MAKE: Blog: Make a Reprap Robot Part 1: The Electronics

Make a Reprap Robot Part 1: The Electronics - Weekend Project Podcast

This week, take the first step towards making your own self-replicating rapid-prototyping robot! You can order up your boards, from the Reprap foundation or make your own since the whole project is open source. Get your parts and solder these up and test them! Huge thanks goes out to Zach Hoeken, who inspired this project. Marius Kintel, Philipp Tiefenbacher, Benko, Red, and other folks at Metalab along with Michael Zeltner and Flo of the GRL Vienna crew pulled a lot of all nighters this week getting this robot together to present at Roboexotica. The best ways to make excellent new friends is to ask for help on an ambitious project!

Sponsored by Ponoko: Ponoko is a new concept that's perfect for Makeziners. Use it to make and promote your product ideas. Ponoko supplies the digital manufacturing technology and the materials, you supply the creativity. Plus you can sell your product ideas in their showroom. Ponoko is this week's sponsor of our weekend video podcast.

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Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: Grudge on November 23, 2007 at 4:06 AM

wow, this looks like a great project. Busy downloading the video file. Any idea on what the costs would be ?

Posted by: BruceWattendorf on November 23, 2007 at 7:30 AM

I have been with the project for over a year now and it is from 400.00 to 500.00 us $ for everything. but that is using our original bot. www.reprap.org I think it might be cheaper using the McWire bot. I do know it will be easier to build the McWire bot. the goal is to be able to make a McWire bot and then make the parts to build the Darwin bot if somebody wanted. The original goal was to be able to build a machine that was able to make its own parts. We have the chicken and the egg problem and that you need a machine to be bale to make parts for a 2nd machine... So then Zach, and Bre, has worked on making a bot from ordinary parts and few 3d printed parts so then we can get more to be able to build machines..

Posted by: TheThompsonFive on November 24, 2007 at 3:27 PM

Are you going to do the entire project in back to back podcasts, or will you give us a chance to catch up?

Posted by: bre3 on November 25, 2007 at 5:22 AM

I'm planning on doing a podcast on the physical building of the robot hardware in the next week or two and then do the podcast about how to make the software work when the software is done!!!

Posted by: michaeljanderson on November 28, 2007 at 6:18 PM

Is all of this (all 3 axis of the cnc machine, control of the heating element, and the extruder screw) controlled from a single Arduino?

Posted by: bre3 on November 29, 2007 at 1:03 AM

It's actually 2 arduinos. It almost fits on one, but we needed more tx/rx action so it expanded to two.

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