Resin and filament, bonus points for laser sintering or anything else.
OS is pretty hard, Prusa is moving away from OS and I wouldn’t consider them fully OS anymore. There are a lot of good projects around Voron community and I think RatRig is OS, but apart from that I don’t think there is a big OS project alive anymore. Saying that, there is a shitton of smaller projects, not full 3d printers, but motion solutions, extruders, electronic solutions, filament swappers and such, everything you need to build a 3d printer yourself.
Reformatting this as a list for readability.
FDM:
- Voron
- RatRig V-core
- the 100
- Micron by Printers for Ants
- Powerbelt3D
Resin:
- Prometheus MSLA
- Lite3DP
SLS:
- SLS4ALL
Check out reAM250 powder bed fusion 3d printer
Looks like a step towards true industrial metal printing.
Excellent!
3 hours in and no one’s brought up VoronDesign? You can’t buy their priners or parts directly, you either have to self source or buy some variant or “BOM in a box” from a third party. I’ve had mine for two (three?) years and although the build was long it was very well documented, via a 240+ page lego-like build manual. It’s a great printer and community.
As someone who got the “Kit” version, I must add something that drove me nuts.
The Voron Documentation is extremely good, while I had some instances in which I would have liked more detail, the instructions are easy to follow.
However, the LDO documentation is abysmal and missing quite a bit of stuff. They do have a wiki that lists things to skip but the replacement instructions are very short and barely understandable. They don’t even mention things that you might need to print in addition to what the Voron needs. A specific example of this is the exhaust, the “Voron way” would be to print a cap that goes on the top at the back of the printer with a fan and a HEPA filter but the LDO kit doesn’t have that because it should come with the Nevermore filter. But this isn’t really mentioned there in the documentation and you need to dig through the wiki and the github project to find the right files for what needs to be printed.
I also had some trouble with the cables on the stepper motor that controls the X axis, they seem to be loose inside or don’t make full contact which means that, depending on the wires position, could make the stepper motor not work that well.
Lastly, I am currently building the Box Turtle AFC (automatic filament changer) System also from LDO and, from what I can find, there is absolutely NO documentation about it. I was in the beginning of ordering some TPU spools because the build instructions of the Box Turtle say that you need some before I saw that they provide those in the Kit.
With that being said, would I source the stuff all by myself? Hell no.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I do hesitate on projects like this for this rreason, it’s always the small stuff that seems to get in the way of a streamlined experience. That said, I feel like building one rather than buying off the shelf would give me a lot more know-how about how to troubleshoot and maintain the system I am using, plus I prefer to support Open Source initiatives when I can over walled gardens.
You know, as an aside, this kind of part kitting is one of those things that I think LLMs might actually make a meaningful change in very shortly. No one wants to individually order all the parts on a BOM right now because it is a bunch of labor, but do it once with an activity log of your purchasing behavior and the sites/vendors used and there is no reason it cant be fully automated and shareable as simply as the BOM itself. Add in a function to check pricing and inventory against other related vendors and it could get quite good.
Nice, there was one other mention but good to see a full vouch for Voron, definitely the kind of projected I had in mind.
Voron
If it counts, One of my friends in college had a bedslinger mish mash of like 4 different printers cobbled together to make a sort of bastard child prusa i3 equivalent. It actually made decent quality prints although it was pretty slow. That’s about as open source as you can get.
If he didnt publish a build guide it’s not open source hardware.
Documentation and open source are two orthogonal concepts. I’ve seen plenty of well-documented closed-source projects and just as many open-source projects with no documentation at all.
The OSHWA definition doesn’t really touch on documentation aside from saying that the design should be provided in the “preferred format for making modifications to it.”
How can hardware be open without build documentation? Unlike software which is infinitely replicable and open unless obfuscate, hardware is private by default as the method of construction is effectively the “source code” and can not generally be derived without direct access to the hardware in question and disassembly. Dissassembly without reassembly instructions can only derive vocational information, and reverse engineering is required to translate that to assembly instructions which themselves are likely to differ from the prior engineer’s method.
Hardware is only open source if its assembly documentation is made openly available.
“Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available.” is the first sentence of the link you provided. Viable Hardware Design includes assembly, because as any hardware engineers will tell you a schematic is only valuable if it has been proven possible. Schematics themselves are documentation, design of hardware is documenting hardware otherwise you are crafting not designing.
End rant, lol.
It’s open source if there is no proprietary tech, and every single components is replaceable from outside sources. I have owned several 3rd gen printers, and currently keep an Ender 5 Plus, heavily modded. I could replicate the machine without much trouble, and not running afoul of any laws. The whole machine is based on prior art.
So I make a pile of sticks, that pile of sticks is open source? No.
You are confusing using open source tools with being an open source project. Using open source tools is great as a user, but it does not make what you do with them open source, whether it makes the activity legal or not. Publishing the design of the tool to be replicable by others is what made that tool open source in the first place for you to use.
It is the difference between “I built this house out of bricks woth my open-source backhoe” and “I built this house out of bricks this way, and here is how you can do it the same way”. Neither one is illegal, but one is an open source project and the other is just permissible under the law.
Public Domain =/= Open Source either.
Open source software only applies to software. Open source hardware, as OC mentioned, does not imply documentation, as long as all components are replicable, and readily available.
“Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The hardware’s source, the design from which it is made, is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it.” - https://oshwa.org/resources/open-source-hardware-definition/
the only one I’ve used is my MakerBot Rep2 and honestly it holds up for being over a decade old
Other than prusa, I’m not sure of any you can purchase. Of the build yourself ones, they are variants of prusa. Or corexy. For a bedslinger, I built a bear upgraded prusa Mk something. But custom, so not exactly. For my next, it will be a variation of a corexy. Smash together a voron and the other popular one. Because I don’t like the bed design.
Plenty of open source projects out there, not sure why you would claim otherwise. The biggest is probably Voron, but it’s far from the only one- Others that I’m familiar with are RatRig, Positron, the 100, the Micron, and Powerbelt3D, but that’s far from an exhaustive list. There’s even an SLS project called SLS4ALL.
Nice! Great list, do you run any of them?
