3d printer possibilities

[Shrapnel]

After seeing numerous documentary's about the upcoming 3d printers ,i also started to see the possibilities with it.

 

ive seen joysticks where the white base inside of them is broken or got one of the pieces broken off,

& I also had one with a rattling noise inside it when i first got it ,after opening it up,i discovered that the small ring thats around the joystick has broken into tiny little pieces.

 

After getting both of these off a relative for free to try out my first ''atari repair" ,I managed to get 1 perfectly functioning joystick.

So i started to wonder ,will we soon be able to reproduce our own atari parts with the click of a button?

If id ever encounter anything like this again And have no spare base's or controller parts lying around ,it would be pretty easy to just place a file in a printer and wait a couple of hours.

 

So what do you think? will all this soon be possible without leaving the comfort of your game room?

 

 

[+Gemintronic]

Yup.

 

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:23216

[freewheel]

Once the cost of materials comes down significantly, the possibilities are endless. I have several functioning consoles whose outer shells are broken. Same goes for some cart shells. Easy for a 3D printer to handle. And like you said, joystick parts - although I think the plastic insides need to have a certain type of flexibility, so I'm not sure if it would need a special material.

 

There're also oodles and oodles of ideas I have when it comes to repairing 70s and 80s toys that have lost/broken pieces. 3D printing is a retro geek's dream come true.. soon.

[+batari]

Consider that hobbyist grade 3D printer technology is roughly 30% the strength of injection-molded counterparts.

 

I found that 2600 cartridge casings are a poor application. The walls need to be so thin that they are very weak, the tolerances too small such that the prototypes are ill-fitting (as seen in Joe's video and my personal experiments here), there is too much plastic involved (printing times are measured in hours for a single cart, require several dollars worth of plastic) and there is often lots of manual labor cleaning up temporary support structures. Unfortunately I found (hobbyist-grade) 3D printing unsuitable for anything beyond the roughest prototyping of new 2600 cart shells. If you had access to a $15,000 machine it would be different (though most of us don't.)

 

However, items like the joystick parts are better applications. It's unlikely that you'll be able to copy a particular part verbatim (due to the strength issue) but something like that could possibly be beefed up and work fine.

 

Here are some other examples I found:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:292341

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:30008

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21854

[coppertj]

I see that 3d printers are going down in price. Hopefully by next year we can get some consumer printers that are around 300-500 dollars.

 

And the future begins: http://www.peachyprinter.com/#!methods/cjg9

 

Also if you're bad at modeling in blender you are able to scan whatever you're trying to replace. So if a atari controller is broke you just put it in and scan it.

 

Really fascinating I might buy one myself!

 

-EDIT-

 

This is also a cool 3d printer

 

https://www.phoenix3dprinter.com/

 

cheap and works very well.

Edited September 20, 2014 by coppertj