Oops!)

RAMPs

Once everything was back together in it’s proper place, I was ready to print, except that the z-axis then decided to have a mind of its own. Telling z to home made it go up. Then down. Then up. Then up and down. Hmmm. I ended up swapping the x and z axis Pololu drivers. The z axis was back to normal then. Test print. Hmmm. The x axis was missing steps, and I got the old problem of your entire print shifting to the left (or right) mid-print. A bit of Pololu pot adjusting and eventually all was good. (Come to think of it, it took a bit of adjust on the z axis driver as well. Things seem dialed in now, and I can print.)

I secured the RAMPs board down, and… wait, nope. Crazy stuff again. I thought perhaps a noise issue? Hmmm, it seems perhaps the connector that plugs the z motors into the RAMPs board is a little wiggly, so for now the RAMPs board is just hanging there. Sigh… I’ll fix that connector. Eventually.

The important thing is, I can print again. One of the reasons I leaned towards building my own printer was that I figured I would be familiar enough with the machine that I could easily repair it when the time came. That’s seemed to prove true so far.

I’ve spent the weekend calibrating things again. I’m still using Slic3r and Pronterface. I know there are lots of other (and newer) options out there, and I should explore them a bit, but for now, there are things to print!

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Tank’d

Tankless Water Heater

The previous owners of our house did a number of “upgrades” over the years, and one of them was to install a tankless water heater. If you’re not familiar with tankless heaters, it’s basically a water heater that doesn’t keep hot water sitting around, but heats it on demand. The idea makes sense, I mean, why keep 40 gallons of water hot all the time when you don’t need it all the time?

Tankless heaters also have the advantage of not running out of hot water. In theory, you can take a shower for 6 hours and never run out of hot water! After your 6 hour shower, you can run the dishwater and do some laundry. Nice! There may be some concerns about how much hot water a tankless heater can deliver at the same time, so taking a shower while washing the dishes and doing laundry may result in warm water rather than hot water if the system can’t keep up.

Well, we managed to get eight months of usage from the tankless water heater. We moved in back in June, it was warm, and sunny, and all was good with the world. Then came winter. It was cold, and bleak, and everything sucked.

I woke up one morning, and turned on the shower so the water could warm up (oh yes, it typically takes a bit longer to get hot water from the faucet from the tankless. At least in the winter months) and it was nothing but cold cold cold water. I went to the basement to see what was up, thinking perhaps the circuit the heater was on had tripped, and I was greeted by water pouring out of every orifice of the tankless water heater. Fun! I was now standing in freezing cold water trying to solve the problem. Luckily all the water was going right down the basement drain, and not really flooding the basement. Score!

It seems that it got so cold (and yeah, this is the coldest Wisconsin winter on record for quite some time) that the water in the tiny tubes of the tankless water heater froze, and the the tiny tubes cracked, and then the water came out.

So I learned a few things:

  1. Tankless water heaters don’t work when the power is out. No power equals no hot water. None. At. All.
  2. Supposedly we could have prevented this if we had left the hot water running all night. Yes. Seriously, that was the advice of a plumber. If it’s cold, leave the hot water running.
  3. Don’t mount your tankless water heater on an uninsulated exterior wall. If the heater had been located somewhere else, or there had been more insulation between it and the concrete wall, it may not have froze.
  4. Home warranties are sometimes useless. Wasn’t covered, so we were on the hook for repair/replacement.
  5. Having more than one heating vent in the basement might be useful. I know the basement is mainly storage/laundry/workshop, but the only heating vent is on the opposite side of the basement that the water heater was on. Cold!
  6. We’re not ready for tankless.

Tankless heaters might be fine for some people. The idea is a good one, but there are a few factors that can cause problems. (Obviously!)

Tankless water heaters are also expensive. Of course you may recoup the costs over X number of years. (X may be 10 years, so you’d need to still have the same tankless heater for 10 years. It’s a gamble.)

In the end, we decided to replace the tankless water heater with an old fashioned tank water heater. It ended up being about half the price after purchasing it, and paying a plumber and electrician to install it. We also opted for an electric heater instead of gas. I’m still not 100% sure that was the best idea, but hey, the deal is done. We now use electricity to heat our water and store it in a big-ass tank for when we need it. Hooray.

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Yak Shaving

Ignite Madison

As I recently mentioned, I will be speaking at Ignite Madison on February 12th, 2014, and since the organizers are smart people and want everything to go smoothly, they had all the presenters meet to go over their progress in preparing for the event. This is a really good idea, because it lets everyone meet each other before the event, and get a glimpse at what each person’s presentation looks like, even if they are still in-progress, and pretty much all of them were. (But hey, we still have a week!)

When it was my turn to practice, I said that I had to do quite a bit of yak shaving before I could work on my slides, and since no one was familiar with the term, I had to explain it. I basically said “It’s the work you need to do before you can do the work you need to do.” I cited one of the participants who said that before he built something, he had to build a workbench. (Obviously! Any yak shaver would agree.) As for me, before I could get my slides started I had to find an Ignite slide template, and then I had to find an Ignite Madison logo, and scale it down, and clean it up, and drop it into the template, and once that was all done I could totally start my slides.

So anyway, these best definition(s) I found for yak shaving were on the Wikitionary:

Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.
I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.
A less useful activity done to consciously or unconsciously procrastinate about a larger but more useful task.
I looked at a reference manual for my car just to answer one question, but I spent the whole afternoon with my nose buried in it, just yak shaving, and got no work done on the car itself.

So yeah… yak shaving. There’s a few interesting citations for the term as well. And even more interesting is Joi Ito’s realization that yak shaving is pretty much his job. Damn! I guess I should add “yak shaving” to the old resume, eh?

Hmmm, now where was I? Oh yes! Come hear 10 makers talk about making, and help out some kids in need. It’s a win-win-win situation! You can buy tickets to the event and all proceeds will be donated to Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Dane County.