Question about Ultimaker design.

[moo10032 0]

I'm looking into designing my own 3d printer. I love the X/Y setup the Ultimaker has, is there a special name for its type of setup? Like some printers are called Cartesian, or Delta printers, technically this one looks like Cartesian but its very different having the steppers mounted to the frame to keep it light.

I'm referring specifically to the X and Y design how the extruder is only supported by 2 bars, this seems like the lightest design out there.

What I would like to do is create my own printer based around this same X / Y setup, but a completely different frame, and Z setup. If it is protected under some kind of copyright I would look for another design as I do want to eventually sell them. Is this type of design copyrighted by Ultimaker? I have not seen it on any other 3d printers.

Ryan

[nallath 581]

Cartesian refers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system. So basicly it uses a number of 'straight' and linear dimensions to indicate a position.

The Ultimaker design is open source. But designs like this are hard to protect by copyright, so even if we wanted to, it would be almost impossible to do so (let alone enforce it).

Personally, I would ask (and its nothing more then asking, your free to not do this) you to open source the designs just like we did, so others can also benefit from it.