Da Vinci Printers, do any of you have one?

3D Fabrication
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After 2 years of frustration with the printerbot, I finally got the cheapest thing I thought would work for me, and that was the Da Vinci 1. $400 on amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00H7VEU0G/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Do any among you have them?

I like the case…
I received it yesterday and it jammed the very first print (requiring a pen butane torch to burn out, yay for experience to think of it)
But its working again, only printing the on board demo patterns, I will have it on a computer soon.

Its a whole lot more precise than my printerbot ever was, but that is made of wood.

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From what I’ve seen the printrbot simple metal prints pretty well. You might want to talk to John K about the XYZ DaVinci since he has one, he seems to have pretty good luck with it. It would probably be a good printer if you could replace the control board with something open source.

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Kewl kewl @Ken_Schmitt!

'n yeah @JohnK has one… It seems to work well as far as I can tell. I’m not sure if he has his “hacked” yet to use 3rd party filament, etc… If not, I imagine it’s only a matter of time. :wink:

Keep us posted if you get it doing any new tricks!
:smile:

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I do, the worst part of the printer is the calibration, there’s a trick to do this: Bed Leveling for Beginners (Page 1) — XYZ Printing DaVinci — SoliForum - 3D Printing Community

XYZ pushed a firmware update and the software crashed on mine, so I went ahead and flashed it back to the default firmware, you can try repetier on the machine but its still in BETA testing and ive had no luck using the printer without it damaging the X and Z axis.

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Initially the sound (depending on if its used or not) can be some what loud but this can be resolved by adjusting the belts.

Theres been talk of improving the quality prints to that of what makerbot and lulzbot prints here:
http://www.soliforum.com/post/65580/#p65580

Hacking the Davinci: XYZprinting Da Vinci 1.0 Hacking (Page 1) — XYZ Printing Hacks & Mods — SoliForum - 3D Printing Community

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Ive went ahead and put together XYZ mods just in case you want to print additional accessories: http://www.thingiverse.com/ldale2006/collections/xyz-da-vinci-10/page:1

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Seems like the DaVinci uses a Arduino Mega based board, that’s interesting. So you could theoretically replace the printer with RAMP, Sanguino etc.

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I got the expensive program ‘simplify3d’, and didn’t want to fight with it at the hardware level.
the supplied XYZ software is dreadful with the bottom millimeter, and it also calls home letting them know what you are printing, or if the printer has been modified. firewall can block it.

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It’s it worth $400? Or is it one of those instances where a couple hundred more would give you a better printer?

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I’ve been happy with mine with the exception that the software is a bit cranky on slicing. I’ve printed some 8 bit arcade characters with it but had to edit some of them because it didn’t like when blocks only touched on corners.

Don’t update the firmware and block the executable from accessing the internet with your software firewall on your PC and it won’t nag you about upgrading.

Once mine is out of warranty I plan to hack the firmware to let me use any filament.

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I bought it for 399 on sale at Micro Center and bought it mainly as a first printer to gain experience. I didn’t want to spend 2+K on a printer off the bat without learning more about them first.

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Simplify3d has been worth the investment.
If you dont want that one maybe look into the perl proxy so you can run slic3r.

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The problem with the 8-bit characters sounds like you are violating one of the STL criteria, specifically the one which says that an edge will be shared by only two triangles. If you mathamatically generate the STL from the 8-bit graphic, you likely are having the cubes which represent each pixel EXACTLY meet at the corners. Thus you would have 2-4 cubes sharing the same edge, and with each cube face contributing a triangle touching that edge, you’d have many triangle faces meeting at that same edge.

The solution is to oversize the cubes slightly (0.00001% bigger is fine). In that way, there will be a VERY small square pillar at each intersection.

Here is a model that is invalid for converting to an STL:

           |-----------|
           |           |
           |           |
          2|           |
     1     |           |
|----------+-----------|
|          |     4          
|          |           
|          |3           
|          |           
|----------|

Where the plus sign is, there are four faces sharing that edge (if extruded into the 3rd dimension). The slicer has a hard time determining what is “inside” in this case.

Here is the fixed version:

           |-----------|
           |           |
           |           |
          2|           |
     1   5/            |
|--------|   |---------|
|           /6   4          
|          |           
|          |3         
|          |           
|----------|

Making a very small pillar allows each edge to only touch two faces:
1 and 5
5 and 2
3 and 6
6 and 4

Since this is a mathamatical issue, the length of 5 and 6 can be very, very small, but non-zero, to solve the problem. So small that they disappear once sliced.

*Edited for clarity.

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Yeah, that’s the issue. I was using a web site that generated the character and the STL file.

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@Raymond Are you still happy with it? Or now that you’ve gotten some experience would you purchase a slightly more expensive printer?

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Still happy with it. Consumables are a bit pricey but it has printed a lot of small stuff just fine. I’m almost through the first box of filament.

I will be hacking it later. :slight_smile:

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I’m near the point of giving up on these.
I turned it on after about 3 weeks, tried to change the filament and it broke it. I tried to burn it out, and that was an adventure, and havnt completely done so… I will try again.

I like the case, its a pretty case, but the head is a bad design. it has sensitive electronics and plastic next to the extruder so you have to be very careful if you use a blow torch to burn any jams out, and we all know you need a blow torch to burn a jam out.

tonight i dont print, i sent them a strong complaint, and tomorrow I loosen the head again and try again with the torch.

basically, if you get this, set it to warm, set it to calibrate, set it to change filament ‘new’ first before you even try to a change filament ‘extract’… the extruder rips the filament and you have to drill or burn it out.

its an oven, heat it evenly before you attempt to use it.

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someone more ‘wordsmith’ than myself, please come up with a proper follow up to the ‘your hot end sucks’ I gave them… i dont have it, they didn’t copy it in any complaint reply… anyhow, it wasn’t childish… i told them it at the filament, i attempted to burn it out, and its not better yet, i may need a replacement.
thats the essence of it… i didn’t get expletive.
all things considered, the fast removable head is brilliant… if it only worked right. it snaps in again without calibration.

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What kind of reply do you need? To what would you be replying, and why do you need to make another reply?

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I’m just very frustrated with it, the hot end doesn’t allow for burning it out and its in a bad place to get a drill down either.
I need to find some exceptionally long drill bits to run it down the filament path into the hot end.