We, the roboticists, love to build things. It is much better if we have the possibility to build some parts of a robot from scratch. If we don’t have a hammer and a sheet of aluminum, the usual thing to build plastic parts is a 3D printer.
We have a variety of 3D printers to select the right one for us. But if you need to have a small 3D printer next to your laptop, I have a brand new 3D printer – the Micro 3D Printer.
The Micro 3D printer is priced at $449.00 on Amazon, and you don’t have to pay more for shipping.
Aside from features like printer weight, power, printer dimensions, three things makes me think that this is a good (not the best, only good) printer to build small and medium size robots. It has the best quality layer resolution between 150 to 250 microns, so you don’t have a perfect surface, but at least, you’ll have very nice results.
The print area is 4.3″ x 4.5” (109mm x 113mm), and the print height is 4.6″ (116mm). This printing volume is large enough for small size robots to medium size robots.
The extruder supports 1.75mm filaments in ABS and PLA. Your 3D digital object that you send to the printer should have the STL and OBJ formats.
