Open Source Desktop 3D Printers
Description
Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman:
"Today’s lowest cost 3D printers have their roots in university research projects. The two leading consumer-level 3D printer platforms originated from university research labs at Bath University in England, and Cornell University in the United States. The University of Bath’s 3D printer is called RepRap and Cornell’s is called Fab@Home.
Perhaps because of their university origins, the machine blueprints for both RepRap and Fab@Home are freely available to anyone who wants to build their own machine, or to improve upon the existing designs.
Not only do Cornell and the University of Bath openly publish their machine design blueprints, they permit commercial companies to develop and sell their own versions based off of the designs of the original university machines.
In contrast, commercial-scale 3D printers are developed commercially and their product designs are proprietary and not shared publicly." (http://web.mae.cornell.edu/lipson/FactoryAtHome.pdf)
Directory
RepRap
"(short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper); from: Bath University in England
Dr. Adrian Bowyer and his graduate student, Ed Sells, created RepRap in 2004 with the goal of making a low cost 3D printer, but also one that could print its own parts. Darwin, an open-source 3D printer, was made available in 2007.
Today a number of commercial kit makers sell versions of the RepRap, including Ponoko in New Zealand, Bits From Bytes (UK), MakerBot (U.S.) and Shapercube (Germany).
MakerBot sells their entry level Cupcake machine for about $9506.
In 2009, Bowyer and team introduced the second generation RepRap machine, Mendel". (http://web.mae.cornell.edu/lipson/FactoryAtHome.pdf)
Fab@Home
Via Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, USA.
"Fab@Home is an open source 3D printing platform that was developed at Cornell University. In 2006, graduate student Evan Malone and Professor Hod Lipson created the Fab@Home personal 3D printer. Fab@Home was designed to be versatile and works with almost any material that can be extruded through a plastic syringe and nozzle.
Though more expensive than other entry level 3D printers, Fab@Home can produce objects from a wide range of materials such as silicon, wiring, even food and has a variety of digital manufacturing tools for extruding, cutting, milling and assembling various materials7. The parts for Fab@Home, as well as complete machines are sold online by a variety of vendors and hobbyists. The cost of an unassembled machine kit is about $1,600." (http://web.mae.cornell.edu/lipson/FactoryAtHome.pdf)