Now with COLOSO-Gears!(tm).

An improved version of my prior design.

The Adapter Plate was just revised (to v1.2) the gearing was completely redesigned (which involved drawing the involute curves the hard way, which gave far better results).

Gears are 51 and 7 tooth respectively. Giving a ratio of 7.2857:1.
The gears are also oversized (COLOSO-Gears!(tm)). I will be uploading a slimmed down version in the near future, I just wanted to be sure I had a large enough meshing area.

Note that the new adapter plate is very wide, 90mm+ and will only just fit on the cupcake platform. I recomend printing a z-rider to get a larger build area!

Also, the 51 tooth gear is kinda massive. You might have issues printing it from ABS. As always, I recomend PLA.

The 7 tooth gear is TINY. Sorry. It will be a pain to get to print right. I broke mine trying to remove it from the build platform. Had to epoxy it back together.

UPDATE:
Added 14 tooth pinions sized for nema17 and 23 (5mm and 1/4" shafts).

Added an 8 tooth pinion (obsolete files gone, but 7 tooth gear left up for the brave).
I recomend that you print the small gears with 0 extra shells (infill of 0.1 or higher will result in solid teeth).

9 Tooth gear is off for now unless someone really really needs it

Here is a video of it running (and reversing thanks to SF35!)
flickr.com/photos/45928876@N02/5405071895/

also a this is a derivative work of thingiverse.com/thing:5995 i stretched them and shrunk them to fit 1/4" bushings
you could combine the parts but i already had the bushings printed for something else.

i didn't want to dissemble my bot to put in the really big z rider assembly just yet, i will wait till it actually breaks before i break it trying to fix it. i looked at just printing the wobble arrestor but it was about a 5 hour print for all the parts, i wanted to have it fixed in an hour or so.

so i looked around to what i had printed, came up with this and hot glued it all together. i went from a pretty extreme z wobble that matched the threads of my acme rods to nearly nothing.

its not pretty but it works and prints really fast and is easy to install and easy to remove.

the 2x2 lego is with both installed
the black 2x4 is with one rod installed
and the mendel part is the excessive z wobble before i put these in.

this is not a permanant solution, just to temp straighten it out as fast as i could

This is a simple model to help tune reversal parameters for a stepper extruder. It consists of a number of towers with different thicknesses, with different spacing between each tower.

This is for mounting the Extruder Controller and Relay board to the side of a Cupcake CNC. The boards stick out a bit above the top of the side panel, but are still below the Z belt. The big improvement over other EC board mounts is that the bracket mounts to the Cupcake body with two screws instead of one, so it won't pivot the way my previous mounting solution did.

Similar to the last one, but I also need to mount servos facing forward to a shelf.

This thing allows you to mount a server with its plane of rotation in parallel with a shelf that it is sitting on securely.

The extent of the shelf clip is long enough that you could use glue to attach it to the shelf, and it will probably provide enough support for the applied torque.

If this is not good enough, you could drill a couple of holes and use some screws.

After many little pieces, I am finally able to construct a delta robot that is mostly made of printed parts.

This thing is a delta robot frame. There is the basic frame, mounted motors, arms, tool holder, and the like. The arms closest to the motors are printed plastic notched spans. The longer arms are wood dowels, with tape on their ends to enhance the friction fit into their fittings.

Steel rods in this case are 5/16". The size doesn't really matter, you can select any size as long as the vertices match.

the size is 2' on edge. that's a pretty huge build area if you decided to use this robot as a 3D printer.

It's a good platform for experimenting with various delta robot ideas. The arms will be replaced with carbon fiber. The 'bearings' will be replaced with brash, with 1/4" axles, the motors will be replaced with servos, etc.

At any rate, at least a model can be built, with not too many different types of materials. There isn't a fastener on the whole thing. Of course if it were actually moving, you'd probably find places where you'd want some fasteners, but that's the whole point of the experiment anyway.

Some interesting aspects of the design:
This is an endoskeleton. It can take a 'skin', but it's not required for structural support.
The tetrahedron is a fairly stable self supporting structure.
No threaded fasteners, other than the threaded rods themselves
Use zip ties to hold the little motor board in place. That board could be gotten rid of entirely if the motors mounted to the rod instead

UPDATE: 05022011
Changed male and female clevis part counts. They were 24 ea, and they should have been 12.

UPDATE: 06022011
Created a page on RepRap as this is more of a development project than I think is appropriate for Thingiverse
reprap.org/wiki/PolyBot

UPDATE: 27022011
There have been many parts updates. I've included a new picture with the servos and new arms, as well as the base plate in place. I've added a video on YouTube of the thing in action: youtube.com/watch?v=VzWJDWvJvqo

**************************
This is a current, WORKING design, not to be confused with v2: thingiverse.com/thing:5327
**************************


Very much inspired by thingiverse.com/thing:4740 by twotimes.

Originaly started just to see if I could design a simpler z-rider that worked... v1 was an attempt to remove any requirement of 'bot modification. A miserable failure.
v2 went with the maximum spacing on the vertical guide rods. A slightly less miserable failure (it worked, but not as well as my 2 screw bodge of the existing CupCake Z axis).

v3 was a complete redesign from scratch, starting from the most solid and stable bearing arrangement I could envision that would total 10 bearings or less.

If you look closely you will see that some of the parts seem to not completely match, this is because I have added the 2 extruder mounts as a interim measure, the complete design is part of a larger project I am working on. As part of this its also worth noting that this design currently limits you to a max build height of about 95mm

Oh, and the z-axis can now manage 250mm/m!

Update: v3.2
Revised version of top.screw.bearing added, alternative motor mounts added (they are inverted as suggested by Cryozap, they are currently untested but should be fine).
Extruder mounts added that allow the use of the Mk5 extruder WITHOUT modification (can't for the life of me think why I didn't do that from the start).

Update:
Bearing mounts version 3.2 added. Testing on-going but design should now be considered finished.

Update:
New top section added (General improvements, including the return of the original top panel, also adds compatibility with SUPER Cupcake Mk3). Version updated to v3.3
Top.center.bearing.new includes mounting holes for an endstop (although the flag for said endstop will need to be taped in place!)
Top.center.new is kinda huge, 120mm long. Let me know how it works out.

!! New version penrose5.stl with a couple of wayward vertices fixed !!

This is a 3D-printable version of the Penrose Triangle illusion, based solely on the 1934 design painted by Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd. The design also appeared on Swedish postage stamps in the early 1980s.

I created this 3D design entirely from scratch using the process outlined in the "Instructions" section below. This work is based solely on Oscar Reutersvärd's design, although some elements are inspired by the Hollow-Face illusion discovered many decades (if not centuries) ago.

This model contains a number of notable improvements over previous 3D representations:

1) It is parallax-corrected for a viewing distance of 40cm, i.e. it will look exactly like Oscar Reutersvärd's design, with cubes lining up on all 3 sides simultaneously. This is a great visual improvement over previous versions, which only lined up on 2 sides simultaneously.

2) It has been resized (to 99.43 x 99.65mm) to make maximum use of the Makerbot build envelope.

3) The top edges are now tapered so as to make the most of your printer's capabilities. The better your printer, the sharper the edges will be.

4) I own the copyright to this 3D design, and hereby distribute it under the "Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-Alike" licence for all non-profit parties to print, improve and share.

This is another cooling design, inspired by (but not directly based on) thing 5756.

I wanted to use Iwo's design, but I just upgraded to a MakerGear stepper plastruder on my Thing-o-Matic, and there wasn't enough clearance around the extruder nozzle to mount any fan ducts on the top side of the Z-stage. So, this design is a circular cooling nozzle that mounts around the extruder nozzle, just under the Z-stage.

It is fed by two 1/4" PVC hoses, attached to a fan mount that sits on top of the Z-stage, near the rear of the bot. This mount holds a 40mm fan salvaged from an old graphics card.

The overall airflow is very subtle- it's detectable with your hand, but just barely. But it makes a huge difference in print quality for small parts. In the attached image of two single-wall calibration boxes, both boxes were printed consecutively using the same g-code. The only difference is that one box had the cooling fan intake blocked.

This design is in parametric OpenSCAD, so it should be fairly easy to adapt to other nozzle types or fan sizes.

Note: This adds some extra hardware to the underside of your Z-stage. Make sure there will be clearance with anything you have sticking up from your build platform. I had to remove the nozzle wiper from my ABP. (The wiper wasn't working very well with my MakerGear nozzle anyway, so no big loss...)

For a very nerdy Valentine's Day, I give you heart gears. This was inspired by Greg Frost's Broken Heart thingiverse.com/thing:4683, but it fits in the palm of your hand and can be twisted like some kind of worry ball. It makes use of the heart shape from thingiverse.com/thing:6190, the MCAD involute bevel gear script from thingiverse.com/thing:3575, and nophead's polyhole script for making properly dimensioned tap holes thingiverse.com/thing:6118.

UPDATE: If you lack a 3D printer, you can now buy these from CarryTheWhat at etsy.com/shop/CarryTheWhat.

I was daunted by the complexity of Greg's design, so this one is much simpler, having fewer gears, and a much simpler attachment design (simply thread the bolts into tight plastic holes). It also uses a smooth heart shape and is made for the hand instead of the desk.

This plugin does not work with 2.57 use 2.56 , code update coming soon .

Updated version of the gcode script from thingiverse.com/thing:6103

I have taken MR's instruction and converted this to a menu item.

With the plugin installed there is now a File | import | gcode item.

This brings up a file browser. So there is no more messy text editing.

This will continue to be available at

github.com/zignig/blender-gcode-reader

I'm looking into parsing skeinforge comments , and dealing with 5D and stringy bits.

This part simply holds your phone for a "desktop" mode. This will probably work for many other phones, but i have only tested with the Nexus One.

Im sure you can cut a hole in the bottom and slip a power cord in, but it wont be as simple as dropping a phone in and lifting it out.

Approximate build time: 3 hours +/- 0.5 hour

GCode has been provided as a reference, but is probably not compatible with your particular printer.

Notice: This is a project in development, and I intend to improve it over time. This draft will work, but it's hardly ideal. Caveat Emptor!

Update Jan 31st: I've uploaded Version 2, which is pretty much the same as 1.5 (which I've removed as a result) but comes with the "Hex Key Holder", which can be fitted with a standard screwdriver bit from a powertool to act as a crude "center". My experiments with using two such centers to drive the lathe weren't great, as one invariably ends up spinning and the piece stops. So it looks like the required parts at present are: Two Bearing-End-Body Sections, two Bearing-And-Tool-Fittings, A Boltplate and a Hex tool holder. You'll also want a Dremel Rest and a length of MDF/wood to bolt it all down to. And you'll need googles, and perhaps gloves, and a lot of sense.
For now, it is left to the user to figure out spacing of the body sections and how to align them. I'm working on improving that. :)

More Update: Really bad video of me demoing Microlathe: youtube.com/watch?v=6XXN6UkrnIw and a shot of the finished piece of dowel on my Twitpic: twitpic.com/y8jnl
Also, Microlathe was featured on Makezine! blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/01/tiny_printable_dremel-powered_lathe.html

Microlathe is a little dremel-powered woodturning/watchmaker's lathe that can be printed and bolted together with all those leftover M3 nuts and bolts that came with your Makerbot. In addition to the M3 nuts/bolts, you only require a 608 bearing (I got an extra one with my Makerbot) and an 8mm diameter spring to fit the bearing-end. You probably don't even need that spring.

So, if you have a Dremel handy, you can consider this "The Lathe That Came Free With The Makerbot"!

Microlathe is Parametric, and makes use of a "Global Parameters" script from which the others derive shared traits such as the radius of the bolt plates, etc.. you could try printing a larger one, but bear in mind the limited space you have to print the body portions, which are already quite large for a Makerbot.

MicroLathe makes use of shapes.scad, which was kindly released to the community under the GNU General Public License by Catarina Mota. Permission was explicitly granted for shapes.scad to be considered released under an Attribution, Sharealike license additionally in this case, to facilitate licensing crossover. Thanks a million Catarina!
Microlathe also makes use of teardrop.scad, which was provided kindly by Erik De Bruijn. Teardrop.scad is released under the GPL2 license, with the inheritance clause generously waivered in this case to permit release under a non-GNU license. I'm very grateful Erik, thanks!

I'd appreciate a small donation via Paypal if you find yourself using this to generate a profit (selling turned items, etc.), or if you just love it and want to show your appreciation. Otherwise, it's all yours to print for yourself or others! Just don't charge for it without asking me and informing the buyer that it's available freely here.

This is the next iteration of my original sumobot design.

A few changes:
* It's made from three pieces, not one
*It uses two solarbotics GM8 gear motors (actually the pololu 120:1 equivalent), instead of continuous servos
* It works.

I'm really happy with how it came out.

**UPDATE**
I've updated the files since I first posted this thing. They're pretty small tweaks but they really help when trying to wire up the whole thing and hold down the electronics.

I've posted a video of it in action. It still has no opponent sensing/detection but it's staying within the white space perfectly. See it here:
flickr.com/photos/24375810@N06/4281870587/in/set-72157622790238786/

Stay tuned for thorough instructions/code and possibly a chassis kit for sale at botmade.etsy.com

It's never a bad idea to have spare parts for your MakerBot lying around.

I have an old batch 2 MakerBot with outdated z-guides which make removing the z-stage really difficult. Luckily the new version of the z-guide is super easy to print out.

Also interesting is the x-rod bracket. Upgrading to the newer, skinnier rods is a little easier now and you need four less lasercut parts.

Yay. Hardware upgrades over the internet!

If you want to make any of your own parts the dxf's are all online (or in the repository svn.makerbot.com/).

After having some difficulties with the Plastruder MK3 which comes with the MakerBot, I decided to try to print a better (i.e. more reliable) extruder with and for my MakerBot.

The design was inspired by the "Thermoplast Extruder Version 2.0" from the RepRap project and by photos I saw of Nophead's "Fast extruder" .

(Update: There's now a 4th part to print: InsulatorRetainer.stl)

Clip them together to make bigger objects

So far my script-fu is failing me on the whole "solidifying profiles" issue.

This script:
zoo-logique.org/3D.Blender/zip/Vert2Face_0.3.zip

works okay if you have fairly few points, but with the meshes Blender converts from DXF it has yet to finish a task I give it. Not cool.

In retaliation I tend to do one of two things:

1: Get pissed off and remesh from scratch, tracing the profile by repeatedly extruding a single vertex for flat areas, pasting in parts of circles for the curves, and hitting alt-m a lot. Follow that up with a good session of click-click-click-FKEY until solid.
2: Coax Blender through the process of converting the DXF splines into a single united profile, converting the profile to a mesh, then removing double verts, then extrude curved areas, followed by merging those curved areas' extruded tabs to single points, reducing the number of needed click-click-click-FKEY commands.

This derivative was done with the second method.

I know people have already experimented with this a bit but I thought it would be nice to have a slightly more elegant solution to the problem of mounting a pen or pencil or brush or whatever to the Makerbot (before I had just hot-glued a marker to my extruder).

*Just updated it with an extra piece that you can print and strap on with rubber bands that allows the pen/tool to travel slightly, allowing better contact with the surface. It does this while still allowing the pen to be picked up off of the surface when you need to start a new line.

This is a derivative of the Plastruder MK3 design I've been working on. The goal is to make the plastruder into a printable design that can be made on a MakerBot. I also wanted to take on an ambitious project to put the new AOI plugin, MetaCAD through its paces. Learn about metacad at metacad.org

This extruder design uses 5 printed pieces: two halves that bolt together for the housing, 2 dinos to put it at the right height for printing, and a simple insulator retainer to keep the PTFE in the right spot. The rest of the design is mostly the motor, heater barrel assembly, electronics, and a 625 bearing to provide the pinching force. It has yet to be tested, but ideally it will be simpler to put together, as well as a sturdier design with no squeaks! I've printed all the parts on my travel bot, and as soon as I get home, I'll be assembling them and testing them out.

A few design notes:

* no more layered construction! that was a hack to make it laser-cuttable. new design is two halves bolted together. one half holds the motor + filament, the other half holds the idler wheel.
* idler wheel switched from acrylic + 608 bearing to a single 625 bearing. smaller, more compact, and nothing but a nearly indestructible bearing to break. should be quite a bit more consistant
* 4 adjustable screws with captive nuts for setting the pinch wheel tension. you'll be able to adjust it on the fly, without any sort of dis-assembly. hopefully the abs will act as a sort of spring as well

a few things i'd like to change yet:
* rotate the captive nut slot on the right-housing to be in-line with print direction for a better finish.
* switch the captive nut / bolt head holes between right and left housings to improve print quality for both (adjust on right side instead of left side)

Articulated modules for building modular robots. It is the repraped version of the Y1 modules that I have created for my PhD.
iearobotics.com/personal/juan/doctorado/Modulos-Y1/modulos-y1.html
Version 1.0 is the first one. It works and it is 3D printable, but the design should be improved in order to obtain a better printing quality.

UPDATE: 09/Nov/2011
A new version has been released: thingiverse.com/thing:13442