Printing out robot parts

[team222badbrad]

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