Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 8, 2012. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Until now, most open-source printers have built 3D objects from melted plastic filaments that are pushed through a nozzle. Pwdr is intended to be able to turn a wide variety of powder types such as gypsum, ceramic, cement, and even sugar into 3D objects.
Home-Built Brand
The printer is intended to be reproducible for around 1,000 euros in a few hours; its housing consists of several acrylic sheets that were cut with a laser. Parts such as motors or metal rods as guide rails, as well as a print head from Hewlett-Packard, are intended to create the home-built 3D printer. The binding agent applied to the powder with the print head is a mixture of water and alcohol.
The housing of the Pwdr prototype is 12.5 x 12.5 x 12.5 centimeters in size. For one print layer, the 3D printer is intended to require a total of around one minute, depending on the size of the component. The print resolution is said to be 96 DPI, and a layer is to have a diameter of approximately 50 micrometers.
The open-source printer was developed by Alex Budding at the University of Twente in Enschede. The developer is working to ensure that the Pwdr printer can also use the high-quality laser-sintering process in the future and thus also manufacture metal parts.
Blueprint and Software
If anyone actually feels like printing their own 3D confectionery design this weekend: The blueprints for the Pwdr printer are available here: www.thingiverse.com
The open-source software is based on the open-source tools Arduino and Processing. It is intended to convert CAD models into a printable file and transfer it to the device. The software is available here: https://github.com/Pwdr/
