Abstract— Aiming to reduce the current worldwide organ shortage for transplant, tissue engineering has thrived on organ fabrication techniques. Nevertheless, building three- dimensional (3D) vascularized organs remains the main technological barrier to be overcome. New technologies like bioprinting are emerging to aid scientists to bring new solutions, since drop by drop demand allows cell deposition with high precision. In this paper it is explained a method of building a low cost 3D bioprinter, from scratch, that allows three axis printing with a reasonable resolution for this use. Index Terms—3D bioprinting, step motor control, image analysis, nozzle firing control. I. INTRODUCTION RGAN FAILURE is a critical problem in the worldwide healthcare nowadays, and the demand for organ transplantation largely exceeds the supply. Conventional tissue fabrication techniques, like seeding cells onto scaffolds, are still not capable of producing thick viable tissues, because there is no control in vascularization and cell respiration at core level of the thick tissue doesn’t occur [1]. Bioprinting technology brings new hopes to overcome this problem, because it allows a high rate and high precision cell deposition granting the possibility to manufacture the thick tissue with its own vascularization with the patient own cells [2]-[4]. There are many techniques being researched focused on the nozzle firing type (inkjet: thermal; piezoelectric; laser), adapting usual printers to use in this field, or building the printer from scratch. Although the overwhelming possibilities of this technology may seem, some issues like cell death caused by the firing process and cell proliferation after printed are still being researched and improved [5]-[9]. Manuscript submitted March, 2014; revised March 31, 2014. João B. L. Fermeiro is with the Department of Medical Sciences, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal (e-mail: jfermeiro1@gmail.com). Maria do Rosário A. Calado is with IT – Instituto de Telecomunicações and Department of Electromechanical Engineering, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal (corresponding author; phone: +351 275329760; e-mail: rc@ubi.pt). Ilídio J. S. Correia is with the Health Sciences Research Centre and the Department of Medical Sciences, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal (e-mail: icorreia@fcsaude.ubi.pt). Sílvio J. P. S. Mariano is with IT – Instituto de Telecomunicações and Department of Electromechanical Engineering, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal (e-mail: sm@ubi.pt). José A. N. Pombo is with IT – Instituto de Telecomunicações and Department of Electromechanical Engineering, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal (e-mail: d1232@ubi.pt). Building a bioprinter from scratch was the path that was chosen in this work, so that there are full control of the printer and the printed material. The main printing material would be human cells, among other tissue constituents. Depending on the type of cell, the size varies a bit, however in general a human cell with nucleus has 20 to 30 micrometers length. With that being said for the bioprint process to be viable the ideal printer resolution should be at around 50 micrometers [10]. II. BUILDING A BIOPRINTER FROM SCRATCH A. Pre-build Standard printers roll the paper at the same time as the printer head goes side to side and shoots the drops of ink, while all this parts move. Instead of trying to modulate this intricate kind of system, and since there is little information on how the circuits inside the printer work, we chose to use a simpler system that we could understand and have full control. Our system combines this entities:  Matlab - where the main code analyses the images to be printed and transforms the information so that it can be worked to be sent in binary to the next component.  Micro controller – The micro controller grabs the binary information sent from the Matlab and interprets it to move the motors and firing the nozzles.  Breadboard – Where all the driving components receive the information from the logic and power up the motors and nozzles.  Bioprinter itself – where all the physical components are, ready to receive the commands. As for the X and Y axis motion, bipolar step motors were chosen to allow precise start and stop motion. Other advantage on using step motor is the unnecessary use of a feedback system to know the position of the print head. However without a feedback system the only way to ensure minimal step loss is to return to position 0 at each printing line. The axis need guides so that the print head runs only on each of the axis directions, and doing guides manually wouldn’t be accurate enough for the precision required, so we have chosen motors from CR-ROM drives which already has its own guide support system with good precision, and Building a Bioprinter from Scratch for Bioprinting Testing João B. L. Fermeiro, Maria do Rosário A. Calado, Ilídio J. S. Correia, Sílvio J. P. S. Mariano, José A. N. Pombo O Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering 2014 Vol I, WCE 2014, July 2 - 4, 2014, London, U.K. ISBN: 978-988-19252-7-5 ISSN: 2078-0958 (Print); ISSN: 2078-0966 (Online) WCE 2014