The build party was another big success, the 7 participant teams built themselves a brand new Reprap “Prusa i3“.
The people from GarageLab were very helpful, and have a nice space to work at. We used the coworking space rooms to do our building. Thanks to Daniel Bruns and Carsten Born, they helped out a lot. Also thanks to Lab maintainer Axel Ganz for helping setting things up, and Yvonne Firdaus, the Coworking Space / GarageLab owner.
We had a lot of help from the community people attending, there is a lot of information to be had when you are in a room with Kliment Yanev, Josef Prusa, Joachim Glauche, Nathan Zadoks and Ruben Lubbes. Also there was a group of locals working on their Reprap’s in the fablab itself, there were a few machines from our earlier parties present. It was nice seeing them improve the machines, and using them a lot.
We built a reasonably new model, the Prusa i3, and it is a big improvement in building the machine. That was also one of the reasons the machines are so quick to be in use, most of the people were printing at the start of sunday afternoon, and everyone printed a model that looked pretty nice.
The i3 is different from the model we used in our previous courses because it now uses a wooden box-frame that is very stiff, stable, and easy to build. Also it moves the motors to the bottom of the machine, so the Z-axis does not hang from the motors anymore. Also the amount of noise the machine makes is lower, and cable management is improved. Also the spool mount is integrated on top of the machine.This makes the i3 a very good option to build as your next Reprap. The design is still in developement, so for now the build info is still incomplete.
We did most of the building in the first day, and were mostly doing the last part of the electronic setup on sunday morning. The electronics we used were ReprapDiscount RAMPS system, and jhead hotends. Most of the other parts were sourced at ReprapSource. Both of these performed very well. Around lunch most of the people were getting ready to print, and we made some cool models in the afternoon.
Then we also did some presentations on the history of the project, getting help from the community, and some info on how to do 3D modelling with OpenSCAD.
Just look at this 7,4cm tall Statue of Liberty, it is not very visible because of the background and transparent material, but the crown is really very nice. I hope we will get more pictures of that soon.
Some pictures are already available here, but i hope to see more soon.
And this time we managed to do a group picture again, so here it is!
There was even an interview done with me by Josef Prusa in his series of interviews, see it here
And finally: a timelapse of the build!
[youtube_sc url=1Lxe34VohlQ]
I would like to personally thank Axel Funke, for driving me home afterward although he had to go a totally different direction to get home himself!
We will be doing more of these buildparties, so if you want to organise one in your town or hackerspace, contact us!
