pic: Team 3824 Robot
 

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Tell me more about this 3D printed chassis?

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The chassis is made on a large scale 3D printer. Instead of an 8"x8" build platform like common printers, this one has a 8'x8' build platform. The extruded beads and layer thicknesses are much larger and thus much larger parts can be made in reasonable time. All the black components on the robot are carbon fiber infused ABS and all the white components are glass fiber infused ABS.

Re: pic: Team 3824 Robot
 

Made with BAAM (Big Area Additive Manufacturing). Look up the Strati and printed Cobra. See links below. HVA works in Oak Ridge National Labs Manufacturing Demonstration Facility. Before they printed the Strati, they used HVA as a test case. Their 2014 FRC robot was the first system printed on BAAM. It gave Local Motors, now one of their sponsors, confidence that BAAM (developed by ORNL) could print a car. It takes about 2 hours to print their robot. They built 4 robots this year

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HXvIMRklWiM

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=daioWlkH7ZI

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On the printed Cobra... It took 6 weeks to go from saying we wanted to print a new car to having it on the road. Wonder where "6 weeks" came from???

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That looks perty epic!

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I mean, cars are easy in 6 weeks. All they have to do is move; they don't have to shoot frisbees or place things or get driver practice. :P
It's cool how much they accomplished though, with the testing and methods.

That is a really cool 3D printer/ method of making the chassis. What kind of materials can they do? How long did it take to print the robot?

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The printer runs at between 10 and 40 lbs per hour. The majority of the robot is printed. It has about 25 lbs worth of printed parts (chassis, forklift, truss...) so under 2 hrs. The material we used is glass and carbon fiber filler ABS. BAAM uses pellets as the feedstock so it's cheap ($2 to $5 per pound). So the total cost for their printed parts on the robot was. $100. We are putting together a much larger printer, 8'x20x6' with a new extruder that runs at 100 lbs/hr. We are going to try to print HVA a new pit for Championship

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Here is a picture of the 3D printed Shelby Cobra, for those that did not watch the video.



Our robot did not get a nice paint job like that :rolleyes:
But it is still inspiring for the kids to look at that car, and their robot, and know they were both produced with the same technology. Some of the people that worked on that car are alumni of Team 3824, which is also quite inspirational to the kids on the team right now.

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So overall costs were below $100??
:eek: Why is everyone not doing this? Does anyone know where I can find a list of materials the company they used is proficient in 3D-Printing?

Very impressive use of additive manufacturing.

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Is the carbon fiber integrated as continuous fibers or as a "chopped" additive?

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There's a company that either makes or stores those pellets in columbia. I need to get me one of these large scale printers.

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where do you get/make of of these large scale printers?

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The technology is called BAAM (Big Area Additive Manufacturing). It's being commercialized by Cincinnati Inc. A few service bureaus are considering buying them. It's a fast and cheap way to make large composite parts.

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I'm guessing that these large scale printers will be well beyond the price range of most (all?) FRC teams. In addition, roHAWKtics has on-site technical support for when things inevitably stop working on this brand new piece of technology. I think it will be a while before a significant number of teams can print large parts of their robot at this quality level.

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Yea I was assuming you can't just go out and buy this printer ourselves.

How much does the chassis weigh compared to if you made it out of metal? Or is that something that you can't fully calculate?

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Somebody somewhere said that the company wants to commercialize them soon, but I'd guess they will cost well over $100K, so out of the reach of all but the richest teams, or those with a sponsor interested in the machine for whatever reason.

As for weight, I can't speak for the team but I'd guess it would be very lightweight, probably even lighter than our laser-cut plywood bot (which was 105 w/ electronics and mechanisms).

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Challenge accepted.

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I should say it could be lighter, if they wanted. It would make more sense to use a little more weight than required for extra robustness. I would think they could technically get away with an almost skeletal frame, whereas with our wood we need boxes.

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Coming from a close-by team, I cannot speak with certainty of their bot's weight, but their head mentor said at SMR it weighed roughly 117lbs (with everything); In addition my team had bin arms printed out of the stuff, and both arms (which were 100% solid) weighed under a pound :D .

The key to this material is not just its weight, but rather the complexity and speed at which items can be built. Example being our bin-arm, compared to traditional techniques, printing in the carbon-fiber ABS allowed us to CAD and manufacture a precision part in under a day (without waiting, total time from concept to final product was roughly 3 hours :ahh: )

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A large 3D printer is not a terribly complex thing to build. The BOM cost for something like this could be as low as $5000. For some inspiration, look at the Part Daddy from SeeMecnc. http://3dprinteros.com/wp-content/up...Faire-2014.jpg They use aluminum t-slot extrusion for their linear rails and have an arduino controlling NEMA 34 Stepper motors for motion control. Toss in some SSR's for temperature control of the extruder and you have most of the parts.