I’m not sure why we waited so long to post this on our site, but we had our debut on Dutch National TV. Erik was contacted (he’s the most visible one of us three) by De Wereld Draait Door to come and show our 3D printer. They thought it was a good idea to print a whistle, so we did. We just that day received some really good quality PLA and it printed very smooth and quick. The printer actually had a small startup error but a second time it fired off.
We did some testing regarding the speed boundaries of the Ultimaker. For ABS plastic it lies at approx. 150mm/s feedrate (x,y movement). It could be higher but we ran into flowrate issues occasionally and at high speeds it bonds less to the previous printed layer. PLA is a different story, it is much more sticky and flows better, it reached printing speeds of 350 mm/s during travel and 300mm/s during extrusion. It is not recommended for all kinds of shapes, although there is some loss of shape, objects with some infill will print fine. The part you see printing is a Mendel Z-bearing plate, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1768
The fastest printing time was 9min, the print in the video took 12min at 300mm/s feedrate.
Update: the result with our new 0.4 mm nozzle is even better. No flow rate problems running it at this feed rate, either (with PLA, that is)!
I took my Ultimaker to BOTACON 0 (the first BOTACON of, I’m sure, many BOTACON’s to come!). There, I was giving a talk on the collaborative ecosystem that is emerging around digital fabrication. Bre Pettis and his Makerbot colleagues have given me ample opportunity to demonstrate the Ultimaker, which many people were seriously impressed by.
Photo by John Abella
Photo by John Abella
What I really liked about Botacon was the diversity of the talks. Some were about the development process, 3D printable transistors and OLEDs, the age of matter compilers, what it means for children to grow up with 3D printers, how to print intriguing shapes based on math and parametric design, how we can still define the word ‘robot’, anthropomorphizing robots, paint bots, etc. etc. There were many more talks that had a serious impact, together making it into a hugely successful event.
My presentation, figures from my research (PDF). Photo by John Abella
Above is a graph taken from my research (PDF) into the viability of open source hardware.
There weren't enough ladies at the event, so I printed some more during the conference. Photo by John Abella.
Some more photo’s in this gallery:
Many people stayed around until after the conference, allowing people that knew each other to also meet face-to-face. After the conference I’ve been hacking another extruder onto my Ultimaker at the awesome and renowned Hackerspace “New York City Resistor”, where there are always nice people around that are doing the most interesting projects.
Now I’m off to Boston, where I’ll be visiting my friend Mako and visiting the MIT Media-lab’s FabLab, where Ilan Moyer studies. Ilan, who was also speaking at BOTACON, is one of the developers of the Fab-In-A-Box, which has been an important inspiration for the Ultimaker’s XY positioning. Most other open source 3D printing bots have serial kinematics, which in some cases requires motors to be part of the moving mass. The Bowden cable concept, inspired by Ed Sells and further developed by myself, allows even less moving mass because the extruder can extremely light. The extremely low moving mass of the Ultimaker and Fab-In-A-Box allows these machines to move much more rapidly. This has been key to allowing it to print at 150 mm/s, while the default at which many people are currently printing is 33 mm/s.
L. Rodrigues, one of the 3D printer fanatics at the scene, made a nice movie at Botacon 0 that features the Ultimaker:
One of the things I don’t like about 3D printing is the time it takes to print. So I decided to see how fast this thing would go and see print time go down on the Unicorn file from Thingiverse.
Especially with the infill a lot of time is saved. The layer thickness for this print is 0.25mm printing this at 0.4mm would speed it up even more.
Update: the feed rate in this print is 150 mm/s, printing about 41.4 cc per hour (for measure, this would (theoretically) allow you to print a full 1100 cc RepRap Mendel set in 28 hours). The Unicorn STL was scaled up a factor of 2, so it has 8 times more volume to print. The limiting factor to speed still seems to be a software (firmware) related issue, not a hardware limitation of the frame (mechanical). Of course, you do need to have a well oiled machine to print at speeds like this, but it’s definitely possible. The shape would just fit in a 8 by 9 cm big. The raw material and electricity costs of this print are about 40 eurocents.
Here’s a print with support material. The overhang at the chin and nose is would not be possible to print without support material. Support is printed from the same material as the guy is printed from. Removing it takes a bit force (I have to find a way to make the support less dense) and leaves some spots, but it works.
One of the reasons I started designing the Ultimaker is I wanted to print larger, taller things, hence the 21x21x21cm build envelope. When printing large objects sometimes because of differences between the warm and cooled plastic, the prints tend to come loose from the platform. But when the object is placed on the build platform with just a small contact area it prints fine. Below is a thin walled lamp shade which prints fine when placed upside down.
Printed parts starting to appear on the Ultimakers. This one has is nice and smooth surface at a 0.25mm layer thickness, thanks to the precise cartesian system. Even at high speeds it stays precise. At the moment we are working on Replicator G and on Skeinforge for some good standard ABS and PLA print settings for when the machines will be available for pre-order. Pre orders will start in december. The source files will be available shortly after the orders start shipping.
This week Fab6 took place in the Netherlands, there were several workshops to attend, one of them was to build a 3D printer, the Ultimaker. Wood was laser cut and two people with no technical skills started building the machine. They enjoyed building and we were amazed to see that at the end of the afternoon they finished building the hardware. Great Job.
Erik's Blog
Erik is co-founder of Ultimaker and long time contributor to the RepRap project.
RepRap
RepRap is the project that the Ultimaker originated from. Their wiki is a great resource of technical knowledge on all things related to 3D printing.
Photo by John Abella.
Loading...
Tonight is #3DPrinting night with the @Ultimaker and some @picaroons on tap! A mugfull of Dooryard helps the filament go down!
RT @tinkercad: Too legit. RT @dscheyh: Designed my 3D business card in @tinkercad and printed on my @Ultimaker with 0.12mm layers. http://t.co/V39DH3Gi
Too legit. RT @dscheyh: Designed my 3D business card in @tinkercad and printed on my @Ultimaker with 0.12mm layers. http://t.co/V39DH3Gi
RT @DscheyH: Designed my 3D business card in @tinkercad and printed on my @Ultimaker with 0.12mm layers. http://t.co/yAD0oagd