Category – Mechanics

For the past year, I’ve mostly been caught up in writing my PhD thesis, which is why nothing new has appeared here. However, sporadically I also worked on a design for a machine to sort M&Ms by color.
Over the past few months I have made a few improvements to my Rostock Mini 3D printer, which has greatly improved the quality of its prints and ease of use. For example, one of the additions is a Bluetooth interface which doesn’t require any firmware support.
Those of you who’ve read both my Rostock and HAluBot articles, might have noticed that I would have a lot of parts from the Rostock left over after building the HAluBot. In order to put those leftover parts to good use, and because having a 3D printer will be convenient during the design and debugging of my HAluBot, I decided to make a Rostock Mini.
Since the first 3D printer I constructed, a variation on the Rostock, only worked so-so, I decided to tear it down and reuse its components for a new printer. In this first article about my new printer, named HAluBot, I’ll go over and explain my design choices and show some renders of the CAD model I constructed.
In the summer of 2012, I stumbled upon the fantastic delta 3D printer by Johan Rocholl, the Rostock. Until then, 3D printers didn’t really interest me, but the Rostock looked so nice that I couldn’t ignore it. So I decided to build a derivative version myself, and started designing.