Requiem for a Reprap - packing down the BAM printer

18 January 2019 at 11:42 pm

At 4.5 years, this is my longest running personal hardware project. I’ve learned incredibly much about building machines that “just work” and I’ve taken the project as long as I feel it makes sense. Since my focus these days are on electronics and IoT hardware, 3D printing is now more of a tool for me. So why swap out a 3D printer that works great already?

After posting this video, I realised that there are a couple things i did not mention that has affected my decision. The major one being that a 3D printer you make yourself can never become complete. It’s been my bad concience for a long time as I had so many plans for it, but I’m not prioritizing it over electronics these days. With so many projects I want to do, I had to cut away something and since it’s a more or less complete project, I felt it was the time. Swapping it for a Prusa MK3 opens up quite a few new possibilities. The machine also takes a valuable space on my desk, so rebuilding my office to be geared towards electronics did also affect this. I simply won’t be using 1/3rd of my desk for the printer any more. I couldn’t just pack it down though, so in this video I’m summarising the project and some of lessons I’ve learned while building it.

I discuss filament diameters and selection (2.85mm or 1.75mm), electronics (Ramps, MegaTronics, Beaglebone + Replicape), extruder alternatives (Wades, Bulldog XL, E3D Titan Aero), Mechanical challenges (rigidity, Flex3Drive, Lulzbot) and solutions when building robots using Makeblock and what I’m replacing the printer with. This VLOG also marks the start of a new Youtube channel as a place to post video’s that are somewhat more “polished” (or at least edited) than what I post on my old (and rather messy) Youtube channel.