John and I saw them and we now have “his and her’s” version plus hopefully a homebrew one we build ourselves 🙂 This is part of the movement calle Reprap which sure feels like the old Altair 800 kit computer days. That product was what gave start to the Microsoft with Altair Basic and of course it was based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Those were the days!
The main thing is that Reprap represents the largest set of printers actually being made, so the market is still very much a kit oriented one (although Stratasys just bought MakerBot for $500M, so they will have huge share in the finished product market). There seems to be a blog aggregator (really RSS) at rerap aggregator and there is place where you can see how to build a reprap. These are focused on so called cartesian printers where the lead product seems to be the Prusa Mendel (Iteration 2) which has a good set of instructions as well as instruction videos. There is even a wiki page with the places to get complete kits. There is also Iteration 3 coming out now and of course there is a forum.
In case you are confused by all the 3d printers out there (I was), a google search shows that the best overview site is at 3dprinterlist. In short there is another family of printers that are called delta printers. Seems like building this, we should instead wait for the Kossel Pro to arrive in December, so maybe do the Prusa Mendal first and then do a Delta printer which Johann started with the Rostock. It’s main advantage is that it can build tall things.
Congrats to Ethan and Joe for their Kickstarter launch! ? A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way
And what the heck, while I was at it, I backed the Openbeam Kossel Pro 3d printer — another Seattle team. I saw this printer at the mini Maker Faire here, it looks totally awesome.
