Heating Up A Printrbot’s Bed

June 16, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 32 Comments

Heated beds for 3D printers help reduce the amount of curling and warping of parts. The warping happens when the part cools and contracts. The heated bed keeps the part warm for the entire print and reduces the warping.

As an upgrade to her Printrbot, [Erin] added a heated bed. The first plan was to DIY one using Nichrome wire, but heated beds are available at low cost. They’re basically just a PCB with a long trace that acts as a resistor. She added a thermistor to monitor temperature and allow for accurate control.

The Printrbot heated bed worked, but didn’t heat up quite quick enough. [Erin] was quick to scratch off the solder mask and solder new leads onto the board. This converted the board into two parallel resistors, halving the resistance and doubling the power.

This version heated up very quickly, but didn’t have a steady heat. The simple control that was being used was insufficient, and a PID controller was needed. This type of control loop helps deal with problems such as oscillations.

The Printrbot’s firmware is based on Marlin, which has PID support disabled by default. After rebuilding the code and flashing, the PID gains could be adjusted using g-codes. With the values tuned, [Erin]’s printer was holding steady heat, and can now print ABS and PLA with minimal warping.

3D Printed Portal Turret Searches And Destroys

June 12, 2014 by James Hobson 11 Comments

Ah yes, Portal — one of the most iconic puzzle games from this past decade by Valve. [Yvo] just put the finishing touches on his fully 3D printed, working, Portal Turret. Well — it doesn’t have guns — but it does just about everything else!

This intricate prop replica has attention to detail written all over it. [Yvo’s] carefully designed it to actuate as close to the video game model as possible. Its eye and arms move, has a targeting laser and even features a camera for color based object tracking. You can also play around with it using a joystick — but it’s much more fun to leave on autonomous mode.

Because the whole thing is 3D printed, [Yvo] has also made up an Instructable for making your own, and according to him, it’s not that hard to build! This isn’t his first rodeo either, if you remember the awesome GlaDOS we shared last year — that’s his too.

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3D Printed Trays For Your Pick And Place Machine

June 12, 2014 by Adam Fabio 37 Comments

3dprintedPNPTray Pick and Place machines are one of the double-edged swords of electronics.They build your boards fast, but if you don’t have everything setup perfectly, they’ll quickly make a mess. A pick and place can’t grab a resistor from a pile and place it – so far only humans can pull that one off. They need parts organized and oriented in reels or trays.

[Parker Dillmann] had to load some parts, but didn’t have a tray for them, so he 3D printed his own. [Parker] works at a small assembly house in Texas. He’s working on a top secret design which includes FFC connectors. Unfortunately, the connectors shipped in pick and place unfriendly tubes rather than reels. If he couldn’t find a tray, [Parker] would have to hand place those connectors as a second operation, which would increase the time to build each board and leave more chances for mistakes.

Rather than place each part by hand, [Parker] got in touch with his friend [Chris Kraft] who is something of a 3D printing guru. [Chris] confirmed that a 3D printed tray would be possible, though the PLA he prints with was not static safe. That was fine for the connectors, but [Parker] was hoping to save some tray space by putting his PSOC4 chips in the printed tray as well.

[Parker] used SketchUp to design a tray that would fit his Madell DP2006-2 pick and place. He left .15mm clearance around the parts – just enough to cover any inaccuracies during printing, but not enough to throw off parts placement. He sent the STL file over to [Chris] who used Simplify3D to a create a Gcode file. [Chris] printed the tray at .2 mm layer height on his MakerGear M2 printer, and the results looked great. Would they be good enough for the pick and place machine?

[Parker] received the printed trays in the mail and loaded them with parts. The pick and place had no problem finding and placing the connectors, making this job a huge success. [Parker] even left room for the PSOC4 chips.He plans to paint the tray with anti-static paint before giving them at try.

We really like this story – it’s a perfect example of how 3D printers can speed up processes in manufacturing. Now that the basic design is done, creating new trays is a snap. Nice work [Parker] and [Chris]! Continue reading “3D Printed Trays For Your Pick And Place Machine” →

DSLR Gives Exposure To 3D Light Traces

June 11, 2014 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

light lion

We’ve all twirled sparklers around in the darkness to write fleeting circles and figure eights with the light they give. Some of us have done it with the glowing end of a cigarette, too. Hackaday Projects user [ekaggrat] went a step further, painting with an LED mounted on the print head of his newly built 3DR Delta and capturing the LED’s path with a DSLR camera set for long exposure.

He started by creating a mesh model. From there, he converted it slices and G-code in Grasshopper. The LED is connected to pin D11/servo pin 1 on the RAMPS board. [ekaggrat] used the M42 G-code extension toggle the pin and write the slice lines with light. He has future plans to use an RGB LED, and we hope he shares that on the Projects site as well.

While this isn’t the most advanced light painting setup we’ve seen, it’s still pretty awesome and far more accessible. There is more information on his site, and you can grab the G-code from his repo. Stick around to see a video of the process.

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Wind Powered Strandbeest Could Roam The Land Indefinitely

June 11, 2014 by James Hobson 22 Comments

3d printed strandbeest

We have to admit, Strandbeests are one of our favorite mechanical inventions of recent years — many-legged, life-like mechanisms that walk around? Awesome. [Eric] wanted to design something really cool — so he decided to build a turbine attachment for [Theo Jansen’s] Strandbeest — the AG5 & AG7 models specifically.

If you’re not familiar, the Strandbeest is a mechanical contraption that actually walks around. It’s been developed by [Theo Jansen] for years and has been built in many variations by other people over the years. [Theo] even gave a TED talk on it back in 2007.

The very idea of the Strandbeest is to have it move by itself with autonomy — no electronics allowed! [Theo] has designed a propeller attachment for one of his 3D printable Strandbeests to do this, but [Eric] wanted to take it a step further. He’s designed a more functional wind turbine that sits on top of the Strandbeest, allowing wind from any direction to cause it to walk.

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Mechanical Clock Designed For A CNC Router Gets New Life Using A 3D Printer

June 10, 2014 by James Hobson 4 Comments

[Madis Kaasik] designed a clock a while back using Solid Edge (3D CAD) — but never got a chance to build it — until he became an exchange student at a university in Norway with access to a big industrial 3D printer!

He had originally intended for it to be cut out using a CNC router or with a laser cutter, but when discovered he could use the university’s 3D printer he decided to give it a shot — it’s actually the very first thing he’s ever printed! The designs had to be modified a little bit for 3D printing, but now that it’s done he’s also uploaded them to Thingiverse for anyone to use.

It took quite a bit of fine tuning with the pendulum, weights, and gears to get it ticking properly, but what [Madis] enjoyed most about this project was the realization of just how vast the possibilities of 3D printing are — he’s excited to begin his next big 3D printing endeavor!

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Printable Lamp Assembles Itself

June 7, 2014 by James Hobson 14 Comments

Printable-Self-Assembling-Lamp

With the advent of 3D printers, printable circuits, and other “one-machine-to-rule-them-all” automated systems, printing fully functional items is fast becoming a reality. The lamp seen above starts out as a flat piece of cardboard with circuits printed onto it — apply some electricity and it will fold itself up, creating a lamp — it even has a capacitive touch sensor for turning it on!

This ingenuity comes straight from Harvard researchers who presented the project “Self-assembling Sensors for Printable Machines” at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) just last Tuesday in Hong Kong. It’s not fully printable (wires and the LED had to be soldered in by hand) but it’s an amazing proof of concept — there’s also an Arduino off-screen taking care of controlling it.

The cardboard is a sandwich of shape-memory polymers which are triggered by heat, generated by running electricity through thin layers of copper trace. It takes a long time to assemble so the following video has been sped up 32x speed.

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