Printrhub

Printrhub for Simple 2016

I have been part of the Simple 2016 development team and will give you some insight in the development process and core technology we have developed for this amazing and ground breaking 3D printer. More specifically I have mostly developed the framework and hardware for the so called Printrhub. It's the display component of the printer responsible for communicating with the cloud, implementing the user interface and controlling the printer.

First, let's have a look at this awesome 3D printer. It's fast but more importantly it is very easy to control and can produce amazing quality, have a look at these prints! We believe in Open Source and so we have published everything under the MIT license to the Printrbot github repository. But not only that, we have written extensive documentation about why we developed certain parts and how they work. That should get you started using our technology to build your own great devices or improve your own Simple 2016.

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Isn't it a wonderful machine?! 

Behind the scenes

This is a series of documents describing the development effort and core technology in detail. Have fun reading it. We really hope you can improve our work by forking and sending pull requests. We are graceful for every addition and bug fix. Also, please let us now if you have used our software stack or hardware for your own devices (@printrbot).

  1. Behind the scenes. Learn why it matters to do open source work and what it needs to successfully develop a product
  2. The Display System explained. We implemented a very powerful small TFT display system that you can use to build your own fluid touch based user interfaces
  3. CommStack explained. We developed our own communication protocol that we use to handle communication between ESK8266 and the Teensy. You can use that, too!
  4. Hardware explained. This goes into detail of the hardware development effort and describes the PCB in detail.

Source code and PCB layout and schematics

You can find the complete source code and PCB layout and schematics in Printrbots Github repository.