Insane 3D Printing Resolution: Putting UltiMaker Under the Microscope

high resolution Yoda printed on Ultimaker
Last week I got to attend the Open Hardware Summit and Maker Faire NYC. Both events were really excellent.

There were so many wonderful things it was hard for me to pick a favorite. That is, until I hit the Ultimaker Booth. Ultimaker is another open source 3D printer offshoot of the RepRap Project. Erik de Brijn, Martijn Elserman, and the rest of their team have been hard at work perfecting v1 of the Ultimaker (and now Ultimaker+). The quality of this machine continues to amaze me (I’ve seen a previous beta version in person at Botacon). New this year, when mixed up with the newest firmware Marlin (which was recently ported to 3D FDM printers and is based on GRBL, the same firmware codebase picked to run Lasersaur), the Ultimaker is able to get insanely high resolution prints. You can get the Marlin firmware for RAMPS and RepRap from HERE on Github.

High mag of Finger on Ultimaker Print. Scale Bar = 1 mm.

Erik gave me one of the high res Yoda prints (Thanks Erik!) which I put under the microscope last week. You can see with the scale bar… we have 162 pixels = 1 mm. The average layer height in that pic is around 12 pixels, or 0.074 mm (That is 74 microns). And that orangey low res looking thing on the left? That’s not a print… that’s my finger. Click the image to see in higher detail!

Apologies to my buddy Dave Durant, but Ultimaker just beat your high res Cupcake record. And they’ve gotten even thinner layer heights than those, recently. Join their google group to learn more and stay apprised of the latest.

w0w. The future for FDM is so bright. Really Amazing.

7 Replies to “Insane 3D Printing Resolution: Putting UltiMaker Under the Microscope”

  1. > Apologies to my buddy Dave Durant, but Ultimaker just beat your high res Cupcake record.

    Since I’ve got an Ultimaker now too, I’m ok with it!!! 🙂

  2. You should try to 3d print a tissue scaffold and seed it with cells to create phony finger-prints — hacked biometrics FTW!

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