BigFDM — A Really, Really Big Open Source 3D Printer for Under $3,000

Last year Daniele Ingrassia created the LaserDuo. This year, he’s at it again, with a giant (80cm x 80cm x 90cm), open source 3D printer built at Fab Lab UAE. It uses a mix of standard components and FabLab-made parts to be as easy as possible to reproduce. It also uses Ingrassia’s own open source controller board and stepper driver.

It’s already been replicated by a team in week-long building workshop held in Tunisia at the National Engineering School of Tunis, and now it stays at Fab Lab ENIT helps the local community and the students to print big objects for their university courses/projects.

Ingrassia answered a couple of my burning questions below:

The idea come when I got commissioned by Open Lab Hamburg to build a machine for a workshop to be held in Tunisia in June 2019; having already built LaserDuo and due to the limitations on importing lasers to Tunisia, I decided to switch to a big 3D printer.

A more concrete motivation is that a giant, cheap 3D printer will help fab labs to access large scale 3D printing technologies that are usually quite expensive.

LaserDuo took me two years to be developed, during which I gained much experience about machine building in a fab lab. With this experience I was able to make BigFDM in just two months, and this is the first prototype, already working quite well; next improvements include having much more powerful heaters in the extruder, to use much bigger nozzle sites (up to 2mm). The next prototype will be made this winter, and will also be bigger (1 cubic meter).

You can find BigFDM on Hackster here.