HOWTO Make a 3D printer out of Legos
Here's an ambitious (and excitingly incomplete) Instructable from "Gene Hacker" explaining how to build a 3D printer from Legos.
Build a Polar 3-D Printer from Legos (via Beyond the Beyond)
A polar printer is a printer whose principal axes, or how it can move, are radius(in and out), angle(spin clockwise/counter clockwise), and as opposed to a Cartesian printer whose principal axes are X(left/right), Y(up/down). In other words, it moves just like a polar coordinate system.So why did I make a polar 3D printer instead of a good ol' Cartesian 3D printer?
1. I didn't have enough Legos to build a Cartesian printer.
2. I hope to eventually add a 3D laser scanner to it so I can scan in objects and send them to another printer somewhere else in world. Making sort of a 'teleporter'.
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love it ! gonna build it out of nbephews star wars lego !
OT, but why do some people insist on referring to lego as 'legos'?
@#2 Because they are American
is that an illegal Devo hat?
I'm not American. I call them Legos because Lego is a neologism and there's no reason in the world not to pluralize it by adding an "s" to the end. Indeed, millions of people do so. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
There's a new generation growing up being inculcated with engineering fundamentals once reserved for the very wealthy and most educated. I can't imagine how fast the acceleration will be. Will Lego next do IC circuit blocks? (NANDS, NORS etc.)? Or did I miss that already?
by four years
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/15/lego-logic.html
though actual snap together electronics would be cool
I'm not American either! However referring to lego as 'legos' is not only unnecessary, but a waste of a few perfectly good bytes.
For me the word lego refers to a system - not the physical manifestation of that system - the lego block.
Hmmm. I (UK chap) have never used the word 'Legos'.
And as it ends in 'consonant + o' shouldn't it be Legoes?
#2,#3,#4,#6,#9,#10 (You know who you are)
Could we please get back to talking about how I can use plastic blocks to make green poo? I go through a lot of fake poo and would really like to make my own!
P.S. To (#6) Cory Doctorow: By using the word cromulent you have earned your keep for the week.... Have a great labour day!
I am fascinated by the implications of this Lego singularity.
Why can't Lego blocks = Legos in the same way that Xerox copies = Xeroxes?
HA-HA-HA
Lego Dyson sphere anybody?
For the record: being Australian, I never read/heard the word legos (spelt without capitalisation too!) until I started using the intertron. For me it falls into the same category as "sheep".
Lego has always been the brand - there is no such thing as a "lego", hence there can be no "legos".
#14 is right (well nearly - the LEGO company also insist on caps). Cory has IMHO used a perfectly DIScromulent word. Legos is unnecessary when Lego exists - thus, how can cromulence (cromulentaryness for the Americans among us?) apply to "legos"? Would "sheeps" be cromulent? Personally, I tend to think not.
Anway I'd rather make a printer out of my Meccano ("meccanos", to you Cory?)
For reference, from the rec.toys.lego FAQ, citing a Lego product catalogue:
" Dear Parents and Children
The word LEGO(R) is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'LEGOS.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you!
Susan Williams
Consumer Services"
(Personally I'd always used "Lego" as an abstract noun and "Lego bricks" to describe, well, the bricks.)
But well, neologisms are neologisms. Cromulent, indeed (lol).
Cory is wrong
LEGO should never be pronounced "legos" (sounds like a pasta sauce)
The title should read "How To Make a 3D printer out of LEGO"...
I've spent many, many hours playing with LEGO
I have thousands of LEGO blocks at home
I'm a LEGO expert dammit!
Etymology aside, I always associate the word "neoligism" with "neolithic" and "neanderthal". I don't want to turn this into a language debate, but I can't help it if I imagine people who insist on making up new words where there are plenty of sufficient old ones as people with a slightly stooped stature and pronounced brow.
LEGOlas for president!
Asking your buddies to come over to your house and play with your 'LEGO' is a little too homo-erotic for most red-blooded American boys.
Calabanos, how so?
What about inviting one's buddies over to do some rifle cleaning and watch ultimate fighting?
Just saying.
I'd like to retract my last statement as I now get your joke, Calabanos. Pardon me for not assuming the best of you.
I wasn't joking. Most prepubescent American boys are overly sensitive to homo-erotic language. I have never heard anyone seriously ask a friend to "come over and help me clean my gun".
LEGO system is cumbersome, LEGO is gay. Legos is a natural way to describe the toys. It should be considered slang and left alone.
CALABANOS,
"LEGO is gay". You are hilarious!
In the (South West) UK superfluous pluralizing is very common in a particular Plymouth Dialect - Janner.
As in .. 'I goes to Asdas an' do's my lotteries.'
( http://www.chavtowns.co.uk/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=1083 )
Really though..
LEGO == gay
Legos == red-blooded American
Was that actually supposed to be a coherent/cogent argument?
Calabanos, you have mistaken your paraochial, myopic experience for an accepted universal reality. You are wrong.
y'all keep arguing, but if you get near my stack I'll brain you with my Legovian morning star.
While I admire those on the "LEGO" side for their geeky pedantry in the face of common (mostly North American?) usage, it strikes me as a lost cause. Sort of like the old Sid Harris cartoon of the lab-coated scientist in a movie theater showing Star Wars, waving his arms and shouting, "No! No! Space is a vacuum! It couldn't go 'KA-BOOM!'"
"the LEGO company also insist on caps"... Who cares?
For the past 50 years everyone I've ever known who has played around with these has called them Legos. I don't think that's going to change, no matter how many pedants point out the "error". Or no matter what the Lego company insists. We have this same discussion every time there is a story about Legos, its old news.
Asking your buddies to come over to your house and play with your 'LEGO' is a little too homo-erotic for most red-blooded American boys.
Following that specious reasoning it's surprising that boys named Peter or Richard have any friends at all.
and I was looking for commentary not about the word 'Lego' but on 3d printers utilizing whatever a person had on hand (in this case lego bricks). The word is fascinating but perhpas a tad off topic? I wanna know more about making 3d printers that can self assemble other 3d printers in full working order, creating a green goo like effect. Question becomes however, if you use lego to make it, and it starts making itself utilizing the patented lego brick design, does the machine get the lawsuit or do you?
Please take a deep breath, step back, and look at how needlessly, and annoyingly, pedantic you all are being.
Does it really matter all that much what someone calls small plastic bricks? Will your world shatter down around you if someone uses LEGO as a generic term rather than a collective one?
No, no it won't. Stop acting like angry nerds who just can't believe that someone might not like their favorite comic book movie.
I say we make a Lego jail.
There are serious disadvantages to a polar coordinate printer when it comes to making "real" parts, parts that have to mate up to other parts in an assembly. Polar coordinates scale with distance from center - even if your software is converting from cartesian to polar your parts will be less accurate the farther from that center their features are. Not to criticize the hack - making any kind of 3d printer from LEGO is pretty cool.
Jake:
You have mistaken "everyone [you've] ever known" for the whole world. You will find "legos" to be a colloquialism, largely confined to the North American continent (and certainly not 100% of it).
Jake/Zippy
Like it or not, saying "legos" is exactly equivalent to saying "sheeps", "mooses", "swines", "fishes", "mans", "tooths" "foots". Just wrong. As wrong as any common grammatical or spelling error.
Is it pedantic to point out a difference between the spellings of "there", "their" and "they're"? Or "it's" and "its"? Of course not.
..and you all know, of course, that Cory is well aware of the impact of writing "legos" in a BB post.
He is sniggering, mightily.
Chevan: aww, iz u mist u coffy 2day?
Ark, no I'm not. I was just trying to explain what my experience has been. LEGOâ„¢ was ubiquitous when I was a kid. Although I've traveled overseas quite a bit I never happened to discuss this particular subject with anyone from another country. So you are right in that respect, my experience is limited to the US.
As for pointing out correct spellings and usages, yes it does come off a pedantic sometimes. Depending on how its done, it can sometimes seem like one is calling someone stupid or ignorant.
Apologies for continuing this off-topic discussion. I really AM interested in 3-D printers and what they're made of. :)
Fair enough :)
__
Anybody ever heard of EMB (Electron Beam Melting)?
I got the link from the Instructables comments, it's a titanium prototyper (eg. it builds 3d, in titanium). It can even prototype "flight-certified" parts, so you can actually build working machinery with it..
WOW!
Thank you Cory for posting this. I am the guy who made this thing.
Eustace, I compensate for this by gearing the rotational axis down such that 1 degree of motor rotation equals about 0.1-0.01 degrees of axis rotation.
But this doesn't matter, because I have converted my printer to cartesian mechanics to get higher accuracy and because the math needed to do polar conversions is too much for the NXT to do in real time.
Anybody remember Erector sets?
On topic now:
Do the final 'prints' have a 3D "pixelated" appearance due to the extruder pumping little blobs out?
The college by me has a large scale 3D printer in the architecture building. I keep meaning to go check it out.
If this thread is an indicator of the current state of western society, we do really have the governments that we deserve.
Antinous
Pardon the juvenile crap. It was coming from the right place.
Anthony, the 'pixelated' appearance of the cone in the photo was due to air bubbles in the extruder and a bump when I was taking the photo. This 3d printer more like a vector plotter than your typical inkjet printer. However, I am willing to bet that the 3d printer at your college is the inkjet type, as they produce parts with more detail(but less strength) and color than this type of printer.
Juvenile? I would take my country to war over the correct pluralization of Lego.
They probably wouldn't follow me though.. So, just me on the battlefield, waving my badly-made, non-uniformly-coloured little sword around, shouting about grammer and the might of our Danish overlords, at nobody..
I may need to go outside and look at the trees and the sky for a little while :(
MHTH
Well done on this great little machine. An interesting point that you swapped from polar to cartesian, if the hardware was up to it, would you keep to polar?
@#5 Cory D - If you can call LEGO "legos" I can call Canadians "Americans"
Eventually someone will develop an entire operating system out of these plastic bricks, and we can call it "LegOS".
I know this is off topic, but I just wanted to say that, in terms of North American dialect, there is an argument that 'legos' isn't wrong, though it doesn't mean that it holds for all English dialects. We, I've noticed this particularly in California, tend to use brand names in the same way we would use other regular words. Bandaids are an excellent example of this. They are really Band-aid brand adhesive bandages, but few people really use it like that; we often ask if someone has a bandaid or for them to give us several bandaids. Most people don't care if they are actual Band-aid brand or not, but they will still phrase it like this. It doesn't hold for everyone in North America, but it doesn't make it inherently wrong. Let it go as a dialectical difference, and let me get on using the cool printer I just built with my old legos.
EnglishNerd, join me in beating this horse.. It's very nearly dead.
You are right to a degree, as you noted people don't generally say "pass me the bandaid" when they mean several bandaids. But contrary to this, people actually do say "pass me the lego" when they mean "many pieces of" lego. So it's not quite the same.
In the example, bandaid refers to the singular "adhesive bandage", so logically the plural is bandaid(s). Whereas lego refers to the whole system, people rarely* use "lego" to refer to a single brick, eg. "a lego", more likely "a brick" or "a bit of lego". Or, "I stood on some lego".
* when I say rarely, I mean by the people who also use "lego" as the plural.. for all I know, the "legos" people say "pass me a lego" all the time.
Anyway, as you say, it's dialectical.
I think she just whinnied her last neigh.
whuts all ths fuss 'bout them thar leggers?
Arkizzle, yeah I would keep it polar if the hardware was up to it.
@#50
And you've found the difference. Everyone I know, when they ask people to "pass me the lego" mean a single, particular brick, and "legos" refers to the plural of that. We would all find it rather odd if you asked for "lego" and expected more than one. I actually despise words where the plural is the same as the singular as being remarkably deprived of potential ease of understanding for no damned good reason.
Also, for the person who used
"sheeps", "mooses", "swines", "fishes", "mans", "tooths" "foots" as examples of other improper words:
man, tooth, and foot actually HAVE a plural, so they're not a decent analogy. Fishes is, actually, correct, though not often used.
Swine, sheep, and moose are all terrible words that should rightly have a plural, though they are actually decent analogies.
Since we're arguing about a word that is WRONG, hands down, either way (legally and by the dictionary and many other ways) I think we'll all just have to agree to disagree over which regions inmproper usage is... uh... less improper?
Fishes is only correct when talking of multiple species of fish. The plural of individual fish, is fish, always.
"Since we're arguing about a word that is WRONG, hands down, either way (legally and by the dictionary and many other ways).."
What is it intrinsically wrong with the word lego? And what does your assessment of "moose, "swine" and "sheep" as "terrible words" have to do with the argument? Seems irrational.
MHTH
Is there a particular benefit to Polar over Cartesian? Build simplicity? etc..
#39: This is pretty sweet. I'm in the middle of building a reprap 3D printer and legos seem much easier than what I've had to go through to get the custom (read: reprap printed) parts. Do you hope to get the resolution down, or keep it LEGO size compatible? What about overhangs and filler material? Or maybe I'm getting ahead of you and you're just trying to get the control software done!
#50: Just like in Texas where every soda pop in existence is known as a Coke. Even Dr. Pepper.
When I got my first LEGO set, my dad told me the interesting story of how it's LEGO and not legos, well because my dad is smart and worldly. I'll use LEGO because any other way seems disrespectful to the makers of this wonderful product.
#56: #50: Just like in Texas where every soda pop in existence is known as a Coke. Even Dr. Pepper.
Not entirely accurate. While people here will say "Let's go grab a coke" meaning "Let's go get something to drink", when we roll up to the counter, we don't say "I'll have a Coke" and expect the person to know we mean "Give me a Sprite".
The concept of using brand names rather than product descriptions has a title, but I can't remember what it is. You see it all the time with people saying "Kleenex" instead of "Facial tissue", "Q-Tip" instead of "Cotton swab" and "Band-Aid" instead of "Adhesive bandage", but these are all part of a slightly different phenomenon than "Coke" as "Beverage" since you actually don't care if you are given a particular brand (or flavor) when asking for those other items.
I used to joke with an old girlfriend that every time she said "Kleenex" but was referring to a non-Kleenex-brand tissue she was stealing food from the mouths of the employees of the Kleenex company and their advertising firms by diluting the power of the brand name.
Yes, I'm a dork. But I *rule* with Lego since BrickGun is my company.
In my world you can ask a friend over to play with Lego *and* clean your gun. ;)
Thank you, Cory,
for not submitting to the authority of LEGO corporation in their demands that you use their product name as they specify.
Legos, Legos, Legos, Legos.
I need an Aspirin (TM).
#57 / #56 "Just like in Texas where every soda pop in existence is known as a Coke. Even Dr. Pepper."
Definitely an odd dialectic device, but there is no trademark genericism here, just mispluralization.
God damn, am I still talking about this?! Someone drag me away, please!
Tak, Ant, MinT, Tenn?! Help meeee!
BBonyx, I'm gonna give you mad props for BrickGun.com (and the last line of your post @ 57 :D
NICE
Also, Enochrewt: your dad rules.
come to the Darkness...step away from the light....
Phew, I almost got a little "optimistic" there, too.. thanks Tak.
Let me step into your shadow..
Enochrewt, I have done some experiments using smaller nozzles and got some good traces, however the nozzle tended to get jammed. If I use a more powerful air pump or a less viscous material like wax this shouldn't be a problem. I intend to use frosting a support material.
As for getting the reprap printed parts, use a lasercutter to make the laser cut versions.
Arkizzle, polar was all that I could build with my limited set of parts.
can Google Earth provide downloadable topographic info to use this to make 3D maps of terrain?
I can't believe that arkizzle got all shizdiggled because I pointed out that 12 and 13 year old American boys are homophobic. Haven't you been to a middle school, ever?
What mention of 12 and 13 y o boys?
All I was addressing was your limited assessment of language and toys.
Could you make use of the 'hot ice' described in the following link for your printer?
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Hot-Ice