Just curious if anyone here still has one of the first Darwin model repraps. I'd love to see a picture of one of these, as I feel they were the starting point for reprap. I've never seen one.
Printable View
Just curious if anyone here still has one of the first Darwin model repraps. I'd love to see a picture of one of these, as I feel they were the starting point for reprap. I've never seen one.
I used to have one, but too many parts went bad, so I had to scrap it. I have a buddy that still has one. I'll try and get a photo of it for you :)
Never heard of the darwin reprap before. Are you sure these exist?
Yes. Darwin was the first model of Reprap. After it came the Mendel, then the Prusa Mendel (later called just the "Prusa") and Huxley, and lots of other variants.
Is the quality of print printed by the Darwin much worse than the Prusa or Huxley? What would it cost to build a Darwin?
I still have one that I assembled from an early kit....back in the days...
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Drew
Here is a picture of the RepRap Darwin, the father of all open source 3D Printers.
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I believe one of the reasons for scrapping the Darwin design and moving forward with the Mendel was the large number of non printable parts. Remember, the original goal of the Reprap project was to design a printer that could print itself. Reducing the number of metal components from the Darwin to the Mendel effectively increased the overall percentage of itself a Reprap could print.
The main reason the Darwin design was scrapped was that it was barely functional. Back then, most of the discussions revolved around the bad design of the Z axis and the troublesome extruder, not to mention the software chain. The necessity to make a functional 3D printer was much more important than self replication. Plastic parts have their limitations. For example, I had to redesign the extruder bracket in metal because it would deform when it got warm (another design weakness). Self replication is an interesting concept and it is not impossible but I believe mass production with conventional methods is going to bring us cheaper 3D printers.
IMHO,
Drew