As mentioned in my last post, we are pleased to have joined forces with Adrian Bowyer and his company to form RepRapPro, and launch a new campaign on indiegogo. For this, we are offering 100 kits with delivery due in time for Christmas. The 100 unit limit was set since this is the number of sets we feel we can print in the time. Unlike our previous campaign, however, we will not wait until the end of the campaign to place orders for components, but instead invest up front in order to meet our delivery target.

The purpose of this post is to present a product which many eMAKER Huxley owners have enquired about: Huxley kits without printed parts*. One of the selling points of RepRap is that one can print parts for a friend, enabling potentially exponential growth. This is only feasible with the availability of hardware kits to go with the printed parts.

So if you know someone who wants one of these great little 3D printers, and you want to print the parts for them, then lead them to our indiegogo campaign here.

But we also want to give our beta customers a little something extra: a PCB heatbed upgrade (1 per customer) in return for referring a friend to our campaign, who then goes on to buy a kit. In order to claim one of these you will need to follow these simple steps:

1. Register with indiegogo

2. Navigate to our indiegogo campagin

3. Copy the ‘Share this:’ link and provide it to your friend.

4. By clicking the link, indiegogo will record the referral for us.

One final note, if not all of the 100 Christmas kits are sold, then the numbers shipped will be made up from the January batch of hardware kits.

*Hardware kit: a full kit of parts including all hardware, pre-assembled electronics with microSD support, motors, heatbed, belts, pulleys, power supply and cord, and sample printing material. The only thing missing is the printed parts.

Jean-Marc Giacalone’s company eMaker  has already supplied over 300 RepRap self-replicating open-source 3D printers to the world.   RepRap Ltd is Adrian Bowyer’s family company.  Adrian invented RepRap, and he is the person who started the global revolution in low-cost open-source 3D printing.

These two men, and their two companies, have pooled their resources to form a new joint enterprise: RepRapPro Ltd.  The new company will be mass-marketing RepRap 3D printers, running a 3D print bureau using them, and organizing training and education in all things RepRap.

Sally Bowyer is the third member of the team.  Under Sally’s supervision as Production Manager, RepRap Ltd has printed over 250 sets of RepRap parts for sale to the community.

She said, “The two companies have been collaborating informally for some time.  We have now decided to form a new bigger joint company so that we can expand more quickly.  Open-source has been a solid business proposition in the software industry for years.  The growth of RepRap shows that it works brilliantly for hardware too.  RepRapPro and both its parent companies are dedicated to the idea of freely shared technical information that RepRap embodies.”

In addition to being a director of RepRapPro, Adrian Bowyer is also a senior lecturer at Bath University in the UK.  He said, “I started RepRap six years ago as pure academic research, just to see if the idea of a public free self-replicating manufacturing machine might work.  It has succeeded far beyond any bounds that would have seemed reasonable at its inception, and so I now spend my whole research time on this one project.  Indeed, I shall retire from the university next summer so that I can devote all my energies to RepRap worldwide and to RepRapPro Ltd.”

The new company is running a RepRap 3D-printer campaign for Christmas on IndieGoGo.com.  Jean-Marc Giacalone said, “We ran a similar campaign this summer to sell $30,000 worth of RepRaps.  We ended up selling $159,000 worth of them.   RepRap has a habit of growing exponentially…”

***ends***
Contact:

http://reprappro.com

RepRap Professional Ltd, 106 Old England Way, Peasedown St John, Bath BA2 8SW, UK.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have been so patiently waiting for their eMAKER Huxley 3D printer kit. And if you’re still wondering when we’ll be contacting you regarding shipping, then you’ve missed the email! In which case, please contact us on info@emakershop.com

Last week saw us reach a record of 30 kits shipped in one day, so despite getting up to a week behind schedule, we have almost clawed that time back.

Plug’n'play RepRap
One of the aims of these RepRap 3D printer kits was to try and make 3D printing technology more accessible and affordable. The term plug’n'play RepRap has been bandied about, and I was initially reluctant to use that phrase myself, but the recent weeks have proven that the eMAKER Huxley is a big step towards that goal. Many of the beta Huxleys have now been assembled, and people have reported good quality with little to no tuning required. The instructions have required a number of updates, however that is one of the great things about running a beta program and empowering the community to contribute: the product is ever evolving and improving. Our forums provide a great communications channel for feedback, as well as recording a wealth of information about the assembly and use of the machine.

The beta program also enabled us to identify weaknesses in the design of the printed parts, and changes have been gradually incorporated into the official design.

Huxleys in the wild

We know of a handful of eMAKER Huxleys having been successfully commissioned, and we hope to soon see evidence of over 300 of them printing successfully. A youtube search for eMAKER Huxley yields the following (among others):

Users have also uploaded images of their prints in our forum, which you can find here. A selection is shown below

#55 smbell

#89 snille

#105 richgain

Community

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who believed in this product and supported us by funding a kit, as well as getting involved with giving feedback and supporting others in our forums and through the #emaker IRC channel on freenode. It is so great to see people getting good prints from their eMAKER Huxley machine and getting so excited about what they can print.

We still have over 150 kits to ship, but we also have an aggressive development plan to keep improving the machine and process, so watch this space!

eMAKER Huxley RepRap 3D printer assembled

eMAKER Huxley RepRap 3D printer assembled

Between sourcing, printing and packing, eMAKER Huxley 4 has finally been assembled and commissioned, built from the same bill of materials which will make up each of the 300+ kits. The only tuning required was to set the extruder steps per mm to suit the CNC manufactured hobbed stud, followed by printing something which is not a machine part: a whistle.

eMAKER Huxley 4 printed whistle

We are now in a position to publish the firmware which will be programmed into the Atmega 644p microcontrollers shipped with the kits. For those of you interested in having a look, you will find it on github here. The firmware is essentially the same as Sprinter, with a couple of minor additions to make it easier to finely adjust the bed height of the machine using software rather than mechanically moving the limit switch.

On the host side, we have a cosmetically different, but functionally very similar version of Pronterface, which you will find on github here.

All the design files for the printed parts have been available for some time on the eMAKER Huxley wiki page on the RepRap site, and now can be found on github here.

Assembly instructions have been slow in coming, but  will be completed in the next few days. All of these have been published on wiki pages on this site. I’m sure that with so many people assembling from the same kit, new and better ways of assembling the machine will be discovered, and I hope that people will be keen to get involved and update these wiki pages for the benefit of future eMAKER Huxley users. I’m sure there will be people with better camera and lighting than we have used in the photos too.

So here follows the images and text which were recently sent out.

300 eMAKER RepRap 3D printers to be released into the world

Assembled eMAKER RepRap 3D printer with filament spool, full image here.

Close up of 3D printer, full image here.

A set of eMAKER printed parts, full image here.

A Vica Illusion by Chylld printed on the eMAKER RepRap 3D printer, full image here.

eMaker is a company that makes the famous RepRap self-replicating 3D printer, and IndieGoGo is a website that allows anyone to fund their enterprise from individual contributions. eMAKER has just run an IndieGoGo campaign to raise $30,000 from customers who wanted to pre-order a RepRap 3D printer.

It raised $158,685, so eMAKER have become a bit busier than they anticipated. The initial offering was for 150 machines, but, owing to the overwhelming demand, the company’s manufacturing strategy has now been revised to allow them to offer the 300 that have been sold.

Jean-Marc Giacalone, eMAKER’s MD, said, “We are passionate about the benefits of working with the RepRap community. We set up www.emakershop.com to let anyone sell their RepRap-printed parts to others for free. We have now applied this philosophy to our own RepRap production and bought many of the parts for the machines that we will sell from the same RepRap community.”

Because the eMAKER design is a RepRap, it can print a large proportion of its own parts. Printing of these parts will therefore be done not only on eMAKER’s own RepRaps, but also by some notable figures within the global RepRap project, including RepRap’s creator Adrian Bowyer of RepRap Ltd. and Bath University.

Sally Bowyer, RepRap Ltd’s Production Director, said, “eMAKER are now at the forefront of realising my father’s original idea of crowd-sourcing hardware by distributing a manufacturing machine that anyone can freely use to make copies of itself.”

Reprappers James Walsh, Glen Searle, Joe Malone and Kliment Yanev will be supplying electrical and mechanical parts.

nophead, is noted for his RepRap’s having printed over 100 copies of itself last year. He will also be printing sets of parts for eMAKER, and said he was, “glad to be involved in this exciting project to bring low cost 3D printing to ever more people. Now if they all have 100 offspring…”

Community sourcing is a long-term strategy for eMAKER, so when a customer owns an eMAKER RepRap they not only have a 3D printer, they also have the opportunity to be part of the supply of printed parts for future owners of RepRaps, and also any other RepRap variants, which can likewise be printed on the eMAKER machine.

Indeed, anyone with a RepRap from anywhere will be able to become part of this process. Giacalone said, “Any RepRap owner, including our customers of course, can recoup some of their initial investment by selling printed parts back to us. We will do a quality check, then use those parts in future machines. So our customers can become our manufacturers, allowing us to supply more new customers.”

***end***

The above breaks some exciting news for the RepRap project. Keep your eyes on this blog for future updates regarding our crowd sourcing plans and how you can play a part in making RepRap ever more accessible to a wider audience. And here’s one of me posing with Huxley No. 3

41 days ago we launched our modest eMAKER Huxley beta program with our campaign on the crowd funding website indiegogo. I say modest because we initially aimed to release 100 sets of eMAKER Huxley kits as part of a beta program, offering the machines for a very competitive price in return for feedback on the product and its use. Thanks to the power of the internet, soon after word got out via boingboing.net and gizmodo, it became apparent that 100 units would not satisfy the demand. So we decided to offer full kits at a pre-release price, but with the understanding that the beta program would have priority.

So having started out with a $30,000 goal for the campaign, we actually ended up taking over $150,000 to provide over 300 eMAKER Huxley 3D printers to people literally all over the world.

What happens next?

I think most people can probably visualise how printing 100 sets of parts would be a daunting but manageable task. However, over 300 sets present a challenge on a totally different scale. Sure we could just have kept to our initial shipping schedule and planned to ship kits well into 2012, but I certainly wouldn’t like to wait that long for a 3D printer, so we have adapted out manufacturing strategy to aim to ship all kits in the next 3 months. In order to achieve this, we are finalising negotiations with some notable figures in the RepRap community, who will use their own RepRap 3D printers to print sets of eMAKER Huxley parts. In addition to this, we have decided to take on a small business unit in which we will setup our very own RepRap factory. More details will follow in the coming days and weeks, as we plan to keep posting regular progress updates to this blog.

As for those 300+ of you eagerly waiting for your kits, you may be wondering why we haven’t started printing yet. Well actually we have. Here is the first set of parts printed on eMAKER Huxley No.2

We will also soon put up a counter to keep track of the number of sets printed to add to the excitement.

Now that the indiegogo campaign has come to an end, we have setup a forum here on eMAKERshop for you all to get to know each other and (once the kits start to be assembled) to provide feedback and seek advice from us should you require it. As the eMAKER Huxley is based on existing open source RepRap designs, we will be publishing full details of the machine’s components as soon as we can. This may not be for a few days since we have a not insignificant task of managing our first UK RepRap master class this weekend in Bath, UK.

We are so pleased that so many of you will have the chance to play, and in many cases work, with what we feel is a great little 3D printer.

One query that people often have about the RepRap 3D printing process is what happens when the machine has finished printing the object. Well I thought I would just publish a short post to show how the  parts are removed from the machine, and how they look and function. The parts shown here are functional parts, in fact they are Z axis motor mounts for Prusa Mendel kits for the master class we are hosting is Bath this summer. I would like to print some more artistic objects, but these will have to wait a few more days until we have one more eMAKER Huxley up and running.

The above video, although not the best definition, gives an idea of the speed at which the machine prints in order to produce good quality prints. The clip also demonstrates the fact that parts generally do not require cleaning up or reaming post printing. In this case, the 8mm threaded rod is a nice fit in the holes running the length of the part.

The photos below give a closer view of the parts as they came off the machine

Of course many people for whom this technology would be beneficial will not be interested in printing parts for other machines, so we will endeavour to print parts which showcase this 3D printing technology as soon as the next machine is commissioned.

If you like what you see, don’t forget to check out our beta program on indiegogo here.

BETA PROGRAM

The beta program will be limited to 100 machines, and in order to offer a very competitive price we are running a crowd funding campaign on indiegogo. For $475 (~£295) we are offering a full kit of parts, including everything required to assemble and commission the eMAKER Huxley 3D printer, even down to the power supply and software. All kits will be backed by full instructions, online support and a 12month warranty. So we are not only providing a 3D printer, but a complete 3D printing solution.

THE eMAKER HUXLEY

The eMAKER Huxley 3D printer was developed to offer the user a portable yet capable machine, with a large build volume (140x140x110mm) to footprint (260x280x280mm) ratio. Design features were incorporated from proven developments within the RepRap community, such as the Prusa Mendel 3D printer’s Z axis arrangement, as well as many innovative developments.

The design incorporates a heated build surface as standard, enabling the machine to print in a range of thermoplastic materials including ABS, as well as a custom designed robust all metal extruder hot end.

A brief specification of the machine is as follows:

• Machine type: RepRap (Replicating Rapid prototyper)
• Build volume: 140mm x 140mm x 110mm (X, Y, Z).
• Motors: NEMA 14 for X, Y and Z axes, NEMA 17 for the extruder drive, all controlled with 1/16th microstepping A4983 Pololu drivers.
• Drive system: Polyurethane T2.5 profile belts for X and Y axes, M5 threaded rod for Z axis, giving a resolution of 12.5microns for X and Y axes, and 2.5microns for the Z axis.
• Extruder type: Bowden fed all metal hot end, with thermistor temperature control, sized for 1.7mm diameter plastic filament.
• Build surface: 80W PCB heated build surface
• Bearing system: Linear bearings for X and Y axes, printed bushings for Z axis
• Electronics: RAMPS or Sanguinololu, powered by 120W 19v laptop power supply
• Optional extras: Z automatic probing, SD card for standalone printing

All RP part design files and instructions will be published in the near future.

HARDWARE KITS

Many of you will already own a larger sized RepRap 3D printer, such as the Mendel and Prusa Mendel designs, but you may be interested in owning a second smaller machine, for example for taking along to hackerspace group meetups. We will therefore also be offering full kits minus the plastic printed parts once the beta program is underway.

WHERE TO GET ONE

For more information and to purchase one of these limited edition machines, please visit our indiegogo campaign page here.

The reason for not having done this sooner is simply that I wanted to ensure my process yielded an acceptable print quality with one material, and ABS filament  was more readily available to me at the time in 1.75mm diameter.

So, happy with the quality of the ABS prints form the eMAKER Huxley, I decided to try a sample of black PLA from Ultimachine. The results were pleasantly surprising. I of course started with my favourite test piece (a 20mm square, with an 8mm hole in the centre).

Buoyed by this achievement, I quickly moved on to something a little more challenging

The sample of black PLA didn’t last long, so I fitted a spool of clear 1.75mm PLA, again from Ultimachine, and had a go printing to make sure it wasn’t beginner’s luck. Here are some parts for the eMAKER Huxley

I have to admit that my thermistor temperature table is complete guesswork, so I currently have no idea what temperature I am using to extrude PLA. I merely increased the temperature gradually whilst feeding some filament in by hand until the force required to extrude it felt acceptably small. On my todo list is to run a calibration experiment coupling a thermocouple to the thermistor.

All in all, I am pleased at the print quality form the eMAKER Huxley, and with the control I am achieving over the bowden extruder setup.