RBS
Contents
Subpages
Working Notes
These are working notes, leading towards making models and then a formal proposal. It may be too early to talk this up in other places.
License
Documentation
This webpage, and more generally, the Library as a whole.
Action Items
- Ask Forrest to make 2 gears which mesh, and are both bolted to a perforated sheet of metal.
- Ask Forest to make up a set of pdf or SVG files I can use to make gears.
- Find a friendly laser cutter. I favor South End Boston Fab Lab because they can follow along.
- Make several hundred gears of all sizes.
- Make a 500 feet of plastic gridbeam using the CNC router at architecture.
- I want to move to an open source design system. I think blender is best because it is the open source modeling program with the most users and the biggest community.
- Prepare a proposal for the BRL-CAD people to design a gear-cad module for blender.
- First, see what has been done with blender.
- Eventually, we may want benchtop jewelry-scale sheet bend and brake, to make my own RBS parts.
Motivation
- Vik Olliver's Meccano-set based RepRap prototype.
- Merkur based apparatus for centrifugal casting of soft contact lenses by Otto Wichterle
- Eiffel is an idea for making a RepRap using RBS for the parts, and for making RBS.
Sourcing
Still an open question. Probably going to be Sebastien + drill press and jig.
RepRap Building System
This is a cross between grid-beam and old-fashioned erector_set, but we will make RepRaps and Eiffel from it.
The 'RepRap Building System', aka 'RBS', aka 'Building System' is made from grid-beam type perforated beams, store-bought fasteners, and RepRap-printed parts like gears and fittings to hold stepper motors and smooth rods.
For more information, see Eiffel.
This will engage folk who work with their hands well, but are not computer oriented.
And it will be lots of fun.
Description
- Eiffel will be a steel square-tube CNC router made with tri-lapping joints, aka Tri-Joints with Image:NEED-trijoint example.jpg Note that this is slightly similar to LumenLab's RogR, but will be cross-fertile with RepRap.
We can if we want try to extend this use of gridbeam and erector-set like technology into a Eiffel/Building_System system that leverages RepRap to make lots of mechatronic systems using grid beam and grid sheet, and 3D printed gears, etc., but that's sort of beyond the scope of this project. (Step 2, technically)
Development Outline
- Make gears and beam to illustrate core concept.
- Sketch out a Eiffel in gear and beam.
- Blog.
- Speak with domain experts for toy and model building systems. This means sending polite emails to Erector Set, Meccano, and Model Engineering geeks requesting critique. After further development, we will engage user testing, i.e. 3rd graders and architecture students.
Motion Control
A:So what do you need? Besides a miracle. B: Gears. Lots of gears.
Entrepreneur-based research
If it is any good, we will have to make kits to test the ideas. This process will putting kits in front of 3rd graders. SETC fab lab might be able to do this.
If you like this idea and want to get started, please buy a grid beam book.
Documentation
The primary documentation for RBS will be this wiki. Please share your ideas on thingiverse, google sketchup, and so on, but please first upload and share on this wiki. Thank you.
License
GPL.
Innovation - Why is this new?
Erector-set-like technology is old. Millenia old, in internet years. But making 2' by 4' CNC routers from it, and making gears with it is new.
Also, this system will be cross compatible with old systems like erector-set,meccano, and the other European systems ??? and will be compatible with anything with the right hole spacing Vex, etc.
We could emulate Lego if we wanted, but Lego is not compatible with building systems like 10 foot long, 2 inch wide square steel tubing. And we need tubing like that to make our CNC routers and non-toy scale projects.
There are, however, two new and open-source projects of relevance. Contraptor is like inch-width Erector, with motion control systems already built and demonstrated. MakerBeam is a T-slot system in 10mm pitch, making it fully Merkur compatible. It is also scale-compatible with larger T-slot systems, making it useful for prototyping larger assemblies.
Contraptor is oriented around building 3-d gantry robots, and uses a perforated beam construction centered around angle aluminum. MakerBeam uses a square T-Slot beam, which results in good orthogonality. Contraptor's inch-pitch is compatible with half-inch systems such as Meccano and the proposed RBS, while the centimeter pitch of MakerBeam is a) easily adjusted for due to the 'bolt anywhere' nature of T slots and b) would be readily compatible with 20 or 25mm pitch metric systems, including metric Contraptor or larger T-slots.
We may, if the major stakeholders (RepRap, Contraptor, and Makerbeam) cooperate and agree, attempt a slow 'reverse fork' and eventually merge the software base, hardware base, and so on. In this case we could either mirror the relevant portions of our wikis, or start with said mirroring and eventually bootstrap the RepRap website into a debian-like apt-get repository, like SKDB. (See Library). The later course promises the greatest functionality for all of our user/builders. And speaking plainly, the more each system is functional and useful, the more our users will start cross-fertilizing our systems, with our blessing or without it.
Inventors
Gridbeam - ? Modular Building Systems - Eiffel. RepRap - Dr. Adrian Bowyer Erector Set - ?
