Rhombot

Rhombot 0.3 alpha

See an animation of it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSeg-Th1tRw

The Rhombot is a printable XYZ stage based on 3 chains of rhombus shapes. It is currently just an early alpha version. It's a rough sketch of the idea. See one of the two .MOV videos for how it is intended to work.

The Rhombot can be used with Makerbot motors, electronics, and extruders. All parts can be built in a Makerbot, or in itself. The Rhombot has no rods, belts, pulleys, nuts, threads, screws (other than the screws on the motor), sarrus hinges, moving towers, or moving motors.

That last point is important. The XYZ motors and extruder motor are all fixed. The X motor does NOT move a carriage carying the Y motor. The Z motor does NOT raise a platform carrying the extruder motor. Instead, all 4 motors can be permanently mounted. This means it will work with motors that are arbitrarily large and heavy. That should help when we start printing motors, since the ear