Categorie: RepRap

Ultimaker op Tegenlicht!

We were lucky to be featured in Tegenlicht. Tegenlicht are exceptional documentary makers who go in depth into major issues of humanity. The part where I’m being interviewed starts at around 34 minutes. Most...

Ultimaker @ Codebits 2012!

At Codebits, an amazing event organized by Sapo (an awesome, innovative Portugese company) a lot of nice stuff was happening. Besides a 48 hour programming contest, there was a hardware hacking den. This is...

Trip to Switzerland

Beautiful view of the river in Bern With al the busy-ness at Ultimaker I haven’t traveled much. Finally I had a nice trip to Switzerland, to give a talk and meet our friends from...

New developments at Ultimaker!

We’ve been really busy with many developments at Ultimaker! Most notably: the Ultimaker Controller, reducing lead times, adding individual 3D printer parts and lowering the overall shipping costs. Also, we’re releasing an improved version...

Just playing and 3D printing!

Usually, during the weekend I spend my time working on Ultimaker as a company, or I have social obligations. For this weekend, my wife surprised me in an original and heartwarming way. She said...

Software accelleration

Bernhard, an Ultimaker power-user at MetaLab Vienna, has gotten the Sprinter firmware working on an Ultimaker. Sprinter is written by Kliment and Caru, based on Triffid Hunter’s codebase, based on FiveD [update]oops, it’s based...

Ultimaker shipping & open sourced!

Good news, everyone! Finally, the Ultimaker is shipping. It took much more work that we had ever imagined, and we knew it would be hard to design a complete machine from scratch and also...

CAD

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...

One small step… (RFC)

First of all I would like to introduce myself. The current PCB layout, click on it for a larger version. My name is Gerald Ebberink and I am a first cousin of Erik. During...

Ultimaker at BOTACON 0, New York

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...

ReplicatorG’s build volume

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....

RepRap and ReplicatorG-5D

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...

Open Letter to Google (Sketchup)

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...

RepRap @ FAB6: Slides available

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...

Self-replicating devices: the statistics

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...

Another non-printed part less

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...

Getting married, Open source style ;)

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...

Erik’s RepRap for loan!

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...

RepRap in Dutch newspapers again

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...

Meta-innovation: Surprise boxes!

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...

SHiFT 2010: Personal fabrication

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...

[NL] RepRap op Omroep Brabant

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...

[NL] RapRap in het nieuws!

(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...

Mini-mendel built and working!

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...

RepRap Survey

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,...

Mini-mendel printed!

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...

RepRap made the Dutch newspapers!

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...

Smooth I am, yes…

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...

Accessories evolution: Spindle holders!

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,...

Banning 3D printers?

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....

RepRap @ NPOX 2009, Hilversum

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...

RepRap Day @ Protospace

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...

Support material, part two!

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...

The quest for support material support

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...

REPRAP meeting (Dutch)

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...

Bowden extruder

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...

RepRap Workshop!

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...

RepRap @ Hacking at Random 2009

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...

Many RepRap Parts printed!

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

[RepRap] More replication!

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...

A thousand RepRappers!

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...

RepRap: time saving tools

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...

Building RepRaps in Utrecht, NL!

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...

RepRap: Acrylic extruder mods

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...

RepRap: Rotary encoder

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...

RepRap = also a milling machine

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...

(AVR-)Dude, Arduino crashes fixed!

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...

RepRap: Before nanotechnology

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

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...

RepRap: Darwin almost finished!

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...

Actually building!

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...

BitsFromBytes arrived!

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...

Cool PCB setup

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...

End User Rapid Manufacturing

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...

Started building a RepRap

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....