Video Transcirpt
Hi, I'm Kevin from Kitronik and I'd like to tell you a little bit more about the Robox 3D printer, which is a new 3D printer that we've just added to our range. It works by layering a layer of plastic, and then layering another layer of plastic on top of that layer, and then another layer of plastic on the layer after and eventually it builds to produce the 3D printed object. Now the quality of the final object is determined by the thickness of those layers. On the Robox you can choose a variety of layer thicknesses. The lowest and smallest layer that is achievable is an incredible 20 microns. One of the things that we felt set this printer apart from other printers was the quality of it's design and construction. It's got a steel case which is very well designed and the manufacturing to us appear to be fantastic. It's also got this closing lid. Now we felt a closing lid was essential for a printer that was going to be used by young children or within education. During the print process this lid locks into place. Now this is important because the bed itself and print head can get extremely hot. The other benefit of the locking case is that the print is protected from things like draughts. So if someone opened the door and you got a cold draught, that draught wouldn't affect the printing process. The size of object that the Robox can produce is determined by it's print volume. This is the area within the printer that can be used to produce a 3D printed object. This is determined by the bed size and the height to which the printer can print. The Robox can print objects to a size of 210mm x 150mm x 100mm. Now that's actually quite large and we find that's great for all the objects we've wanted to print. You might want to build larger objects but we believe you're better to build those out of a number of smaller objects. With 3D printers the performance of the print bed is crucial to get successful prints. The Robox has a couple of features which make printing with this printer extremely easy. The first thing is that the bed itself auto levels, you don't have to do this manually, the machine does it for you. The second point is that the bed itself is heated. This is crucial for when printing things like ABS, it stops warping of the material. On the Robox the bed heats extremely quickly so you can be printing within 2-3 minutes. An important element to any 3D printer is the print material. The Robox uses what's called a SmartReel. So on the back here we have some connections. So when this reel is put onto the machine the Robox can detect the type of material that's on that specific reel. Now this is advantageous for a number of reasons. The first is that different materials such as ABS or PLA have different melting temperatures and require a different profile within the machine. Because the reel tells the machine what type of material it is, the machine can set it all up for you, you don't have to do anything manually. The other advantage is that it can store information on how much material is left on the reel. So if you go to print a print out it can tell you if there is sufficient material, and if there's not sufficient material it can inform you of this before you print. Automaker is the software used to drive the printer. It's a very intuitive interface and has a nice visual look of the machine. You can see that this machine is loaded with orange PLA. That's highlighted in the left hand side bar and it's also visually show on the machine itself. The top left shows a colour and this relates to the machine you're controlling. You can see that the software here shows the light in the machine is also blue. So we have a blue Robox in the top left hand corner, and then the Robox itself has a blue light which you can also see in the machine itself which has a blue light on. This is because the software can drive a number of Robox machines. The connection to the machine is via USB. If you have two or three machines connected you would have a number of these coloured boxes in the corner, they would all be a different colour and the machines themselves would light a different colour so it's quite obvious when you're doing a print job which machine you are controlling. So this is the satus screen. We can then progress to the layout screen. Within the layout screen this is where we can load obejcts into the Automaker software. We can move them around on screen so we could add a number of objects or just one. We can view those objects and we can rotate them depending upon how we want them to be printed. Automaker is compatible with many operating systems including Linux, Windows and the Mac operating system. This is a speaker case design that's been produced by a company called MyMiniFactory. MyMiniFactory is a great website where you can download models to print on your Robox printer. Some of these are free and some you have to pay for. You can do this from within the Automaker software. If you got into the download from cloud you can then access the MyMiniFactory from this screen. And that brings me onto the last great feature of the Robox printer and that is that the printer comes with a two year warranty which means you should have a number of happy years printing without any worries. The Robox 3D printer and filaments are in stock today at Kitronik. You can find more information on this product range at Kitronik.co.uk. 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