Re: Acquiring a 3D Printer?
 

Confession: We got a free license with the lottery M2. My initial reaction was "Bah! I know how to use slic3r, this paid stuff can't be that good." Boy was that silly. Luckily the license coupon was still good a couple months later and suddenly my prints were much better and more useful.

Re: Acquiring a 3D Printer?
 

How's that printer working out for you? My team was in talks of buying it for a while but that $4500 price tag was a bit hard to swallow.

Re: Acquiring a 3D Printer?
 

It's awesome. We've turned out a few parts but we've got an FTC team we're sharing our space with that is turning out parts left and right on it.

The worst issue we've seen is that it can jam when printing at full speed on parts that have high fill levels but the fix is easy enough... just slow down the print speed.... which S3D makes super simple.

The support is amazing when we've needed it. We've got an early one so we needed a new extruder and they shipped it out next day and gave us help with installing it and then doing some firmware tweaking/updating.

So far, very impressed with the company.

Also, if you're a non-profit then they'll cut you a bit of a break via tax.

Re: Acquiring a 3D Printer?
 

Isn't FRC about engineering? So why buy a printer when you can design and build one? Our team did this over the summer and fall. The goal was to run the CAD team through the design process. This was quite the under taking and I'm not sure everything sank into the students brains. Their CAD skills are very improved. We settled on a cantilevered design based on Openbuilds Parts. Plates and other parts were cut on a cnc router. We are getting good at going from solid works to cutting fast. The printer is mostly done and the CAD needs to be cleaned up. At this point WE have < $500.00 into it. We have a printer now with a 12" x 8" x 12" build volume. I'm going to start pushing the students in November to write everything up into a package to post on Openbuilds. This was not an easy project, but learning experience for the student was excellent. Oh, some of the discussions were priceless.

Re: Acquiring a 3D Printer?
 

Our team uses the Applied Tech departments' 2 Athenas, they are RepRap 3D printers with tons of online resources on how to use. Also not only can they 3D print but our next project with them is to get them to do circuitry and laser cutting! They usually only cost ~$500. Alternatively the DeltaGo is a good printer too, same size as the Athena and same cost.