Learn more about repraps multi material tool chain

3dc is intended to be the first part in a multi-material tool chain for reprap 3d printers.

Reprap printers currently (Sept 2011) only support printing with a single material. This is a limitation of both hardware and software.

There is now ongoing discussion regarding allowing reprap's to print in multiple materials as this would allow repraps to print a far greater range of products.

To make this work from the software side we need a tool chain (or simply a series of software tools) that will allow us to control a multi-material reprap printer.

The tool chain needs to deliver:

1. Multi-material CAD Model
2. Multi-material host printer software
3. Multi-material printer firmware

The 3dc software is designed to assist with 1) and 2). Adding full blown multi-material capabilities to one of the existing CAD packages such as OpenSCAD is going to be a fair chunk of work. Also to make it accessible as widely as possible we ultimately need to support multiple CAD tools. Rather than directly trying to tackle this fairly large task 3dc is designed to allow use to work with the existing CAD tools (without modification) to make multi-material designs.

So how do we do this.

1. CAD tools Most CAD tools used within the reprap community support exporting to the STL file format. STL is however a single material file format. A new multi-material format AMF has recently become a standard however it is not currently supported by any CAD tools. The AMF file format was designed to allow easy conversion from STL.

The idea is to allow multiple STL files to be combined into a single AMF file. Each STL file would represent a different material. The end result is an AMF file with multiple materials defined without us needing to enhance existing CAD software.

2. host printer software Once we are able to create an multi-material AMF file we need to add support to the reprap host software for AMF. The 3dc library will once again come to our aid. The 3dc library has been designed to construct a in memory model which is suitable for display and rendering to gcodes by the reprap host.

The host software will also need to be modified to generate multi-material gcodes.

3. Firmware Firmware will need to be modified to accept the new multi-material gcodes as well as providing the additional hardware support to control a multi-material printer.

And then the hardwork begins - we need a design for a multi-material printer.

Feel like contributing? The drop me an email.