Even a decade later, homebrew 3D printing still doesn’t stop when it comes to mechanical improvements. These past few months have been especially kind to light direct drive extruders and [lorinczroby’s] The Orbiter extruder could set a paradigm for a new type of direct drive extruder that is particularly light.
With a weight of only 140 grams, this setup has a reduction of 7.5: 1, with which filaments can be pushed at a speed of up to 200 mm / s. Additionally, the gear reduction style and Nema 14 motor result in an overall package size that is smaller than any Nema 17 based extruder. And the resulting prints on the project’s Thingiverse page are clean enough to speak for themselves. Eventually the project will be released as open source under a Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike license for whatever (licensing!) Calamity you want to add.
This little extruder has only been around since March, but it seems to be very loved by some 3D printing communities. The Voron community recently reinterpreted it as Galileo. In the meantime, people with E3D tool changers have also been experimenting with an independent orbiter-based tool head. And the Annex engineering crew just finished some new extruder designs like the Sherpa and Sherpa-Mini, successors to the Ascender, all of which are derived from a Nema 14 motor like the one in the Orbiter. Granted, with some similarities between the Annex and Orbiter designs, it’s hard to tell who inspired whom. The result, however, may be that we get an early glimpse of what modern extruders are starting to shape: smaller steppers and more compact gear reduction for an overall lighter package.
Possibly as interesting as the design itself [lorinczroby’s] Means to share it. The license terms are such that you can faithfully replicate the design for yourself provided you don’t take advantage of it and remix it, provided you share your remix with the same license. But [lorinczroby] An agreement was also negotiated with AliExpress vendor Blurolls Store, which sells Blurolls-made versions of the design, with some revenue coming from [lorinczroby].
This is a clever way to share some nifty open source hardware. With this release model, users don’t have to worry about making mechanically complex parts themselves. You can just buy them. The purchase is a tip for the designer for his hard design work. In addition, the design is still open and can be reshuffled as long as remixers adhere to the license terms. In a world where industrial mechanics might worry about their intellectual property being cloned, this sharing model is a great alternative for others to consume and expand on the original designer’s work while sending a tip back.
Continue reading “A feather-light extruder with direct drive in a class of its own”
