Printing in 3-D...

       Throughout my First Year Seminar in Engineering Design I have had the opportunity to tinker with and use 3-D printers. For anyone who doesn't know what a 3-D printer is: A three-dimensional printer is a printer that has the ability to melt material (usually plastic but can be a variety of different materials) and move in such a way that as the melted material is extruded out of the tip it forms a 3-Dimensional object layer by layer until the final product is completed. The design of the product is made into a coded form which is then transferred from the computer to the printer. Most if not all 3-D printers open sourced, which means that they are free-licensed designs that are opened to the general public. I believe my class has been working with a model called the Prusa-Mendel Open Hybrid model of a 3-D printer so that is the printer that I will be giving my opinions about in this post. 

       There is a good chance that most people outside of my class reading this have not had the opportunity to "play" with one of these printers so you will just have to take my word for it. The ones that I have been working with are generally, very simply designed for what they actually do. They mainly consist of a platform, a support structure made of metal and plastic, simple motors, and a tip that heats up to melt the plastic. On the less simple side, they have a motherboard thing (not an electrical engineer so I don't know what the actual name is) that sends the commands to move the motors but I am not 100% sure on how it works so we can just ignore that for now. I like their general design because everything is very open which make it easy to adjust/fix parts if needed. Several of the ones that we are using could definitely work with out as many wires everywhere though. Some of the downfalls of them are that they can be very slow while printing some things and seem to break a lot or at least need to be adjusted often. But according to my professor these models only run around $500 compared to others that can sell for $1000 and up so I believe that compensate for the minor issues that can easily be fixed.

        If I was able to change anything about these printers I would probably try to make a program which would incorporate the entire process of printing in one program, such as creating the codes and changing the arrangement of the object. I also do not know if it is possible or not but maybe if you could create a printer where both the bed and the extruder carriage independently move in both the X and Y directions at the same time and set the extruder to release the material quicker then it might be possible to make a model that can produce a finished product faster. Apart from those ideas, making an over-sized version of one of these printers would lead to a wider variety of things that they can make. The extruder would most likely have to increase proportionally to the overall printer size keep it running at a tolerable speed which would result in less detailed products but still a wider variety of products. I do not know if there is already a design for a printer that incorporates these ideas into it already but I am sure that there is always room for improvements.