The hardware used to construct 3D printers varies greatly, despite some fundamental concepts. You can find printers that are made from clear and colored Plexiglas or acrylic, some made almost entirely from wood, others constructed with major components made from plastic (e.g., RepRap varieties), and some that are constructed from a sturdy metal frame.
Not only do the materials used in constructing the frame vary, so do the mechanisms used to move the print head and extrude the plastic. Some may scoff at this claim, but a 3D printer is essentially a special type of machine called a robot. You may think of robots as anthropomorphic devices that hobble around bleeping and blinking various lights (or bashing each other to scrap in an extremely geeky contest), but not all robots have legs, wheels, or other forms of mobility. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, a robot is “a mechanical or virtual agent, usually an electromechanical machine that is guided by a computer program or electronic circuitry.” As you will see, 3D printers fit that description quite well. Recall from the previous section that it is vital to know all of the specifics of your hardware in order to configure the firmware correctly. But to do that, you must understand how the printer as a whole is constructed. In this section, we explore the basic hardware components in a generic sense (no particular vendor or configuration). The following sections introduce the hardware in six basic groups: the axes (parts that move horizontally and vertically), the types of electric motors used, the hardware used in extruding plastic, the build platform, electronics, and finally, the frame. Each section will describe some of the variants you can expect to find and some of the tradeoffs for certain options. A 3D printer gets its name from the number of planes it uses to construct objects. Technically, the axes movement is called a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system. The three axes are labeled X, Y, and Z. They are typically oriented where X moves left and right, Y forward and backward, and Z up and down. Notice that in the drawing, the end points of the axes are labeled with a plus or minus sign. This is representative of how the printer moves. For example, as the printer moves the X axis to the left, its position is reduced, and as it moves to the right, the position is increased.
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