Three weeks ago I visited, the Rocky Mountain
RepRap Festival in Loveland, Colorado, and it was once again an amazing experience meeting
so many great people and getting inspired by so a ton of interesting projects, like
belt vorons, upside down printers, polar printers, chocolate printers, rotary casting, highly
fiber filled co-extrusion filament, pumpkin spice filament and so much more. But before we dive a little deeper, I first
had to get there, so travel montage here we go! Thanks to LDO Motors for sponsoring my trip! So I took a plane from Munich and due to airplane
internet was even able to watch the Starship launch live 35.000 feet up in the air. Landing in Denver was a bit turbulent but
once I sat in my rental and saw this beautiful country everything was great again. Well, until my brand new Ford broke down after
only 20 miles and I had to get towed back to the airport. The next day started with an amazing breakfast
and since I was a bit disappointed that I was visiting the Rocky Mountain RepRap festival
but everything was flat around Denver we took the car and drove for two hours through the
mountains and ended the day with a beautiful hike in the Rockies. This was the first time that the Rocky Mountain
Reprap festival took place and the venue itself was roughly an hour north of Denver in the
city of Loveland, Colorado. I mean, I’ve been twice to the Midwest RepRap
festival so being at an event that’s closer to the West Coast was great because the audience
was significantly different with tons of projects I haven’t seen so far and I am super excited
to tell you more about them. Let me know in the comments what you found
interesting and what maybe even inspired you to dig a little deeper! First let’s start with Hero Me which is
a modular tool head system that currently allows over 35 Billion different combinations
of hotend, extruder, cooling, bed probes and accelerometers. Andy did some amazing work right here and
basically built a Lego block system for tool heads. This started because he wasn’t satisfied
with the standard part cooling solution on his machines and engineered a solution that
was far superior to many of the stock setups. His friends then also wanted to use his cooling
solution so he did separate designs for specific machines. Yet this was super inefficient, so he came
up with the idea to make all of this as a modular system. And this is where we are in Gen7 now. You got an adapter plate for basically any
x-carriage and then mix and match the components you either already have and that you want
to use for your specific application. The best thing is he even uses heat set inserts! CNCKitchen.STORE! If you have an extruder or a hotend that’s
not supported yet, just send him a mail with a picture of the interface and some reference
dimensions and he’ll add it to his library! All of this is free to download and a great
start if you want or need to modify your 3D printer! RepRap festivals usually were dominated by
Prusa printers but it was really interesting to see that this year there were definitely
more Voron machines at the event than the well-known orange printers from the Czech
Republic. The Voron team itself had a huge booth and
didn’t only show off their regular lineup but also some special machines, from the huge
Voron 24 which is a machine with a 24 x 24 x 24 inches print volume but also some oddities
like a Voron Zero with everything printed out of flexible TPU which printed better than
one might imagine. The popularity of Voron printers also sprouted
a huge range of 3rd party accessories around the project. One particular one that caught my attention
was the Belt Bed System by VoronKits.com. What they offer is a parts kit that lets you
add a belt as your print platform. Contrary to regular belt printers, this system
is only used to eject your prints after they are done. This allows you to still print as fast and
precisely as before because the whole motion system stays the same, yet after each print
you eject the parts and start all over again without any manual interaction. Since the belt is not as stiff as a regular
print bed you shouldn’t print huge parts in warp-prone materials with it but I can
see a ton of applications in serial production. And if you still want to print high temp materials
they even ship a flap curtain system with it so the hot air is kept on the inside during
printing. They even told me that since this is only
a kit that they sell, they don’t run into any Stratasys patent problems. (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8668859B2/en) From printers with a belt axis, let’s come
to printers that print upside down! This is the Positron V3 that LDO Motors, how
actually sponsored my trip to RMRRF, showed off at their booth. I was super stoked to finally see it in person
because it’s in my opinion one of the most interesting printer concepts we’ve seen
in the last few years. The idea of the Positron is to have a very
compact but also a capable 3D printer that can be folded together to basically the size
of a filament box. KRALYN and the team around the Positron project
had to overcome a ton of design challenges for that and created custom solutions for
many components like a 90° hotend, a sychromesh cable driven motion system, or a see-through
but heated build plate because this is kind of the only way you can check your first layer
on an upside-down printer! The first design of the bed almost looked
like the rear window of your car with resistive traces on glass yet the latest design is even
cooler with a transparent conductive coating that evenly heats the sheet without any visual
distractions. The Positron project is Open Source and you
can theoretically just go to their GitHub and build one yourself. The reason why the Positron V3 was showcased
at the booth of LDO is that they support the Positron team to get this amazing tinkering
project to the point where you can easily buy and build one without the hassle of sourcing
and building parts yourself. LDO Motors have done a tremendous job over
the last few years. Their background is stepper motors, and if
you have a 3D printer, there is a high chance it uses LDO motors because all major brands
rely on them. Over half of the extruders that I recently
tested used LDO stepper motors which already tells a lot! LDO also worked together with engineering
teams like VORON to provide high-quality printer kits for the small VORON Zero to the V2.4
the Switchwire and the Trident. And with LDOs involvement in the Positron
project, they’ll also make sure that we can hopefully soon build one of the most exciting
printers with ease. Thanks again to LDO for sponsoring my trip
and if you have the desire to build a VORON definitely check out the LDO kits linked in
the description! The next cool and really unconventional printer
that I saw was the P-REXZ a polar core XZ printer designed by the Armchair Engineering
team. Polar 3D printers aren’t something we see
a lot these days even though they do have their benefits. One perk of a polar printer is that it needs
the least amount of motion system for its print volume. Since the bed is spinning, the x-axis only
needs to move the radius of the bed and not the full diameter. Even though there are some non-standard things
on the hardware that need to be figured out, like how to get the heater and thermistor
wires to an infinitely rotating table which they simply solved by a slip ring. One of the bigger challenges was firmware
where they invested quite some brain power. Standard Klipper doesn’t support polar printers
with the rotational axis. I think RepRap firmware would have been an
option. Still, they went all in and modified Klipper
for this really nice-looking kinematics which was quite a task to get all edge cases covered
and work with a combination of angles and cartesian coordinates to get nice and smooth
print moves or to even get mesh bed leveling working. It’s a beautiful machine to look at, and
I had the feeling that they did it mainly for the challenge, yet besides the small size
these kinematics might be interesting for multi-axis printing. By adding a 4th tilt axis to the print head
you would also get a fake 5th axis because the polar axis of the bed would allow you
to reach places that wouldn’t be reachable on a cartesian printer with just a single
tilt axis. If you want to build one, the files for the
P-REXZ and the fork of Klipper can be found on the ArmChair Engineering Github. So the guys from Armchair Engineering were
at the booth of dfh consume and they had some spools there of the most interesting filament
I’ve seen for a while. This is Co-Extrusion filament from Pheatus,
and it’s not the stuff that you know from your dual-color prints. This is highly filled carbon fiber or glass
fiber nylon coated on the outside with what they call a modified resin to improve layer
adhesion. I’ve first seen such a co-extrusion setup
with BASF Ultrafuse where they coat the brittle metal-filled core with a flexible skin to
make it not as easily break in the extruder. I think Phaetus might also do this also for
a similar reason because 25% carbon filling is quite a lot. I haven’t found a ton of info on that filament,
so Phaetus, if you are watching this, I want some to test! From high-tech nylon filaments to probably
one of the most interesting and delicious 3D printing technologies I’ve seen at the
Rocky Mountain RepRap festival and this was Ellies Cocoa Press. A chocolate 3D printer that doesn’t suck
and is able to print this super tasty brown mass with incredible details. The Cocoa Press doesn’t only look similar
to a Voron Zero, they even supported her in the design of the motion system. But the heart of this chocolate printer is
the stainless steel syringe-style printhead and the custom-formulated chocolate that gets
loaded in it. The models are sliced with any regular slicer,
and the standard nozzle the Cocoa Press comes with is 0.8 mm in diameter. Before you start printing you need to heat
the 70 g of chocolate for around 15 minutes until the consistency is right. The two heater zones make sure that the temperature
can be controlled down to a 10th of a degree because even slight variations in temperature
changes the viscosity of the chocolate. The temperatures you print chocolate by the
way are around 34 °C for the milk chocolate and around a degree less for the dark chocolate. Even though you can put any chocolate into
the Cocapress, Ellie, of course, recommends using hers because it has the right formulation
for a good viscosity, is bubble-free, and is ethically sourced. If you live in the US or Canada, you can reserve
a kit machine right now, and I really hope that Ellie will even sell me one for Germany
because this will probably be the first 3D printer my wife fully approves! And after awesomely tasting prints to awesomely
smelling prints. This is pumpkin spice filament from Canadian
filaments. And this stuff didn’t only look like pumpkin
soup it smelled sooo nice! Unfortunately printing it gets rid of most
of the good smell, but hey, it’s a great alternative to the fart-smelling glow-in-the-dark
filament I recently tested. And if you want to print the beautifully smelling
Pumpkin Spice filament together with the Rotten Egg Red Glow in the Dark then the 3D Chameleon
might be the perfect solution for you. The 3D Chameleon that Bill showed off, is
already the 3rd iteration of a multi color addon that you can put on almost any FDM 3D
printer, and the interesting thing was that Bill actually showed it on Bambulabs X1 where
due to shorter unloading distances and a way smarter purging routine he cuts down the time
for a filament change in half and reduces filament poops to a minimum. If you buy the kit, you’ll get the 4 color
multiplexer, the feeder and selector unit, a control box, and the selector switch. When you install it on a machine, you add
the trigger that’s used to indicate when a filament change should take place somewhere
where you can bump it with your bed or your hotend. Once activated the sophisticated cam system
then selects and feeds the filament to the nozzle. Of course, it’s not as clean looking as
BambuLab AMS but it also only costs half as much. One of the reasons why Bambulab's multi-material
system works so reliably is their use of a filament cutter, so you don’t drag the half-molten
end of the filament through your Bowden tube potentially jamming something. Yet Bill also has a solution for that and
calls it his 3DClippy which is a DIY filament cutter that you can for example add to your
Sovol SV-06 to make it an ultra-reliable multi-color 3D printer together with the 3D Chameleon. It’s compatible with many machines and if
you want more information check out his website! All of the projects we’ve taken a look at
so far were extrusion-based, so the last one I really wanted to show you is the Photoncast
from Lowry3D, a rotary casting system for UV resins. The idea is really simple yet clever. You print a mold using a translucent filament,
add some mold release, pour in some resin, and install the mold in the fixture. When it rotates it covers all surfaces with
resin and then blasts it with UV light to harden and after just a minute you’ve got
a finished part. I find the idea really interesting and due
to the control over the movement you can even change the wall thickness in different locations
or even embed electronics in the parts. Charles told me that his idea behind the Photoncast
is to be an affordable machine for mass production with a ton of flexibility due to easy manufacturing
of the molds and the quick cycle times, and he wants to launch his machine on Kickstarter
this year. I would have hoped to see even some more complex
parts but I’m sure we’ll see him again on the next RepRap festival! So this was the first part of my coverage
of the first Rocky Mountain RepRap Festival in Loveland, Colorado. I hope you enjoy this format because I love
to be at conventions like this and spread the word about amazing things I’ve seen
there! Leave a like and subscribe to not miss the
next parts and let me know what you found most intersting! Auf wiedersehen and goodbye!
