UM3 Vinyl Cutter Core

[joris-hiber 2]

Hi,

 

When the UM3 came to market with it's hot-swappable print-cores I was eagerly waiting for the first custom functionality through print cores, but it appears not much has happened yet. I finally had a good project to justify spending some time to build a vinyl cutter core. We took apart an off the shelf Roland Blade holder that turned out to have all kinds of interesting bits and pieces and combined it with an Ultimaker core using a printed adapter:

 

 

The plan is to use it in combination with the SVGToolpathReader Cura plugin. It has some advantages over traditional roller plotters especially when dealing with sensitive materials.

Of course this could also be extended to bring back the pen plotter.

 

We are still working through some last issues (mostly involved with tricking the printer) and hope to have first cuts this week.

 

Would anyone be interested in this solution? I am planning to release the models on Youmagine. Would anyone be interested in buying pre-assembled units if it is a plug-and-play solution?

 

Regards,

Joris

 

 

[IRobertI 454]

Very nice. One of those "why didn't I think of that"-moments for me for sure. I cut vinyl on an UM2 a few years back which worked quite well. I later made a replacement head instead that I just swap in when I want to cut vinyl. Made it much sturdier and produced cleaner cuts: https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/16402-cutting-vinyl-with-an-ultimaker-2/

 

 

I'll be keeping an eye on this for sure. I already have the parts so it could be a fun project 🙂

 

edit: Just had a very quick look at the github project you linked to as well. Looks like it's simply converting to lines, it doesn't do any drag knife semi-circles for corners? (I forget the proper term, I'm falling asleep here as it's quite late 🙂 ). Might want to look into that as you'll very likely run into issues just trying to "print" the lines as normal, it tends to rip the vinyl.

[joris-hiber 2]

Ugh... you are right... I had a gut feeling things were not as straightforward (literally)
 

There's a good description here:

http://www.kronosrobotics.com/using-a-dragknife

 

I'll see if it makes sense to hack this into the SVGToolPath plugin.