3d printers and robots

[Kevin Kolodziej]

1675 did some experimenting with 3D printing last fall and I'm sure we'll continue that this year. We were mostly experimenting with gears. Most of our tests help up just fine - it was when we hastily reduced material near the hub that we had a failure.

On our 2013 competition bot, we used 3D printed plates for custom gearboxes for our drive train. Our milling and pocketing capabilities are limiting so the ability to print two plates in 3 hours greatly increased our production. We had 8 printed plates and assembled gearboxes by the end of week 1 (normally we're looking at week 3 for assembly). Never had a problem with the plates through 5 competitions so far.

We also printed a guidewheel for our climbing mechanism, but the printer ended up having a breakdown after 7 hours of printing so the actual part on the robot is a lathed piece of acetyl donated by a local machine shop.

Previous to that (2006), one of our mentors printed a fully functional set of mecanum wheels for a Vex robot.

Our school has a Dimension 1200 BST and Stratasys donated some material to the team this year.

Stratasys also donated some polycarbonate printed gears for us that we briefly used to increase the speed of our robot (but ultimately removed in favor of more torque).