Printing out robot parts

[Chexposito]

Originally Posted by rsisk

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?

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.

[Peter Matteson]

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

[Mike8519]

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