Here’s another similar 3d printer design… This is even more reprap, as it’s got less metal parts as the stabilizers are printed in plastic. I lost the collapsible feature here… It’d be nice if it was portable though. That’s what my prusa and makerbot aren’t at the moment.
I’ve been thinking about the possibility for a portable 3D printer, where it’s possible to lift up the build platform so that the printer is simpler to move.
It’s sort of a derivative of the Printrbot design, I guess, but some of the ideas are my own also. I’ve put it on thingiverse, and there are some really good suggestions on improvements there.
Here are some pictures of the design:
I just received the RF booster pack for the Launchpad. I haven’t had time to do extensive testing, but I connected it up, got a link and had my son run around the house with it 
It works… good coverage throughout the house, which is as expected really. I’ve now put a solar cell on the sensor node, with a Li-Ion battery connected to it, and I’ll put it outside to have a wireless thermometer. It’s getting colder here in Norway…
Seems like a good kit. The module itself is really small, mounted on a development board that actually has room for an MSP430 chip if you don’t want to use the launchpad itself ’in deployment’. Using this module in a ‘real project’ seems like a good option compared to having to solder the RF-chip yourself.
The code example also seems ok. The example is a lot more advanced than it has to be, but I guess that’s good. They could have left a minimum in there also though, as it’s easier to integrate into existing projects then. I’d like to make something simpler with it. I haven’t looked at it much yet, but it seems the compiled version of the example is more than 4k, which means it can’t use the IAR kickstart?
For some reason, the TX and RX on the launchpad board have to be swapped (it’s in the guide). I thought I had used the serial port on this thing before, without doing this. Might be because they’re using part of the chip for the radio. The headers under the RF board is female (or should it be possible to remove it and leave the male headers?), and I typically use female headers on the main board, arduino-style.
Below is a picture. Sorry for the low quality. Getting darker also … I’ll do some more testing on the booster pack later, connecting it to a Chronos etc.
I’ve had my home made CNC machine for more than a year now, and I built it originally to make things out of metal. But I never dared, since I didn’t find a good way to cool it. Now I realized that I could take a shelf from my kids IKEA furniture and put it under the metal to be routed, and submerse the metal in water. It worked great. Well, the gear is the wrong size… but the quality is excellent. I’m going to try to use the same mechanism to make a hot end for my next plastic printer. The video is below (click the link below the picture) or on Youtube.
