Things - Toasting the Birth of a RepRap from Bre Pettis on Vimeo.

Last year I had an ambitious plan. I arrived in Vienna with 4 days to make a Repstrap self-replicating, rapid prototyping robot from a bunch of parts I’d bought on McMaster Carr. Marius Kintel, Wizard23, and I rallied most of the friendly and smart people at Metalab to help make it happen. We got all the hardware done, and had started working on the software when our electronics started producing the magic smoke of death and the project went dark. We had made a swizel stick, but had not met our goal of printing shot glasses for people to drink out of at Roboexotica.

But that was not the end of the reprap project at Metalab. I left my sad Repstrap robot with them to my great joy, after a few months, they began bringing it back to life.

Today I arrived to find Marius, Wizard23, and Red running the RepRap and printing out shotglasses. The wonderful music of the stepper motors filled the air of the whateverlab, the hardware and prototyping room in the metalab complex.

This video makes me happy because I made a video of how to make the electronics, and a video about the hardware, but I never made a video of a RepRap working and now the trifecta of my RepRap videos is complete.

Recently the Whateverlab got community funding to continue RepRap development and they’ve got great plans. Stay tuned to the Metalab’s RepRap Soup where they’ve got lots of pictures and videos of the project and it’s continueing development. I have one more video coming soon about their continued research that the Marius and Philipp are working on.

You can watch in HD and for the iPhone. You can subscribe in iTunes. Watch them all on Blip.tv, Vimeo, or Youtube.

Now let’s dial the clock backwards a year. Here is my first video I made about the electronics of the reprap last year.

Making a RepRap (Repstrap) Part 1 from Bre Pettis on Vimeo.

Take the first step towards making your own self-replicating rapid-prototyping robot! You can order up your boards, from the Reprap foundation or make your own since the whole project is open source. Get your parts and solder these up and test them! Huge thanks goes out to Zach Hoeken, who inspired this project. Marius Kintel, Philipp Tiefenbacher, Benko, Red, and other folks at Metalab along with Michael Zeltner and Flo of the GRL Vienna crew pulled a lot of all nighters this week getting this robot together to present at Roboexotica. The best ways to make excellent new friends is to ask for help on an ambitious project!

Here’s the second video I made about pulling together the hardware.

Making a RepRap (Repstrap) Part 2 from Bre Pettis on Vimeo.

I’ll walk you through the different parts of the hardware on the reprap. You’ll want to take a look at the pdf for parts lists and more detailed info to get started on the hardware for this project. The software is still in development and until then you should be able to get your reprap working as a McWire Mill until the code gets done. Remember this is an experimental research community project! I really like this design. It’s solid, easy to take apart and put together. It’s also relatively transportable.

I am so excited and proud of the team here in Vienna. They are on the front line pushing code and hardware forward into a future where everyone has a 3D printer on their desk!