New Part Day: ST’s New 3D Printer Motor Driver

October 29, 2018 by 21 Comments

ST has released a new evaluation board for a stepper motor driver. It’ll plug right into your 3D printer, and if you’re looking for a chip to build a cheap 3D printer controller board around, this might be the one.

We’ve come a long way in the field of stepper motor drivers in just a few short years. The first popular driver for RepRap electronics was ‘the Pololu’, a stepper motor carrier board using Allegro’s A4988 driver. If you had a big heat sink, this driver could deliver 2 A per coil, operated between 8 and 35 V, and had microstep resolution down to 1/16th. Was it the best stepper driver around? No, but it was cheap, it was everywhere, and RAMPS, the popular RepRap control electronics picked up on its pinout and accidentally created a standard. The DRV8825 motor driver from TI followed next, with microstepping down to 1/32nd, a little more current per coil, and arguably a better thermal design.

Then the wave of Trinamic drivers happened. The Trinamic TMC2100 was a silent stepper motor driver when running a motor at medium or low speeds. With this driver, you could run a motor more efficiently, which means the motor doesn’t get as hot. There are diagnostics via SPI. Tom liked it, and now in every Prusa i3, you’ll find a bunch of Trinamic drivers.

ST’s new offering, the STSPIN820, doesn’t have the fancy-schmancy features the Trinamic driver does, but the chip itself is fantastically cheap, at about 1/5th the price of a Trinamic driver. As far as feature set, you should probably look at this new chip as an upgrade to the A4988, with much higher microstepping and slightly higher current handling.

If you’d like to experiment with the evaluation module, you can grab one from an ST distributor; at the time of this writing, there were seventeen of these modules available worldwide. If you’d just like to play with the STSPIN820 motor driver chip, ten thousand are available between Mouser and Digikey, starting at $2.97 in quantity one. If someone could tell electronics manufacturers to build more than a dozen evaluation boards at a time, that would be great.

The 3D Printed Plotter You Didn’t Know You Needed

October 15, 2018 by 19 Comments

We’ve been seeing an influx of repurposed 3D printers recently. Thrifty hackers have been leveraging cheap 3D printers as a way to bootstrap their builds, on everything from laser engravers to pick and place machines. There’s nothing wrong with that, and honestly when you can get a cheap 3D printer for less than the cost of the components separately thanks to the economies of scale, you’d be foolish not to.

But there’s still something to be said for the classic RepRap mentality of building things using printed parts and smooth rods. Case in point, the largely 3D printed plotter that [darth vader] sent in for our viewing pleasure. This isn’t somebody sicking a pen on the extruder of their open box Monoprice special, this is a purpose built plotter and it shows. In the video after the break you can see not only how well it draws, but also how large of a work area it has compared to a modified 3D printer.

If you know your way around a 3D printer, most of it should look pretty familiar to you. Using the same GT2 belts, steppers, end stop switches, and linear bearings which are ubiquitous in 3D printers, it shouldn’t be difficult to source the parts to build your own. It even uses a Mega 2560 with RAMPS 1.4 running Marlin 1.1.9 for control.

The biggest difference is the physical layout. Since there’s no heavy hotend or extruder assembly to move around, the plotter has a cantilever design which gives it far greater reach. As it only needs to sightly lift the pen off the paper, there’s no need for a complex Z axis with leadscrews either; a simple servo mounted to the end of the arm is used to raise and lift the pen. We especially like the use of a tape measure as strain relief for his wiring, a fantastic tip that we (and many of you) fell in love with last year.

While it’s hard to beat just tossing a pen onto the business end of your desktop 3D printer in terms of convenience, we think it’s pretty clear from this build that the results don’t quite compare. If you want a real plotter, build a real plotter.

Continue reading “The 3D Printed Plotter You Didn’t Know You Needed” →

3D Printed Arduino Bot Is Limbo Master

July 10, 2018 by 9 Comments

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about in regards to the coming robot uprising, [Ali Aslam] of Potent Printables has recently wrapped up work on a 3D printed robot that can flatten itself down to the point it can fit under doors and other tight spaces. Based on research done at UC Berkeley, this robot is built entirely from printed parts and off the shelf hardware, so anyone can have their own little slice of Skynet.

On display at East Coast RepRap Festival

The key to the design are the folding “wings” which allow the robot to raise and lower itself on command. This not only helps it navigate tight spaces, but also gives it considerable all-terrain capability when it’s riding high. Rather than wheels or tracks, the design uses six rotors which look more like propellers than something you’d expect to find on a ground vehicle. These rotors work at the extreme angles necessary when the robot has lowered itself, and allow it to “step” over obstructions when they’re vertical.

For the electronics, things are about what you’d expect. An Arduino Pro Mini combined with tiny Pololu motor controllers is enough to get the bot rolling, and a Flysky FS-X6B receiver is onboard so the whole thing can be operated with a standard RC transmitter. The design could easily be adapted for WiFi or Bluetooth control if you’d rather not use RC gear for whatever reason.

Want to build your own? All of the STL files, as well as a complete Bill of Materials, are available on the Thingiverse page. [Ali] even has a series of videos on YouTube videos walking through the design and construction of the bot to help you along. Outside of the electronics, you’ll need a handful of screws and rods to complement the 50+ printed parts. Better start warming up the printer now.

As an interesting aside, we got a chance to see this little critter first hand at the recent East Coast RepRap Festival in Maryland, along with a number of other engineering marvels.

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Open Source DIY Printers Are Alive And Well: What We Saw At ERRF 18

July 5, 2018 by 24 Comments

If you follow the desktop 3D printer market, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that nearly every 3D printer on display at the inaugural East Coast RepRap Festival (ERRF) was made in China. Even Printrbot CEO Brook Drumm had to admit that this was the year his company may finally bite the bullet and begin selling a branded and customized printer built overseas.

When you can get a decent (but let’s be clear, not great) 3D printer for $200 USD, it’s no surprise that American and European manufacturers are having a hard time staying competitive. But not everyone is seduced by low-cost printers. They know they could buy a decent printer for a couple hundred bucks, but for them that’s not the point. Some hackers are just as (if not more) interested in designing and building the machines than they are churning out little plastic boats with the finished product.

Luckily for us, these are also the type of folks who document their builds and make all their collected information and design files available for others under an open source license. Such builders exemplify the true spirit of the RepRap movement, and we’re happy to report that in a sea of imported printers, there were several interesting home built open source printers.

Whether you want to build your own copy of one of these machines, or simply get inspired by some of the ideas their creators had, these machines are physical proof that just because you can order a cheap 3D printer on eBay right now doesn’t mean you have to.

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Tiny Printers Get Color Mixing

June 28, 2018 by 8 Comments

Last weekend was the inaugural East Coast RepRap Festival in beautiful Bel Air, Maryland. Like it’s related con, the Midwest RepRap Festival, ERRF is held in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farms, and is filled with only people who want to be there. It is the anti-Maker Faire; only the people who have cool stuff to show off, awesome prints, and the latest technology come to these RepRap Fests. This was the first ERRF, and we’re looking forward to next year, where it will surely be bigger and better.

One of the stand-out presenters at ERRF didn’t have a big printer. It didn’t have normal stepper motors. There weren’t Benchies or Marvins or whatever the standard test print is these days. [James] is showing off tiny printers. Half-scale printers. What’s half the size of a NEMA 17 stepper motor? A NEMA 8, apparently, something that isn’t actually a NEMA spec, and the two companies that make NEMA 8s have different bolt hole patterns. This is fun.

If these printers look familiar, you’re right. A few years ago at the New York Maker Faire, we checked out these tiny little printers, and they do, surprisingly, print. There are a lot of tricks to make a half-size printer, but the most impressive by far is the tiny control board. This tiny little board is just 2.5 by 1.5 inches — much smaller than the standard RAMPS or RAMBO you’d expect on a DIY printer. On the board are five stepper drivers, support for two heaters, headers for OLEDs and Graphic LCDs, and a switching regulator. It’s a feat of microelectronics that’s impressive and necessary for a half-size printer.

Since we last saw these tiny printers, [James] has been hard at work expanding what is possible with tiny printers. The most impressive feat from this year’s ERRF was a color-mixing printer built around the same electronics as the tiny printers. The setup uses normal-size stepper motors (can’t blame him) and a diamond-style hotend to theoretically print in three colors. If you’ve ever wanted a tiny printer, this is how you do it, and I assure you, they’re very, very cute.

Lost In Space Gets 3D Printing Right

June 25, 2018 by 100 Comments

When it has become so common for movies and television to hyper-sensationalize engineering, and to just plain get things wrong, here’s a breath of fresh air. There’s a Sci-Fi show out right now that wove 3D printing into the story line in a way that is correct, unforced, and a fitting complement to that fictional world.

With the amount of original content Netflix is pumping out anymore, you may have missed the fact that they’ve recently released a reboot of the classic Lost in Space series from the 1960’s. Sorry LeBlanc fans, this new take on the space traveling Robinson family pretends the 1998 movie never happened, as have most people. It follows the family from their days on Earth until they get properly lost in space as the title would indicate, and is probably most notable for the exceptional art direction and special effects work that’s closer to Interstellar than the campy effects of yesteryear.

But fear not, Dear Reader. This is not a review of the show. To that end, I’ll come right out and say that Lost in Space is overall a rather mediocre show. It’s certainly gorgeous, but the story lines and dialog are like something out of a fan film. It’s overly drawn out, and in the end doesn’t progress the overarching story nearly as much as you’d expect. The robot is pretty sick, though.

No, this article is not about the show as a whole. It’s about one very specific element of the show that was so well done I’m still thinking about it a month later: its use of 3D printing. In Lost in Space, the 3D printer aboard the Jupiter 2 is almost a character itself. Nearly every member of the main cast has some kind of interaction with it, and it’s directly involved in several major plot developments during the season’s rather brisk ten episode run.

I’ve never seen a show or movie that not only featured 3D printing as such a major theme, but that also did it so well. It’s perhaps the most realistic portrayal of 3D printing to date, but it’s also a plausible depiction of what 3D printing could look like in the relatively near future. It’s not perfect by any means, but I’d be exceptionally interested to hear if anyone can point out anything better.

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This Weekend: The East Coast RepRap Festival

June 20, 2018 by 10 Comments

Are you around Philly, Baltimore, or DC, and looking for something fun to do this weekend? Great news, because Saturday sees the start of the first inaugural East Coast RepRap Festival in Bel Air, Maryland. Eh, we’ll grab some Bohs and boil up some crabs. It’ll be a great time.

Regular readers of Hackaday should have heard of MRRF, the Midwest RepRap Festival, and the greatest 3D printer convention on the planet. There’s a reason it’s so good: it’s not a trade show. It’s simply everyone in the business and a ton of cool people heading out to the middle of Indiana one weekend per year and simply dorking out. All the heavy hitters were at MRRF last year, from [Prusa], to E3D, to [Brook] of Printrbot. The 3D Printing YouTubers made it out, and the entire event was simply a thousand or so people who were the best at what they do just hanging out.

Want evidence a highly unorganized conference of 3D printing enthusiasts can be great? Here’s a working MakerBot Cupcake. Here’s full-color printing with cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white filament. How about an infinite build volume printer? There are roundtables, demos, and talks. This is the state of 3D printing, and it inexplicably happens in the middle of nowhere every year.

This weekend, the East Coast RepRap Festival is launching. This is not an event organized by SeeMeCNC, the hosts of the Midwest RepRap Festival. This is an independent event, and we have no idea how it’s going to turn out. That said, the schedule of events looks great with 3D printed pinewood (douglasfirfill?) derbies, and of course, the event space will be filled with strange and exotic homebuilt printers. The big names will be there, and it looks like this may be the beginning of something great.

Hackaday is going to have some boots on the ground this weekend, and we’re going to be showing off the greatest and the best from ERRF. Tickets are still available, and it looks like this is shaping up to be a great weekend.