Printing out robot parts
 

My uncle sent me this video of a company who can make durable tools with movable parts, and just about anything else, using a 3D printer. Does anyone know if this would be a good idea for making robot pieces? Just send them the CAD design and get your piece, colored and everything, within the nest day or so. It seems easy enough.

Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZboxM...layer_embedded

Enjoy!

Re: Printing out robot parts
 

2502 used some 3d printed ABS parts this past year. They were very durable but one thing to consider is 3d printing is not cheap and will very quickly make you approach your $3500 BOM limit

Re: Printing out robot parts
 

I watched that video and what I don't understand is how they make the parts like the worm screw. Obviously there are parts of the screw mechanism that cannot be scanned, how does the printer know how to make the "hidden" portions of those parts?

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it just goes one layer at a time, it's all a specific type of CAD that is sent to the printer. We used the one our school got this year and made some sensor mounts on it and some gear spacers. Since you can just about make anything we created a sensor mount that both held and protected the encoders they held. we even created our own threads in the model. these saved our lives and we made several caps (the part that protected the encoder and screwed in). considering the matches some valuable encoders could have been damaged these things became popular with those in the pit. we also were able to print out a crab pod in the pre-season that we had designed with the intent of using in the game if the game fit a crab drive.

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We print out spacers and encoder gears all the time using ABS in our lab.

There are several more teams that do this as well.

I'm waiting for this process we use at work to get cheap enough though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_...aser_sintering

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We printed out the toothed belt pulley for our lifter gearbox. It's nice to have a mentor whose company owns a uPrint. made several sizes for prototyping and they stood up to a lot of punishment

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There was a bit of TV magic involved in the process. The worm on the printed wrench is significantly changed from that of the original.

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TV magic indeed. They scanned the wrench, but then had to actually design the pieces inside. Once designed though printing is trivial (but that wrench took 2 hours to print).

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"3D Printing" is often a marketing term for many different forms of technology. Find out which specific technology you're sponsor/school/machine shop has available to you and what it's strengths, weaknesses, and associated costs are.

I've used FDM for a school project before. I'd offer tips or tricks, but I don't really have any. We were able to machine the part after printing to make adjustments that our final design called for.

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We are lucky enough to have our own uprint. This past year we took advantage of it. Maily because we wanted to take a chance on manufacturing parts as we slept. Here is a list of parts we used:
Wheels 6wd
Bearing blocks supporting the wheels
Drum for our cable lift
Bearing glides for lift mechanism
Main body for our manipulator
Couple other parts I am forgetting about.

Design, intent and part orientation are key. Not all parts should be printed but I believe that we proved we could use printed parts as vital parts.

In the end we saved machine time, weight, we all know how valuable each of these items are.

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We get our printing done by Redeye/Stratasys when we get it done (so FDM type). If I remember right this was printed with ABS for about 200 or 300 bucks (it would have been cheaper had we CADed holes in it.



We also had a scale model of our robot printed.



That is sitting on a 13" macbook for scale and it printed the gears inside the gearboxes and the fans in the RS775s

The more interesting part about the scale model is there was no "support material" used to model that as far as I am aware, it was all printed "free form" because of the viscosity of the melted plastic, so all parts that extend horizontally were printed unsupported.

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Funny, a mentor of ours sent us the exact same link yesterday. :yikes:

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Check out www.reprap.org for a 3D printer you can build yourself. Once you have built one, you can use it to print parts for another one.

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3D printing is definitely a great tool for some robot parts.

As I am the owner of Print To 3D and mentor of 222; I have donated machine time and material to them.

This past year we used several FDM parts on our robot such as:

A pulley/capturing device for surgical tubing.
Spacers
Transmission pneumatic shifting mount
Encoder mount for elevator.

In addition I also printed up an entire transmission for display as seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj6naPPiQOw

Also as previously mentioned the wrench replication video is misleading.
If you want to read up on it see here:
http://fabbaloo.com/blog/2011/7/20/3...ntroversy.html

I had to deal with lots of phone calls and emails as one of my videos is "related" to this controversial wrench video on Youtube. Some were non believers while others were amazed they didn't know this technology existed.

In addition to using 3D printed parts on our robots many FIRST related companies such as AndyMark also use printed prototypes to verify their products are ready for competition before expensive tooling is ever made.
http://printo3d.com/andymark.html

Bradley

Re: Printing out robot parts
 

Pardon the threadomancy, but I was wondering if anyone had specific recommendations on a machine for a FIRST Team who might have stumbled upon a few thousand dollars specifically for the purchase of a 3D printer...

All I really know about the technology is that it's really neat and that there are people who want to acquire one for our technology department and FIRST team, so any suggestions on technologies to acquire, brands to investigate or avoid (and why), etc would be most appreciated!

Thanks!

Patrick

Re: Printing out robot parts
 

At our school we have the personal uprint, it prints white only, but also prints a support material. You have to buy a clean station separately which dissolves the support material. The machine works very well, only problem being that the plastic adds up really fast, I think each spool is 30 cubic in, and each cubic inch is $5, and cubic inches go buy really fast. We just got it right before the summer, so hopefully this year our team can use it for some quick prototyping ( our school is making us pay for plastic, not machine time though)

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Definitely the UPrint. While there are countless machines on the market, some cheaper (however less professional, ex: the makerbot), the UPrint seems to be the most cost-effective 3d Printer for personal use on the market.
You can find it here.

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I believe we may have had some parts printed on a U-print, or a dimension, they are very high quality but I will agree it gets expensive fast. The images I added earlier were printed by Stratasys.

The makerbots do have their merits being lower cost to entry, I believe Aren hill has done some fairly extensive research on budget 3d printing for the Iowa State University robotics team.

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We printed replacement tops to our joysticks because we didn't like where the buttons were.

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Thanks, folks!

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As a 3d print service provider I have much experience with Dimension/Stratasys machines.

If the uPrint fits or uPrint Plus fits your budget then you will have a great machine on your hands especially if you need end use parts.

If you have any questions about these machines let me know. Email me direct at printo3d ( at ) printo3d ( dot ) com

Don't let the price fool you. All said and done with all the bits you are talking $19 to $24k. They should have educational discounts so don't forget to ask. Also if time isn't of essence you might want to wait until your local dealer releases a demo unit to save some money. Used units from the dealer should still include the standard new warranty.

Exactly how many thousands of dollars do you have? :D Don't forget to add dozen or so material cartridges into your initial purchase.

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I don't know how many thousands of dollars, exactly -- that's why I came here to find out how many thousands of dollars I'd need to have! :)

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If you've got time during the off season, what about a Thing O Matic. It's a DIY open source 3d printer for around 1500.

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I think that's more our speed... We'll see!

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I'm going to throw in another good word for Dimension/Stratasys Machines.

We have an SST1200 in my department at work that I use pretty regularly for parts and a BST768 at the School that we can also use for parts. (I prefer the 1200 because it's much, much faster) The school's machine was bought with grant money in 2006/2007, and was somewhere around 25k. I believe they've come down quite a bit in price.

I've found that the printer is great for making spacers and other little parts that don't see much load. I think I made something like 18 spacers for our drive last year and they came out to all of .1lbs.

We're also looking at getting a Fortus Machine at work that can print in Polycarbonate along with some high strength ABS blends. From what I've seen, the Polycarbonate is strong enough for some FRC uses. The machine starts around 80/90k or so.

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The Fortus machines are nice, but do escalate in price quickly. You have to specify a single material that it will print when it comes from the factory (ABS, ABS+, ABSi, ULTEM, PC, etc.) and then for the ability to print in each additional material its about an additional $15K/material.

Objet (http://www.objet.com/) makes some seriously cool machines. The surface finish and resolution is absolutely incredible, you need to see the parts to really appreciate it. They also allow you to print in "rubber-like" materials of varying durometers (and even blend materials to really tune the softness). I've been told New Balance uses these machines to print out entire sneakers and wear them around to get a feel for the rubber souls of the shoes. These machines are expensive as well, on par with the Fortus style printers.

Just some more fun 3D printing info.

-Brando

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The cost effectiveness of these machines compared to picking up a decent used mill/lathe, or a quality mini mill/lathe seems so minimal. 3d printing spacers? per price that must be awful, and spacers are really quick for kids to bang out on a lathe.

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If they have the money allocated for "a 3D printer", I think that a 3D printer is probably the best thing they can get with the money. :P

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Yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that since we weren't really all that concerned with price when I got the machine quoted. One of the other downsides is that you can't combine certain material options due to different heats or something. By the way, have you ever played with Ultem? I have 'break stick' on my desk that's about 1/8" thick and I still haven't been able to break it.

IIRC, when I ran the numbers on our spacers, they cost ~$5 to make (Used a hair over a cubic inch of material at $4.54 per cubic inch) and took about an hour to make in the machine. Considering that I was able to run them while I was at work, it seemed like a win win for everyone.

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Some of the popular low budget/"hobby grade" machines:

MakerBot http://www.makerbot.com (Low cost, but requires lots of software tuning)

UP http://pp3dp.com/ (Over twice the price of the Makerbot, but the software package is supposedly great. They also continually update the software).

Bites From Bytes http://www.bitsfrombytes.com/ (Recently purchased by one of the largest 3d printing manufactures.)

Ultimaker https://shop.ultimaker.com/ (Very large print volume)

These companies all have nice kits or complete ready to use machines and can be had for under $5k.

This is only a small list, but the most popular companies. These hobby 3d printers are sprouting up constantly like mushrooms on a rainy day. :)

Also if you notice nearly all of these companies producing low cost 3d printers use FDM "Fused Deposition Modeling" technology.

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Bradley is correct, we use his services very often. Print to 3D is great, fast, and dependable. One day, we may take the plunge and buy our own 3D printer.

At a recent trade show in Chicago, the Objet printer was shown and we were able to see various samples. The ability to print rubber-like product is very cool, and the ability to combine this low durometer rubber with harder material in the same print is amazing. The problem is that this Objet printer costs about $150k.

Andy B.

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OK, now you got my attention........time to do some reading tonight.::rtm::

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This product should look familiar to most folks! :p

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I have a stick as well, and also have been unable to break it.

The sales reps for Stratasys actually brought over a small garbage can printed out of Ultem. It's about a foot tall, and a foot wide at the opening. It's ridiculously strong, more than capable of having several people stand on it.

Your right about the temperatures too. The machine has to run at a specific temp for each material type so mixing and matching becomes difficult.

The objet's material is actually in liquid form when its dispensed and is then cured with a UV light directly after its dispensed. This is what allows them to mix materials because they simply mix the liquids and then cure the material (all automatically in the machine of course).

-Brando

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Yeah pricing is certainly an issue with Objet machines. I've seen them mainly at large companies who have a very obvious use for them that ends up saving them considerable time and money elsewhere.

Oh, they also have a clear material they can print in that after some polishing comes out looking just about perfectly clear. This particular feature has a lot of people in my industry (LED lighting) perking their ears up because it could lead to some really cool things.

-Brando

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Yeah, that clear stuff is amazing too. It looked like molded clear polycarb or acrylic.

One thing that FRC teams could do is find a "service bureau" which sells the service of printing parts by an Objet printer. There are many places who sell this as a service, much as Bradley does with his dimensions-printed stuff at Print to 3D. Many of the same companies who sell and train folks on 3D CAD systems also are service bureaus for 3D printing. For instance, CATI here in the midwest sells this service, with Objet-printed parts. They may or may not be receptive to giving away free Objet-printed parts to FIRST teams, but it's worth a try.

Andy B.