Towards Sensible Packaging For 3D Printer Filament

February 3, 2018 by 66 Comments

Filament-based 3D printers are remarkably wasteful. If you buy a kilogram of filament from your favorite supplier, the odds are that it will come wrapped around a plastic spool weighing about 250 grams. Use the filament, and that spool will be thrown in the trash. Very, very few products have such wasteful packaging as 3D printer filament, with the possible exception of inkjet cartridges or getting a receipt with your purchase at CVS.

For the last few years, [Richard Horne], better known as RichRap, has been working towards a solution to the problem of the wasteful spools for 3D printer filament. Now, it looks like he has a solution with the MakerSpool. It’s the perfect solution for a 3D printing ecosystem that doesn’t waste 20% of the total plastic on packaging.

The design of the MakerSpool is fairly straightforward and also 3D printable. It’s a plastic filament spool, just a shade over 200mm in diameter, consisting of two halves that screw together. Add in some RepRap ‘teardrop’ logos, and you have a spool that should fit nearly any machine, and will accept any type of filament.

The trick with this system is, of course, getting the filament onto the spool in the first place. Obviously, filament manufacturers would have to ship unspooled filament that’s somehow constrained and hopefully vacuum packed. Das Filament, a filament manufacturer out of Germany, has already tested this and it looks like they have their process down. It is possible to ship a kilogram of 1.75 filament without a spool, and held together with zip ties. Other filament manufacturers also have packaging processes that are amenable to this style of packaging.

Whether this sort of packing will catch on is anyone’s guess, but there are obvious advantages. There is less waste for the environmentalists in the crowd, but with that you also get reduced shipping costs. It’s a win-win for any filament manufacturer that could also result in reduced costs passed onto the consumer.

3D Print A 3D Printer Frame

February 3, 2018 by 26 Comments

It is over a decade since the RepRap project was begun, originally to deliver 3D printers that could replicate themselves, in other words ones that could print the parts required to make a new printer identical to themselves. And we’re used to seeing printers of multiple different designs still constructed to some extent on this principle.

The problem with these printers from a purist replicating perspective though is that there are always frame parts that must be made using other materials rather than through the 3D printer. Their frames have been variously threaded rod, lasercut sheet, or aluminium extrusion, leaving only the fittings to be printed. Thus [Chip Jones]’ Thingiverse post of an entirely 3D printed printer frame using a 3D printed copy of aluminium extrusion raises the interesting prospect of a printer with a much greater self-replicating capability. It uses the parts from an Anet A8 clone of a Prusa i3, upon which it will be interesting to see whether the 3D printed frame lends the required rigidity.

There is a question as to whether an inexpensive clone printer makes for the most promising collection of mechanical parts upon which to start, but we look forward to seeing this frame and its further derivatives in the wild. Meanwhile this is not the most self-replicating printer we’ve featured, that one we covered in 2015.

Thanks [MarkF] for the tip.

Upgrading A 3D Printer With OctoPrint

January 3, 2018 by 56 Comments

If you’ve been hanging around 3D printing communities, or reading the various 3D printing posts that have popped up here on Hackaday, you’ve almost certainly heard of OctoPrint. Created and maintained by Gina Häußge, OctoPrint allows you to turn an old computer (or more commonly a small ARM board like the Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone) into a network-accessible control panel for your 3D printer. Thanks to a thriving collection of community developed plugins, it can even control other hardware such as lights, enclosure heaters, smart plugs, or anything else you can think to hook onto the GPIO pins of your chosen ARM board. The project has become so popular that the new Prusa i3 MK3 has a header on the control board specifically for connecting a Pi Zero W running OctoPrint.

Even still, I never personally “got” OctoPrint. I was happy enough with my single printer connected to my computer and controlled directly from my slicer over USB. The majority of the things I print are of my own design, so when setting up the printer it only seemed logical that I would have it connected to the machine I’d be doing my designing on. If I’m sitting at my computer, I just need to rotate my chair to the right and I’m at my printer. What do I need to control the thing over WiFi for?

But things got tricky when I wanted to set up a second printer to help with speeding up larger projects. I couldn’t control them both from the same machine, and while I could print from SD on the second printer if I really had to, the idea seemed painfully antiquated. It would be like when Scotty tried talking into the computer’s mouse in “Voyage Home”. Whether I “got it” or not, I was about to dive headfirst into the world of OctoPrint.

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Books You Should Read: The 3D Printing Handbook

December 18, 2017 by 12 Comments

3D printing was invented in the 80s, twenty years passed, patents expired, and then several diverse uses for 3D printing technology were found. As such, the tips and techniques for 3D printing — especially filament-based printing — have been discussed and documented almost entirely on the Internet, mostly in chat rooms, forums, and YouTube videos. Everything you could ever want to know about 3D printing is available on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to find it.

There have been dozens of books published as a guidebook to 3D printing over the years, and some of those are even in their second edition. Yes, despite the disappearance of 3D printers from the headlines of TechCrunch, and despite the massive public disillusionment of computer-controlled hot glue guns, there are still people that want to learn about 3D printers. There’s actually a market for 3D printing guidebooks, and people are buying them.

The latest such guidebook for 3D printing is The 3D Printing Handbook from 3D Hubs. 3D Hubs has been around for a while, and can best be described as, ‘3D Printing as a Service’. The usual use case for 3D Hubs is that someone would upload a 3D model to 3D Hubs, and get a quote from someone with a 3D printer. This quote could come from a professional 3D printing outfit with machines that cost more than a house to someone with a LulzBot or Prusa in their garage. 3D Hubs is going to be fantastic when people realize you can do CNC milling on the service as well.

This book was written by Ben Redwood, Filemon Schöffer, and Brian Garret, all employees of 3D Hubs. In one way or another, 3D Hubs has a hand in every conceivable type of 3D printing technology, and this book aims to be an introduction to the uses of these technologies, and a guidebook on how to use 3D printing technology the right way. There’s a question with this book: does it live up to expectations, and for that matter, can any book live up to the expectation of being a ‘guide to 3D printing?’

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Hangprinter Build Videos

December 16, 2017 by 22 Comments

We figure with the rise in 3D printing, it is time for a new Finagle’s law: Any part you want to print won’t fit on your print bed. There was a time when a 100 mm x 100 mm bed was common for entry-level printers. These days, more printers have beds around (200 mm)2. A hangprinter’s work area can be larger. Much larger. [Thomas Sanladerer] is building one, and has a series of videos about the build. You can see the first one below, but there are several posted, including about 11 hours of recordings of live sessions of the build.

If you haven’t heard of a hangprinter, it is essentially a 3D print head that — well — hangs from cables and can turn an entire room into a 3D printer. When we looked at the original, it was printing a five-foot tall model of the tower of Babel.

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Better 3D Printing Through Holography

December 16, 2017 by 22 Comments

When most of us think about 3D printing, we usually think about a machine that melts plastic filament and extrudes it through a nozzle. But we all know that there are other technologies out there that range from cutting and laminating paper, to printing with molten metal or glass. Many of those are out of range for the common hacker. Probably the second most common method uses photo resin and some light source to build the layers in the resin. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and several universities are experimenting with a new technique that exposes photo resin using three lasers, printing an entire object at one time. You can see a cube formed using the technique in the video below.

In all fairness, the process really isn’t holography but LLNL refers to it as “hologram-like.” In fact, it appears the lasers project more like an oblique projection (you know, like in drafting) which is considerably simpler. Simple enough, that we can’t help but wonder if the hacker community couldn’t develop machines based on this principle. The key would be arranging for the resin to only cure where laser light overlaps.

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How Cheap Can A 3D Printer Get? The Anet A8

December 8, 2017 by 89 Comments

The short answer: something like $200, if your time is worth $0/hour. How is this possible? Cheap kit printers, with laser-cut acrylic frames, but otherwise reasonably solid components. In particular, for this review, an Anet A8. If you’re willing to add a little sweat equity and fix up some of the bugs, an A8 can be turned into a good 3D printer on a shoestring budget.

That said, the A8 is a printer kit, not a printer. You’re going to be responsible for assembly of every last M3 screw, and there are many. Building the thing took me eight or ten hours over three evenings. It’s not rocket surgery, though. There are very accessible videos available online, and a community of people dedicated to turning this box of parts into a great machine. You can do it if you want to.

This article is half how-to guide and half review, and while the fun of a how-to is in the details, the review part is easy enough to sum up: if you want the experience of building a 3D printer, and don’t mind tweaking to get things just right, you should absolutely look into the A8. If you want a backup printer that can print well enough right after assembly, the A8 is a good deal as well; most of the work I’ve put into mine is in chasing perfection. But there are a couple reasons that I’d hesitate to recommend it to a rank beginner, and one of them is fire.

Still, I’ve put 1,615 m (1.0035 miles) of filament through my A8 over 330 hours of run-time spread across the last three months — it’s been actively running for 15% of its lifetime! Some parts have broken, and some have “needed” improving, but basically, it’s been a very functional machine with only three or four hours of unintentional downtime. My expectations going in were naturally fairly low, but the A8 has turned out to be not just a workhorse but also a decent performer, with a little TLC. In short, it’s a hacker’s printer, and I love it.

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