I’m now working for guy named Joe Graves and Joe’s got cancer. He just started radiation and chemo is coming soon. It sounds like the prognosis is very good but he’s got a difficult road ahead.

Joes attitude towards this is really amazing. We get funny stories (and pictures, which, to be honest, sorta freak me out) about the ”Hannibal Lecter mask” (his words!) that holds his head steady during radiation treatments and about the fun times he’s got coming once the treatments ramp up and.. well.. it just goes on and on. And it goes on in good nature and with humor and with strength I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have.

Anyway, here’s a link to his blog about this process which you might find informative, amusing, uplifting, inspiring and/or terrifying: www.someguywithcancer.com.

That kind of press is usually accompanied by several questions in the comments, wondering about the quality of prints. Can something that moves at such speeds actually produce high-quality prints or is Ultimaker just about speed?

The answer is yes, an Ultimaker can absolutely produce prints of amazing quality.

A few weeks or so ago, I posted in the Ultimaker google group about this and asked for pictures of really nice prints folks have done on their Ultimaker. This blog post, which is a bit later than I wanted (life and such sometimes gets in the way of play.. annoying..), is some of my favorites. As you look at these pictures, keep in mind that Ultimaker just started shipping a few months ago – these are pictures of what the early, rev 1 machines are doing…

I’ve tried to hotlink all the pictures to their sources and include links to the people who originally did them. If you spot something wrong/missing or are the person who printed it and have something to correct/add, please post in the comments and I’ll happily update things.. .

Bucking the tradition of working up to it, I have to start with the most impressive print I’ve seen, done by Paul “Screal” Candler. Paul’s one of the masters at configuring netfabb, a software package that slices and now acts as host software, and he laughs (probably laughs insanely) at other FMD high-resolution prints.

Here’s his copy of Yoda at a 0.02mm perimeter layer height:

Yoda by Screal

That’s not a typo, either: 0.02mm. 20 microns.  0.000787 inches. Holy crap, Paul!!

This was done using the 1/2 layer feature of netfabb, which is similar to the new Skin module in skeinforge 42+. It causes the infill of the object to be done as normal but prints two perimeters, each at 1/2 the normal layer height. For those of you thinking that Skin is somehow cheating, the infill is still at a big, fat 0.04mm… which is still frickin’ amazing and still definitely ‘holy crap, Paul!’

And a couple more from Paul.. One’s the “spinnyJiggyVase” again at 0.02mm, in a nicely artsy pose:

And, ’tis the season for scary, the DevilHead, at 0.04mm perimeter height:

Yoda seems to be the new calibration cube with the Ultimaker crowd.. Here’s another one, this time from Bill Culverhouse. I don’t have details on the print but it looks pretty cool with the lighting (though he needs to shave his ears). Looking at it closely, I’d guess this is down around 0.075mm or so layer height: (edit: it’s 0.08mm layer height)

A copy of Beethoven Bust from Thingiverse user Fabberworld at 0.12mm layer height. The slicing code in netfabb really shows its stuff in this one..

I almost didn’t include this one from Joel “Misguided” Chia because I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.. It’s a copy of the “Faerie Bottle or Bud Vase” – after you take a look at this picture, go look at the Thing then look at the picture again.. It’s really pretty cool. Next time include a reference object, Joel!

Here’s another from Paul Candler, a spiral bevel gear. I’m not sure if this is a 0.02mm or a 0.04mm perimeter but, either way, check out the quality of the infill on top – nice!

Bradley, who I got to meet at MakerFaire NYC a few weeks ago, sent these pictures of the Pink Panther Woman (the other Ultimaker calibration cube) along. Not sure on the print details are here but he says it’s his first print with netfabb…

Back to Yoda! This time from Hrvoje Čop. He says this was printed at 60% scale which, if you look closely at the detail here and think about the misery of tiny prints (if you have a 3D printer, that is.. if not, know that tiny prints are notoriously painful), is pretty darn good:

Florian “flouSH” Horsch is another wizard with netfabb – cohort of Screal.. Here’s his print of Jordan Millers High Resolution Stanford Bunny, printed with 0.08mm infill and 0.04mm perimeter, fresh off (er.. actually still on) the printer with just a little cleanup to do: (netfabb doesn’t have Comb, which is one of my favorite Skeinforge things). Check out the bottom of the ears – overhang central, there..

And what looks like another copy of a spiral bevel gear. Not sure of the settings on this one but probably similar to the bunney above. Again, beautiful infill on this. Florian’s got a whole album of stuff, too much for me to copy here, that you should check out, too..

Here’s more from Bradley. I wish this was a higher resolution picture but for those people that think the Bowden setup kills the Ultimakers usability, I think Bradley might disagree. This one’s via netfabb with 0.06mm perimeters:

He’s also got a copy of “Elvis, the Printable(?) Skull“. Er.. I’m not going ANYWHERE near why this is named Elvis.. Again at 0.06mm on the perimeter:

And another from Hrvoje Čop. Don’t have print details here but it looks pretty cool..

From Jordan Miller, not a print but a picture of a print. He stole a copy of Yoda off the Ultimaker table at MakerFaire:NYC and put it under a microscope. I’ll just quote Jordan here:

… You can see with the scale bar… we have 162 pixels = 1 mm. The average layer height in that pic is around 12 pixels, or 0.074 mm (That is 74 microns). And that orangey low res looking thing on the left? That’s not a print… that’s my finger.  …

See all those blobs? And the way the layers don’t really line up nicely? Neither do I. Check out the Hive76 article he wrote about this, too.

Bernhard Kubicek‘s been doing tons of work on firmware improvements. I think he’s the one that got us all off the stock “5D” firmware and onto Sprinter and lately he (and others!) have been kicking ass getting Marlin all happy.

Here’s Bernhards copy of the OK Hand, done at 0.09mm layer height. This was done during his Marlin testing – you can see some X or Y skips futher down the finger but the detail toward the fingertips is pretty impressive:

I almost passed over this one of the nautilus from Bernhard but then realized that’s an M3 bolt sitting next to the object, which sorta puts it into a different perspective (and I’m sure that’s why he included it..) He notes that the ripples are caused by acceleration so I’m guessing this was early in his Marlin testing – I think those issues have been fixed..

Last, Taylor Alexander got ahold of a Stratasys demo object. I’m going to end this post.. this post that seems to have taken a year to write (and probably read.. sorry!) with his picture of this and a couple prints that Ultimakers have done of this, since the STL showed up on Thingiverse..

The Stratasys print, which Taylor measured at around 0.25mm layers, is pretty damn nice. In particular, the infill is very impressive..

 Screal, of course, jumped on this STL, though he toned things down to only 0.04mm on the perimeter.. Take a really close look at the top of this print – if he’d done this in white, I have no doubt it’d be hard to tell from the commercially-made version:

And one more from Bradley, at 0.06mm perimeter:

Wow.. Epically long post (for me, anyway) but now, the next time you hear somebody say “sure Ultimaker’s psychotically fast but what’s the print quality like?” you know exactly what to say…

My stoopid camera was acting up and I lost a bunch of pictures. There are a bazillion others on the net anyway though so no huge loss, I guess.. Here’s some random (and not-so-random) ones with what my still-sake-soggy-brain can remember.

Both Erik de Bruijn and Martijn Elserman from Ultimaker showed up and brought a few bots with them, including an Ultimaker+, which you can (mostly) see below.

Martijn can be seen on the right and the “holy crap” looks on the other people in the picture are pretty typical of those who visited – this bot’s just insane, combining the general awesomeness of the Ultimaker with a crazy build volume. The orange thing on the kids arm is a single print and I don’t think it maxed out the Z axis. Yoiks.

Erik (blue coat) made it into this one:

Fellow Ultimaker driver Bradley came by with his son Theo and their bot. There seemed to be a steady stream of girls stopping and asking questions, which Theo seemed to be ok with..

Right across the isle was John Abella, organizer of the 3d Printer Village. Here’s John fending off yet another crowd of girls. He looks like he’s growing tired of that.. (note to John’s wife: kidding!)

Also at the Village was notorious ham Luis Rodriguez, with a couple Makerbots:

Josef Prusa was in the Village too – nice to finally meet him, though he had no idea who I was. That’s a MakerGear Prusa in front of him..

Sadly, Rick from MakerGear didn’t make it to MakerFaire this year. His new Mosaic machine did, though. Biggest surprise for me was how small this machine actually is – it’s tiny, even though it’s got a 5x5x5″ build area. I wasn’t able to get as close a look at it as I’d have liked but it did seem very neat and sturdy – unsurprising coming from MakerGear.

A closer look at the Mosaics top:

Sam Cervantes was right there too, with his new ultra-tiny SoliDoodle; 4x4x4″ build area, assembled, US$700. It’s got sortofa similar style setup to an Ultimaker but not quite the same – another one I wish I’d gotten a closer look at..

MakerBot was, of course, there in force. They had a track set up for turtle racers and were doing regular runs, complete with a play-by-play on a PA system. I didn’t get to see an actual race – too crowded! – but the track looked pretty cool:

Ultimachine was there. Got to meet Johnny and company but didn’t get pictures – they setup their table and ran off to enjoy the show – smart! (I didn’t steal any PLA off your table guys, honest!)

Outside the 3D Printer Village area was 3D Systems, who seems to be on a bit of a buying spree lately, and a big setup. Quite crowded there and I didn’t get many pictures. I did get a shot of what is probably the biggest Gothic Cathedral Playset in existance, though:

AtFAB, an open source system for making furniture with CNC-type machines, had a nice display:

Bare Conductive, makers of conductive ink: (their website shows a MakerFaire Editors Choice award – congrats!). I didn’t get too much info here but chatted for a bit with Jordan Miller about them. He was quite impressed and was going to get some of their product – write it up, Jordan!

This guy had hair funky enough for me to take a picture. He turned just as I was taking the picture – the hair’s got to be over 2 feet wide. I’m not used to the city, I guess..

I later learned (saw) that he had some funky shoes, too. Here’s Dave from SparkFun Electronics trying them on. If you’re a fan of SFE’s Friday New Product Videos, you’ll know Dave has a similar role as Kenney on South Park. He seemed to do ok with the funky shoes, though..

Waaay over on the other side of the show was PVC Bendit, a pretty interesting system for bending PVC tubing. The setup on the left was sortofa water sprinkler deal – lots of small holes drilled and a water hookup – which I’m sure every kid in the place would have flocked to, if MakerFaire was held a month earlier..

Very cool sculpture, “Braindrop”, by Kate Raudenbush. Check out her website..

I don’t know what this is but I want one:

Sorta similar, I don’t know what these things are and am not sure I want them but they look interesting.. What do you get when you cross a circular saw blade, a CNC machine and some bit of electronics with very large capacitors? Dunno but want to see it (from a distance) plugged in and switched on..

Yet another thing I want, though I’m not sure exactly what it is. The circular center part is a big fan – I’m sure it’s meant to fly. It’s got warning labels on it, so you know it’s good.

From the “I don’t care what it gets for gas milage, I’m not taking that on the highway” category: (but cool anyway)

The number of kids that were really engaged with all this stuff was both surprising and encouraging.. It seemed like every display that had stuff kids could poke at or mess with had a crowd of kids poking and messing with it – even things like the soldering classes seemed to be filled mostly with kids. Cool.

Some future architects:

…and some at a lock picking class. I can’t help but wonder at the parental thought process that signs the little ones up for a lock picking class but, well, to each their own.

I’d say “that’s about it” but that’s really only about 2% of it. That’s all I’ve got, though.

(actually one more bit.. Had one of the best meals ever Friday night at a place called Mr. Robata, just north of Times Square, so here’s a shout out to them. A bit higher-end but if you’re a fan of Japanese food and are in the area, check them out. I’ll definitely be going back, next time I’m in NYC.)

GHI Electronics announces the (AFAIK) first .NET Gadgeteer product:

…Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is an open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the .NET Micro Framework and Visual Studio/Visual C# Express. Gadgeteer combines the advantages of object-oriented programming, solderless assembly of electronics with a kit of peripherals, and support for quick form-factor construction using computer-aided design. This powerful combination allows embedded and handheld devices to be iteratively designed, built and programmed in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks. Learn more at http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/. …

Although you can buy just the board itself, they have a “FEZ Spider Starter Kit” for US$250. Before you start running away because of the price, look at all the goodies you get with it: (picture courtesy of GHI, without their knowledge (please don’t sue me!))

FEZ Spider Starter Kit

Color touch screen, enet, SD card, webcam, buttons, blinky lights, USB host (attach a keyboard/mouse/anything to it), USB client (act as a USB device to your PC), joystick, all the cables. Craploads of stuff.

Though it’s a small package, it’s no slouch – it’s a 72MHz 32-bit ARM7 with 4.5MB (yes, M) of program space and 16MB of RAM. This isn’t needed because .NETMF is bloatware, either. GHI’s other .NETMF products get along quite nicely with far, far less. And you can always do native code in C or assembly, if you need code that’s really small and fast:

FEZ Spider Board

I’ve got an Arduino UNO and it’s nice and all but it’s too hardwary for me. I’ve also got a FEZ Panda (and Panda II) that runs .NETMF but even though are too low-level for me – do I need a 1k resistor or a 10k? Or do I need one at all? I don’t know. I could figure it out if I felt like learning but I just want to screw around.

With .NET Gadgeteer, if you’ve got a project that needs I2C, you look at the picture above and just plug into one of the sockets labeled I2C. Or don’t even use the picture above and just look at the board, plug into any spare socket that’s got an I on the etch, stuff the socket number (also on the etch) into the code and you’re all wired up. That’s it for hardware – you’re done.

And if you then want to turn it into a real project GHI does sell the processing bits separately, which is based on .NET Micro Framework. And .NET Gadgeteer is based on .NETMF so it’s about as easy of a port as you can get..

If the idea of poking at Arduino stuff has you interested but it’s a bit too nerdy for you (and it is pretty nerdy – no offense, guys), this stuff is definitely worth taking a look at. Far, far more approachable for people with little/no hardware experience.

In particular, the Z axis was really torturing me for a while by skipping steps occasionally. I stared long and hard at the mechanics, trying to spot some problem; I tweaked the Z Pololu pot several times; I pulled apart and scrutinized the duct designed to keep the Pololu’s cool; I put the machine up on books to encourage more airflow; I spent a lot of time staring at gcode and the firmware and the effects of things like Fillet (which seems to break up Z moves).

Then, after begging for help in the Ultimaker google group, Martijn Elserman simply says: “Did you put some grease on the thread already?”

Uh.. I was supposed to grease that? Ok.. Hey, it works now! Crap. I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned here but I’m not sure what it is.

Anyway, here’s a picture:

(click picture to see bigger version at flickr)

This is the Tornado by Martijn and it pretty much uses up ALL the Z space on the Ultimaker.  The build platform is sitting right on the bottom of the machine and there’s about 2-3mm of space between the top of the tornado and the nozzle. Tight fit! It’s 0.25mm layers with 1.5 w/t. Print time was around 80-90 minutes, IIRC.

So.. Bit of struggling at the start but I seem to be on track now. That it happily printed a ~90 minute job (after I stopped being stoopid) almost right out of the box is something I’m pretty happy about..

There’s a base model for US$799 which includes:
- RAMPS (unassembled)
- MakerGear stepper extruder (3mm or 1.75mm)
- About 5x5x5 inch build platform (~127mm)
- Much slippery mechanical goodness via bearings and PTFE coatings
- UP! style X/Y/Z axis arrangement
- No power supply?

Then there’s a Plus version for $999 which adds to the base model:
- HBP
- Assembled RAMPS
- More filament (variety pack type deal)
- Power supply

Note that these are just the bits that caught my eye. Visit www.makergear.com for actual & official details.

I’m a little bit surprised at the UP!-style design, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing – it’s just different than I expected, based on meeting Rick at MakerFaire NYC last year and chatting about some ideas.

MakerGear has a very solid (and deserved, IMO!) reputation of building high-quality gear and offering unmatched levels of service. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to order a MakerGear Mosaic but it’s something I’m definitely going to keep an eye on…

Just powered up my Ultimaker for the first time and, amazingly (amazingly based on my build skills, not Ultimaker quality), it all seems to work. So far, anyway. I still haven’t put any filament through it yet. That’ll come soon, though.

There were a few bumps on the road here: the box was missing a couple parts which the Ultimaker folks rush-shipped to me, work, just being lazy and, most fun, my PC caught a virus last week that eventually resulted in my just buying a new PC; 3 nights wasted with that crap. Grr..

Total build time for me was just under 2 weeks but I took my time and had several interruptions. Anybody who’s built a Cupcake or something similar could do it in a weekend if they wanted to. Total soldering: 0. Total multimeter time used: 0.

Anyway, the build was pretty straight-forward. The laser cut parts are nicely etched with labels on what goes where. Here’s a picture of the back panel – notice the etching for the motor and endstops:

This may seem like a small thing but, speaking for all other mechanical klutz’ out there, it’s appreciated. The bottom panel where the electronics are mounted (sorry – don’t have a good picture of that. edit: here’s one) is really well labeled with laser etching - where the wires for each endstop and stepper goes and which color wire goes to each terminal. Nice.

Another small thing that I really liked is that the kit uses square (not hex) nuts for all t-slots in wooden pieces. Anybody who makes a kit with t-slots and wooden pieces should use these too – hex nuts are a real pain in the neck in small areas.

Even though I haven’t printed anything yet, I’m really impressed with the thought that went into this box. It’s neat & tidy and nothing, nothing, along the way felt like a part was used in the design because they happened to have it on hand.

Erik did have me a little worried recently when he commented that the X/Y belts are very tight to improve print quality at the expense of making the machine louder. I’d gotten used to have a quiet machine – my Cupcake got Rob Giseburt’s PSDM X/Y drivers and Aaron Double’s X/Y low rider, both of which did very nice things to the Cupcakes noise level – and was dreading a little going back to having a noisy machine. Turns out I was worried for nothing because, moving at 100mm/second, the Ultimaker is maybe just a little louder than my Cupcake at 25mm/second. Sweet.

Next up is actually making it print something, which I hope to start poking at later tonight…

WordPress, if you didn’t know, is the host/software of this here blog.

If you have a WordPress blog, they give you some nifty stats and such about search terms that end up here and page hits and stuff like that. My blog gets a fairly steady number of hits. Not great, not horrible. If I write about stuff people actually care about, it goes up. If I don’t, it doesn’t. I get paid the same ($0) either way so I tell myself I don’t worry about it, even a little.

Anyway, today, I see this:

Holy crap! Look at that spike today on the right! I’m popular!! It’s about time all you godless heathens started paying attention.

Yeah. Hovering my mouse over that spike and I see a different picture..

You jerks.

Looks like things are coming together for Erik and company – they’re now taking pre-orders for their Ultimaker 3D printer!!

I got to meet Erik and see this printer at Botacon, back in December, and was really quite impressed. It looks very clean. It moves at speeds that border on psychotic. It’s got more than twice as much room on X/Y/Z than my trusty old Cupcake does (aka: +8x build volume) but the machine itself is only a little bit bigger.

I’m a little nervous about the lack of a heated platform. I’m not too, too worried, though - I expect that either the Ultimaker people will have one before too much longer or that something like the one that MakerGear has on their Prusa will work on it.

Also nervous that the Ultimaker is fed by a Bowden cable.. It’ll be interesting to see how well that deals with ooze.

Even with those (potential) issues, this thing still seems like it’s going to be a monster. I’m excited..

My last post (last year! :O ) ended up with me wanting to do a series of posts in the following weeks about configuring my new MakerGear stepper extruder but then I started to notice some trends in the output.. That led to the revival of some work I started last summer to make coming up with new printer profiles easier. That led to some weird results that made me scratching my head for a while. Then work got crazy, insanely busy. Then I was quite tired and did nothing but watch cartoons for a while.

Anyway.. Just in case anybody’s wondering, I’m not dead yet. More is coming..