Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Massive-Scale 3D Printing with Gigabot”.
This is mike with make we’re at south by southwest, create i’m with patrick from gigabot who’s uh, showing off an incredible new uh kickstarter project. Tell us about this gigantic oversized printer of yours, okay, great yeah! This is our our latest addition. It’S kind of an experimental bot that we’re um it’s right now, it just turned live on on kickstarter, so we’re very excited and very nervous of course. So what we did here is we have a great industrial, 3d printer, the gigabot, and what this is is a configuration of the gigabot, that’s kind of geared a little bit more towards the maker and the home environment.
So it’s enclosed so like when my cat jumps on it. It doesn’t jump on the heated bed or or chew on it. It’S fully networked so that you can.
You can interact with it over your local network and your in your house, so either ethernet or wi-fi it has a web enabled. So you can, you know, control it from your tablet or your phone and you can re monitor a print. So if you wake up four in the morning, like is my print still going, you can just look at your phone instead of like walking into the other room. Um yeah, we’re very excited.
It’S it’s open to us, end-to-end software, hardware, everything and it’s written. You know all the software’s written in python or arduino ide, so it’s really easy to mess with and you can find all kinds of great projects from those communities um. It’S built on a bigger bone: black, not pie, even though it’s pi day yay, but it’s built on a big old bone, black and uh. It has a seven inch touchscreen and we have a whole new controller. That adds a lot of functionality, and we also did a lot of little things from that makers. Would love like we ran extra power and data ports to the extruders, the dual extruders, so that if you had something you want to mount on there, you can use our pre-one wires and you’ll have 12 volts and 5 volts and 3.3 volts. So you can add all your own functionality without having to like tie a wire onto the outside or any of that stuff. So we’re pretty excited about it.
I think it’s a great printer. This is i’ve been printing with my house for, like last few months after i put it together and we’re just i mean we’re very excited and we think people will love it well, congrats on the launch. Now this thing: it’s uh, it’s humongous.
Yes, what is the actual size of the print bed? Yeah? The print volume is huge. It is 24 inches by 24 inches by 20 inches, so you can print huge things like, for instance, this is a skin of a dinosaur that was a foundry in bastrop printing. This because they’re building a giant sculpture and they use this for casting so they print it out and then they you know they uh bronze casting.
So it’s a uh. You know they destroy this as they do their casting for brands. How did where did this design originate from so they did a, i think, a scan. I don’t know they did a scan. I think they did a scan of a of an artistic rendering of a dinosaur got it, but they do lots of dinosaurs, though yeah. This is, this is obviously one of the biggest 3d prints that i’ve seen in person well yeah.
We also have that engine block over there, which is pretty amazing um. I don’t know if you saw that over there, but it you know that thing took three days to print, so so that’s the other thing that we are dealing with with this printer too. Is that because we have huge print volumes, our error detection has to be much better than your small print because, like if you’re, you know, if you’re printing, something that’s three inches by three inches and it fails in the middle and you’ve got. You know you’re air printing and you come in you’re like shoot, but if you come back after three days and your print is broken you’re pretty pissed, so we added a lot of things like filament out detection, um overtemp. We have. We have a watchdog that does um it’s redundant temperature, sensors, and so we did.
We tried to do as much of that stuff so that we can catch your print if it starts to fail and give you alert, and so you can come and help the machine out and finish off your plant successfully. So you don’t have so much any more piles of those half printing, uh prints and you’re. You know sitting in a box somewhere in your office that you sounds like you guys put some pretty smart technology into this. We hope.
So we like the things that we we are makers ourselves and like we are solving problems that we and our friends have so we feel like um. You know these are real everyday problems, and so our team is a a lot of us are have a nasa background, and so we have a lot of very, very smart people on the team and so um uh yeah. I think we come up with good solutions. Fantastic well congrats, on on the launch: good luck with everything and uh. I look forward to seeing how it moves along yeah. Thank you so much i love make magazine. So thank you. Thank you very much cool you! .