This week I was primarily working on finalizing our design for our 2d gantry system and beginning to look for parts to begin construction. To begin this process we looked towards existing 3d printer designs, and found a page that documented several of the most basic and popular designs in 3d printers. All of the products used belts rather than threaded rods, as they seemed to operate faster and be easier to use with a stepper motor. Based on this we’ve decided to utilize a design with belts, and more specifically to follow the design of the Ultimaker models, as shown in the image below.
A major benefit of this design is that Ultimaker is an open source company, and all of the CAD files for the requisite parts are available online. After deciding on this design and finding exact measures of all of the parts I spent some time looking at what parts are available online. There was some trouble here as many of the official Ultimaker parts are sold with a huge markup and are not sold in the US, meaning shipping times and costs would eat away at our project. To circumvent this we have decided to modify the CAD files available to work with more generic parts which would be easy to obtain, and also allow us to customize the design to the needs of our project. We tried printing one of the modified parts to test for strength and print quality, which is pictured below.
The pulley pictured above is meant to have a rod through the center and to have a belt around the teeth. Based on this initial print, it seems that the 3d printed parts are durable and accurate enough to work in the final project.
I also began trying to design the frame and support of the gantry system, but have not finalized any decisions regarding that. Overall this week I was on schedule, as I was able to finalize how our gantry would work, found retailors to purchase generic copies, and tested 3d printing and began modifications. Mostly what I will be focusing on this upcoming week is finalizing those plans and ordering the basic parts associated with the Ultimaker design. Additionally I will make the modifications needed to the CAD files we have found and 3d print a majority of the initial parts we will need.