Printing out robot parts

[Samk]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

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

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)

[msimon785]

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.

[Trent B]

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.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

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