1.0.4 - The Final V-Core 3.0 Release

1.0.4 marks the final release of the V-Core 3.0 design, all future commits / releases will be based upon the V-Core 3.1 design and beyond.

As previously mentioned in 1.0.3, all commits both since, and into the future, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

1.0.3 - Trademarks, Opensource and the move to NC License

As many of you know, not so long ago Rat Rig got hit by some trademark issues in China. The name Rat Rig was registered there by two companies, or more, within a 3/4 day period in September. It would seem there was some sort of race going on in September. Unfortunately, the first company to register "Rat Rig" is still unknown and uncontactable to us right now and will likely be the ones to win the request as they were first. It is also a very anonymous entity as it was created shortly before the trademark registries, so that leads us to believe that is its sole, malicious purpose as a front company is to be used as leverage with other 3D printing related Chinese companies when the time comes. The second company, Fysetc, took most of the PR hit as they didn't do it anonymously. Fysetc have been pretty public about it, and have stayed in contact but can't do much about the Rat Rig name for now as it doesn't seem they will win the register.

The name "V-Core" also got registered in China at the same time. This time Fysetc seemed to be first. They seem to be doing the right thing about it, and are working with us to transfer the name V-Core to us. Papers have been signed, submitted, but the transfer process is not final yet. We will post again on this as soon as this is confirmed. For now, Fysetc seem to be complying well regarding the "V-Core" name.

We have had other troubles recently regarding our V-Core 3 license. Contrary to other similar projects, the V-Core was released without the "NC" license (Non-commercial). Our goal was clear: we wanted the platform to grow and were happy to see other people work on and around our project, profit from it, and share again. We still are, mostly. The "mostly" is the problem, with the growth of the project it became clear very quickly that more and more people will simply not follow what we had in mind. Perhaps it was naive, and I expressed this "vision" many times both to the community and to those who I felt were not respecting the license. But seeing people ignore the previous license and work against the product from within the community has caused a lot of frustration.

With all of this going on as well as the trademark wars, we feel the need to step in now, protect the design, the company, the designers, and change to a NC license so we can continue to invest in the product and make it better at each iteration.

The goal is still the same, it's an open source project: We can and will grant commercial licenses to those working on the V-Core 3 project in a positive and constructive way instead of against it. We want people to build on, use, transform, profit from the platform and the work they put in as long as it's fair to others, at the same time we gain a layer of extra protection. This may seem like a turn from the commercial license we initially chose as well as the core ideas behind that decision, but it's becoming rather obvious why other great open source projects like Vzbot, BLV, Orbiter(I hope they don't mind me mentioning them here) and many others have chosen to stick with a NC license. It just seems to be the safest way forward.

To obtain a license please just e-mail info@ratrig.com! We have already received some requests for V-Minion licenses which we will reply to shortly as well.

For the V-Core 3, we have some really cool things planned for this year. The next minor release as well as any add-ons released from now on will be released under the new license. I will be posting on that shortly as well!

1.0.2

1. ENCLOSURE KIT

The V-Core 3 was designed to be a fully enclosable machine, and the Enclosure kit is now out. The kit includes all necessary profiles, brackets, fasteners, plates, struts, door handles, lid latches & hinges, and printed parts (optional) to assemble the top lid, front doors and side/bottom panels.

Hardware BOM and DXF/STL files for the Panels & Printed Parts will be added to the GitHub Project repository.

Warnings:

• If you already have side panels for your machine and used the DXF files available in the repository before September 24th, 2021, your panels will need a couple of cut-outs to accommodate the hinges for the front doors.
• At the moment we only provide printed parts in PETG. PETG doesn't perform well in an enclosed environment, so we recommend using ABS/ABS+ on the printed parts that will be inside the main printing chamber. The printed parts included in the enclosure kit are not inside the main chamber, so this isn't a problem.

2. SPOOL HOLDER V2.0

The Rat Rig Spool Holder Kit has been completely redesigned. The new 3030 based design offers multiple advantages, like extra sturdiness, simplicity of use, multiple mounting options and, most importantly, full compatibility with the enclosure kit.

3. BACK Z MOTOR MOUNT

The Back Z Motor Mount design has been updated to correct alignment between the 3 mounts and to allow for thermal insulation of the Z motors from the printing chamber in the enclosed version. This way all motors are outside the chamber.

5. IDLERS

We've been exploring some improvement options for the Idlers on the V-Core 3 after a lot of feedback from our customers. These idlers are made custom for us. We have improved the machining, we have upgraded bearings, but we still see some issues. Our latest conclusion is that those are not doing well under slight compression of the plastic part housings. It's very easy to over tighten those sections. So we've changed pulley design to a compressible design. The idlers should no longer be sensitive to axial load. We will be shipping with the new idlers and expect those issues to decrease dramatically.

6. XY IDLERS

We also made a small change to the XY Idlers, they will clear the enclosure lid easier.

1.0.1

Bugfix release

With this release we fixed the issue where some printouts of the xy_joiner parts snapped between the layers. The new version of those parts has a slightly wider hole and is much stronger where the previous version was the weakest.

Bellow a few images showing the new part next to the old part:

Upgrade instructions

Reprint xy_joiner_left.stl and xy_joiner_right.stl. No changes to assembly instructions.

1.0.0

Initial release of V-core 3, read more on: http://v-core.ratrig.com/