May 29, 2014
Los Angeles California based Bot Laboratory, founded by Zachary Schoch, has showcased a giant 3D printed 6'4"/1.9m wall, called the m_Wall at the 2014 Maker Faire.
"The future of the built environment is 3D printed." Schoch said. The m_Wall was printed with the Euclid Robot 3D printer using both black and clear ABS plastic.
The Euclid robot developed by Zachary Schoch is able to 3D print ABS plastic up to 44" x 44" x 48" (1.12 x 1.12 x 1.2m). It is a robot with real-time control and has the ability to scale up easily, be broken down and transported easily. And best of all it can readily move a 40 pound end effector (Ron 2.0 extruder) with ease.
The m_Wall is extremely strong with a single pass print thickness of over 1/4 inch (6.35mm). The most impressive part is, the m_Wall was printed in two pieces, and each took 5 hours to print, making for a total print time of only 10 hours - this is very fast!
"In order to print architecture, it needs to be created using less expensive methods than those of 'traditional' 3D printing," said Schoch. "Time is money, and now architectural scale 3D printing is economically feasible as demonstrated by the m_Wall due to the high speed and inexpensive plastic pellet based Euclid Robot 3D printer. Because time has a direct corollary to cost, Bot Laboratory constantly strives to drastically reduce print times."
Designed using Grasshopper 3D, all of the motion and extrusion data required to print the m_wall was completely scripted inside of Grasshopper using a custom script developed by Zachary Schoch. This process takes the place of the traditional 'slicing' step. It has the advantage of allowing the designer to not only design the form of what they want, but to also design the nature of how it is created; for instance, the ability to use print layers that are at funny angles or print layers that are curved and non-planar, or to directly script the path of the machine in order to create a geometry instead of the traditionally reversed geometry first process.
The project proves that such a project is economically feasible by using inexpensive plastic pellets and high-speed 3D printer.
Check out the video below the Euclid Robot 3D Printer in action:
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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great work. I have one of his original 3d bunnies.
Julio wrote at 5/29/2014 3:34:03 PM:
That's not a giant wall. In fact that's a medium wall printed with a giant 3d printer.
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