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Adafruit has released step by step instructions to build your own 10" Raspberry Pi 2 based computer.
From the article:
This project takes a DIY approach with no compromises in cost. The cost of this build easily goes over low budget DIY projects, but it's [meant] to be [a] premium build. It will be used for monitoring and wirelessly controlling a farm of printers. A dedicated linux box with a decent sized screen could cost about the same amount, but when the process of building a project is more meaningful than getting the cheapest deal, this sorta thing becomes a trophy item as well as a functioning utility. Also, we can mount it to anything and design custom brackets to adjust it in any configuration, and that's pretty darn cool.
A PDF of the instructions is also available.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @05:42PM
When I was a young sprout, I spent some time working for Dahlgren Engraving Company, of San Francisco.
Dahlgren's innovation was to mount a rotating cutter to an X-Y offset mechanism so that he could position his cutter head at any location on an X-Y grid. He then added a computer (we're talking CP/M, and DOS - it was in the early 1980s) to control the X-Y positioning and the cutter up-and-down operation, and, voila, he had a machine that could do repetitious things, precisely and quickly and without error.
A 3D printer is nothing more than this 2D infrastructure, with a third dimension added, and the cutter head replaced by a nozzle of some sort, and a valve, to control flow, and maybe some heating elements, to keep solid things from solidifying. That's it.
The secret to all this is in stepper motors.
Stepper motors are motors that rotate a precise amount in response to an electrical impulse. If they do not not receive a properly shaped and adequate pulse, they do not move. stepper motors provide repeatability and precision.
Once you have acquired stepper motors, the ability to control them, and axes upon which to mount them, you can build pretty much anything - a lathe, a mill, a CNC machine, a 3D printer, even a whole frickin' assembly line.
My local community college has some courses on 3D design. I've been thinking about taking a class because I think that is the future - and because it could lead into another career, at the age of 50+ - something I have been interested in, for quite a long time.
Naturally, this would need to be at my own expense - the current government would prefer to see intelligent and productive people wither and die on unemployment, or welfare, rather than see them provided with a safety net that allowed continuing education and investment in the fundamental infrastructure that is the United States population - nope, the new owners of the United States figure they can outsource that population thing, too, there's no lack of population.
Try searching for '3d printer rail' or 'stepper motor'.
Have fun.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @05:54PM
Naturally, this would need to be at my own expense - the current government would prefer to see intelligent and productive people wither and die on unemployment, or welfare, rather than see them provided with a safety net that allowed continuing education and investment in the fundamental infrastructure that is the United States population - nope, the new owners of the United States figure they can outsource that population thing, too, there's no lack of population.
FTFY.
(Actually, I am the author of those words. I posted them as 'Plain Old Text', but the parsing mechanism filtered them out of the 'Preview'. So I recomposed them using HTML macros 'ampersand less-than' and 'ampersand greater-than' and that was rendered correctly, for some reason - even though it was still marked 'Plain Old Text' - so I posted it; but then, the pseudo-tags didn't show up. So I replied to myself, as a sort of a bug report. I trust the system maintainers will see this.)
(Score: 1) by Illop on Friday August 28 2015, @02:42AM
You are 100% correct. With a few weeks reading up on pulse width modulation and a few other bits and bobs you can make a WHATEVER cutter/additive shapper. I recently hacked an old commodore plotter into a vinyl/sticker cutter with an arduino, some code, a stepper motor, and a bit of soldering, and a lot of patience. It can be done on the cheap if you don't count time as money.