Categorie: RepRap

I’m frequently wowed by progress in CAD software to become both more powerful and more easy to use. Still its good so see how great ideas took quite a lot of time to show...

Photo by John Abella 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...

Hi everyone, Some people have been asking for a copy of the PDF of my RepRap research. Perhaps you didn’t find a link to it while you were in fact interested in reading it...

Update: Phooky merged this improvement into the official branch, thanks!! There was an issue with ReplicatorG posted a while ago: The stl preview pane seems to be fixed at 10cm x 10cm x 10cm....

Some things are just no fun, and in a project driven by volunteers, these parts tend to be neglected. Making things user friendly doesn’t help yourself, because when you get to the point where...

[This article is in Dutch, but you can Google Translate it (click)] De Night of the Nerds was een groot succes! Deze werd gehouden in het Technologiemuseum NEMO in Amsterdam. Foto: (c) Night of...

In the RepRap community, you can observe several interesting applications of domestic manufacturing. A manufacturer will probably not make their product compatible with competing products. But what if you still want this? How cool...

Update: Google responded on my blog! To read it, click here. Below is my open letter to the Google SketchUp team, aimed at Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist and John Bacus, the Product Manager for...

The slides of our joint talk are now available. First up are Rhys Jones and Adrian Bowyer, the third section is my part: RepRap @ FAB6 International Conference, Amsterdam View more presentations from Erik...

Today was our talk on RepRap at the FAB6 conference in Amsterdam at the Royal Academy of the Arts and Sciences. Rhys Jones introduced RepRap and showed his latest developments in multiple materials. Adrian...

I just made a serendipitous discovery:I printed a very narrowly fitting freely rotating Bowden coupling and it had such a good grip on the PTFE that I printed another with just a little more...

My 3D printed cake topper! Friday the 9th of July, I’m getting married to Esther! I’m really looking forward to this really special day. It takes a lot of preparation, but it’s also been...

In December last year, I became the proud new owner of Leo (after Leonard Darwin), the son of Charly (Charles Darwin (my earlier machine)). It didn’t take 9 months to fully develop, but it...

A while ago I put on my RepRap ambassador hat again which resulted in a newspaper entry in a Dutch newspaper. Since it’s slightly old news now and I’m allowed to cite works that...

What I really like about the Thingiverse physical object repository is that people are not just adding awesome, innovative [1, 2] and useful [1, 2] new content. They also innovate in how they publish...

Together with Siert Wijnia from FabLab Protospace I gave a workshop and presentation at SHiFT 2010 in Lisbon, Portugal. The topic was Personal Fabrication while highlighting the roles of FabLabs and the RepRap project...

Televisie Some time ago I had a visit by the Omroep Brabant TV crew. From RepRap Misc The item was broadcast on 30 March 2010. The RepRap part starts at 5 minutes and 30...

(English translation here and here) RepRap was weer uitgebreid in het nieuws. Gisteren in de “Trouw”: Krant Klik hier voor het online artikel! Radio Gisteravond was ik met Siert ook in de uitzending van...

I went to the USA to visit Zach and Bre and the others from Makerbot and to give a talk at MIT for an innovation lab. I proposed to give a demo, but didn’t...

Are you operating or building a 3D printer? (RepRap, Cupcake CNC, RapMan, etc.) We still need some more responses for the data to be statistically significant. So if you have not done the survey,...

From Erik's RepRap parts For some, the fact that the mini-mendel isn’t a finished product is a reason not to try it. For me, it’s the opposite. I’ve now printed all parts for the...

I finally finished splitting and uploading the video’s, so here it is in a Youtube playlist as well: Source: video.fosdem.org A full page interview on RepRap in the NRC, a dutch quality newspaper! Some...

RepRap got coverage in a well respected Dutch newspaper, NRC.next. They also made a blog post with an interview, the original post is in Dutch, but here’s a (poor) google Translation to English. The...

You think vanity and Yoda do not go together? The force may be strong in this fella, but he used a very powerful scrubbing lotion to make him look much younger. 🙂 Stratasys sent...

Even things that are peripheral to the RepRap and makerbot are going through some remarkable evolution! It not that strange, because they can really make life a lot easier. Some accessories, like spindle holders,...

Nick Jones from Gartner made an interesting remark: “[A]s one of my clients pointed out yesterday, do we really want an affordable domestic fabber? Fabbers will likely “print” objects using some form of plastic....

We demonstrated the RepRap at NPOX (15 nov. 2009). It was in the “Beeld en Geluid” building which was a huge building, but beautiful at every scale. We were positively surprised by the way...

The RepRap Day at Protospace (14 nov. 2009) was a great success. (see also, more pictures by Bas) The plan was to print an entire machine at the event, but we did more talking...

In the previous post, I described the rationale for adding a support material capability. It’s not needed for every object, but to have consistent results with tight tolerances, for many objects you cannot do...

In general, there are three general methods to making objects. Formative: By (de)forming matter, such as bending a metal beam into an angle. Or a big steel sheet into an enclosure, or making a...

Op zondag 15 november organiseert ProtoSpace de eerste grote RepRap meeting van Nederland! Iedereen die een RepRap heeft, er een aan het bouwen is, of erin geïnteresseerd is nodigen wij van harte uit om...

I was honoured to be asked to speak at the Corporate Entrepreneurship and Open Innovation. Speakers included Henry Chesbrough (!), an authority on open innovation, so needless to say I was challenged to give...

Courtesy: Blackbag.nl BoingBoing blogged about reproducing keys from distant photographs. This made me think back off what we were doing at Hacking At Random ’09 with our RepRaps. Ray had created an STL model...

I’ve designed a little part that allows you to connect the extrusion drive mechanism, which pushes the plastics, to the extruder which it is pushed through. Here you can see a printed version, attached...

After the big success of our workshop at Protospace, there will be another one! Since it will be in Dutch, the rest message is as well. Na het grote succes van de workshop bij...

I was honoured to present RepRap with Adrian Bowyer, who is the one who came up with the idea of creating a self-replicating machine that would ‘live’ in symbiosis with humans. Presenting our RepRaps...

I’ve been working on getting production up. Because I’m going on a holiday I guess I’ll show of the results 😉

From the RepRap blog: Progress is being made by Rhys Jones to have the Replicating Rapid prototyper make more of the parts that you need to make another one. I think that this is...

The Bits From Bytes kits contain a board with SD-Card functionality. It is not clear what licence BfB will attach to it (it should be GPL for the Darwin based design, though). Anyway, SD...

There are now an estimated 1000+ RepRappers! These people are actively building on their own instance of the Open Source Replicating 3D printer. When I started working on my RepRap in May 2008 (8...

These are some tools that saved me a lot of time and frustration building my RepRap. I should have bought some of these tools sooner though! Click image to enlarge. On the left is...

A couple of weeks ago, the day before I was about to give a talk at the Wikimedia conference, I had a small set-back. After changing from electronics platform earlier on, my RepRap machine...

Nederlandse versie: zie onderaan At FabLab Utrecht, a.k.a. Protospace several RepRaps are going to be built (five to start with). I’m supporting the group with advise (and of course encouragement 🙂 ). It will...

What does the RepRap project do? What do they mean with self-replication? Its aim is to design, through the open source process, a 3D printer that can replicate most of its own parts. Currently...

I’ll be speaking on the RepRap at the Wikimedia conference in Utrecht on 1st of November. The programme is in Dutch. See also the www.wikimediaconferentie.nl website

The gears in my acrylic extruder were skipping where there was a moderate amount of resistance given by the drive shaft. Also, because of the distance between the two gears being too big, there...

This is version 0.1 of my reprap controller. I don’t have much time to work on in so I’ll publish it in a non-finished state (then again, what is ‘finished’?). It still needs an...

Something I almost forgot to share is the optical encoder disks. I made those when Chris made his achievement on the encoder. The encoder on the extruder is an important step towards better 3D...

I just visited a conference about the launch of GPLv3. There was a very nice ambience. People I talked with were very interested in the possibility of the RepRap, and about it being a...

In anticipation of new thermoplast extruder parts, I built a Dremel toolhead for my RepRap. It should be able to do light milling, such as PCB isolation routing! I was hoping to do some...

It’s always nice to hypothesize about the future. I think most will agree that nano-technology (as in nanomanufacturing) just isn’t there yet, not discounting ‘smart fabrics’ (nanomaterials) or chemistry for that matter. As you...

Printcrime (Originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006) The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he...

"If I can build a RepRap Darwin, I can build almost any machine." — Me Because of the experience I got from it, and because of the fabrication possibilities it creates. This was one...

That’s too bad. I thought I was almost done. With the 100nF capacitor it worked better. Now I still have the problem that it more or less stops heating in cycles when the power...

More progress, more videos! I had a lot of time on my hands this week, so I almost finished my RepRap! Here are some time lapse videos. Gaining height: part 1 (40 minutes of...

After receiving all those bits (from bytes) I had to postpone my build further because of an exam. That’s done now. I can finally start RepRapping!!! To document my build, it would be nice...

The bits finally arived! Too bad I have an exam tomorrow. This kind of suspense is probably lethal. Anyway, here are some pictures and a small review. I’m really satisfied with the quality of...

A while ago, while I was waiting for the BitsFromBytes stuff, I had to do something. So I decided to tidy the things I already had made. This is the result of the PIC...

This is from a survey among industry leaders in Rapid Manufactoring: "Krailling near Munich, January 28th, 2008: Mass production in the Western world is on the brink of a silent revolution and e-Manufacturing is...

Project RepRap I’ve started building a RepRap. Read more… Also take a look at the website: www.reprap.org What is the RepRap In short: It is a 3D printer capable of printing it’s own parts....