Jun.20, 2012
New 3D printer is cost prohibitive. If you get a good deal out there on an industrial-quality robot arm, you can now rebuild it into a super functional 3D printer.
Dane Kouttron documented his process of re-purposing an ancient, monstrous 1980's IBM 7575 SCARA Robot Arm into a functional 3D ABS printer. He named it 3D Print-ARM (aka: My Bots Bigger Than Yours) - it is able to print large objects roughly ~25"x12"x6.5" maximum.
The robotic arm was acquired from a lab clean out. Unfortunately, the motor drives, servo amplifiers and control hardware were missing. It was designed to operate via servo motors and precision feedback sensors, so suitable replacements needed to be sourced/designed to drive each axis. This is very different from a number of DIY 3D printers which rely on feedback-less stepper motor assemblies.
So the project features some motor upgrades, documentation of encoder positioned motor control feedback theory, the interminglings of EMC2 [Linux CNC], heated workspace construction and a step by step overview of transitioning from 3D stl model to 3D g-coded structure.
Dane Kouttron is still testing and improving his project. His latest update is 2 extra heated pads and 2x200w 24v power supplies are added to allow testing the heated build platform to higher temperatures for preventing warping with large builds.
watch the demo video of this robot-arm-abs-printer tackling some earlier medium sized prints. - "Note this is running from the developed hardware detailed below, not the stock controls hardware. All hardware to computer interfacing is done over the DB25 parallel port."
Source: transistor-man via hack-a-day
Posted in 3D Printers
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yowza! thats a lot of documentation!