Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
look to
MicroController Pros
for their products. You can buy the Alamode
here
,
which
has an American warehouse and
distributors around the world
.
—
David Bordonada
Control a 3D Printer
HACK 59
Home 3D printing is a relatively new possibility for most people, but as
prices for printers continue to drop, you might find yourself happily print-
ing plastic. Why not let your Raspberry Pi help?
A 3D printer is an amazing machine that lets you convert a 3D model that exists only
in bits and bytes into something tangible. Until recently, the cost for this hardware was
prohibitively high, both in price and space required to house it. In the last few years,
however, they've gone from tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars to as little as
a few hundred and from the size of a refrigerator to smaller than your toaster.
These increasingly common home 3D printers use an
additive
method, which means
plastic (or other malleable materials) are driven through a heated extruder. This ex-
truder is attached to a series of belts and motors, which allow it to move along the X,
Y, and Z axes. The plastic is then extruded in layers onto a plate of glass (which may
or may not be heated, depending on the plastic type in use), where it cools quickly.
The printer repeats this process, printing layer upon layer (upward) until the object is
completed.
There are many different types of these 3D printers, but the most common is known
as the RepRap family of printers. These printers feature open hardware and are rela-
tively easy to build from publicly available plans on the Internet, but they are also
available in prebuilt commercial offerings. One such vendor is
Lulzbot
, which produces
and sells high-quality (and high-resolution) RepRap style printers.
For the purposes of this hack, we'll assume that you have a Lulzbot AO-101 (shown in
Figure 6-11
), but these instructions apply generally to any printer in the RepRap family.
