A giant, 3D-printed key switch that sends F to pay respects.

Big ‘F’ Key To Pay Big Respects

September 1, 2021 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

So your ally was slain. Your comrade has fallen. And somehow, that capital F coming from that tiny key is supposed to convey your respect? Please. What you need is a giant, dedicated F key that matches the size of your respect. And [Jaryd_Giesen] is gonna teach you how to build your own. Well, kind of. Between the Thingiverse build guide and the hilarious build video below, you’ll get the gist.

One of the coolest things about this build is the custom spring. Between a birthday time crunch and lockdown, there was just no way to source a giant spring in two days, so [Jaryd] printed a cylinder with a hole in it to chuck into a drill and stand in for a lathe. Ten attempts later, and the perfect spring was in there somewhere.

We love the level of detail here — making a pudding-style keycap to match the main keyboard is the icing on this clacky cake. But the best part is hidden away inside: the stem of the giant switch actuates a regular-sized key switch because it’s funnier that way. Since it’s a giant Gateron red, it doesn’t exactly clack, but it doesn’t sound linear, either, mostly because you can hear the printed pieces rubbing together. Check out the build video after the break, and hit up the second video if you just want to hear the thing.

Seeing things embiggened is one of our favorite things around here. Some things are just for looks, but other times they’re useful tools.
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New Part Day: DLP300s The Next Big Thing For Low Cost Resin Printing?

September 1, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 73 Comments

The majority of non-SLA resin 3D printers, certainly at the hacker end of the market, are most certainly LCD based. The SLA kind, where a ultraviolet laser is scanner via galvanometers over the build surface, we shall consider no further in this article.

What we’re talking about are the machines that shine a bright ultraviolet light source directly through a (hopefully monochrome) LCD panel with a 2, 4 or even 8k pixel count. The LCD pixels mask off the areas of the resin that do not need to be polymerised, thus forming the layer being processed. This technique is cheap and repeatable, hence its proliferance at this end of the market.

They do suffer from a few drawbacks however. Firstly, optical convergence in the panel causes a degree of smearing at the resin interface, which reduces effective resolution somewhat. The second issue is one of thermal control – the LCD will transmit less than 5% of the incident light, so for a given exposure at the resin, the input light intensity needs to be quite high, and this loss in the LCD results in significant internal heating and a need for active cooling. Finally, the heating in the LCD combined with intense UV radiation degrades the LCD over time, making the LCD itself a consumable item.

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Test For 3D Printer Runaway

September 1, 2021 by Al Williams 22 Comments

A few 3D printers have had a deserved reputation for bursting into flames. Most — but apparently not all — printers these days has firmware that will detect common problems that can lead to a fire hazard. If you program your own firmware, you can check to see if you have the protection on, but what if you have a printer of unknown provenance? [Thomas] shows you how to check for a safe printer. Also check out his video, embedded below.

The idea is to fake the kind of failures that will cause a problem. Primarily, you want to have the heaters turned on while the thermistor isn’t reading correctly. If the thermistor is stuck reading low or is reading ambient, then it is possible to just drive the heating element to get hotter and hotter. This won’t always lead to a fire, but it could lead to noxious fumes.

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Printing Ceramics Made Easier

August 30, 2021 by Al Williams 3 Comments

Creating things with ceramics is nothing new — people have done it for centuries. There are ways to 3D print ceramics, too. Well, you typically 3D print the wet ceramic and then fire it in a kiln. However, recent research is proposing a new way to produce 3D printed ceramics. The idea is to print using TPU which is infused with polysilazane, a preceramic polymer. Then the resulting print is fired to create the final ceramic product.

The process relies on a specific type of infill to create small channels inside the print to assist in the update of the polysilazane. The printer was a garden-variety Lulzbot TAZ 6 with ordinary 0.15mm and 0.25mm nozzles.

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3D Printering: Is Hassle-Free Bed Leveling Finally Here?

August 30, 2021 by Donald Papp 72 Comments

3D printers have come a long way over the past several years, but the process of bed leveling remains a pain point. Let’s take a look at the different ways the problem has been tackled, and whether recent developments have succeeded in automating away the hassle.

Anycubic Vyper 3D printer, front view — Anycubic Vyper, with an auto-leveling feature we decided to take a closer look at.

Bed leveling and first layer calibration tends to trip up novices because getting it right requires experience and judgment calls, and getting it wrong means failed prints. These are things 3D printer operators learn to handle with time and experience, but they are still largely manual processes that are often discussed in ways that sound more like an art than anything else. Little wonder that there have been plenty of attempts to simplify the whole process.

Some consumer 3D printers are taking a new approach to bed leveling and first layer calibration, and one of those printers is the Anycubic Vyper, which offers a one-touch solution for novices and experienced users alike. We accepted Anycubic’s offer of a sample printer specifically to examine this new leveling approach, so let’s take a look at the latest in trying to automate away the sometimes stubborn task of 3D printer bed leveling.

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Never Lose A Piece With 3D Printed Sliding Puzzles

August 28, 2021 by Jim Heaney 6 Comments

Have you ever been about to finish a puzzle, when suddenly you realize there are more holes left than you have pieces? With [Nikolaos’s] 3D printed sliding puzzles, this will be a problem of the past!

An image showing the sliding dovetails of the puzzle — The dovetails, integrated into each piece, keep the puzzle together but still allows pieces to move.

The secret of the puzzle is in the tongue and groove system that captures the pieces while allowing them to slide past each other and along the puzzle’s bezel. The tongues are along the top and right sides of the pieces shown here, with the grooves along the left and bottom. There is only one empty spot on the board, so the player must be methodical in how they move pieces to their final destinations. See this in action in the video after the break.

[Nikolaos] designed the puzzle in Fusion 360, and used this as an opportunity to practice with parameters. He designed the model in such a way that any size puzzle could be generated by changing just 2 variables. Once the puzzle is the proper size, the image is added by importing and extruding an SVG.

Another cool aspect of these puzzles is that they are print-in-place, meaning that when the part is removed from the 3D printer, it is ready to use and fully assembled. No need to remove support material or bolt and glue together multiple components. Print-in-place is useful for more than just puzzles, you could also use this technique to 3D print wire connectors!

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Grappling Hook Robot Swings Like Spiderman

August 28, 2021 by Al Williams 3 Comments

We’ll admit it is a bit of a gimmick, but [Adam Beedle’s] Spider-Bot did make us smile. The little robot can launch a “web” and use it to swing. It is hard to picture, but the video below will make it all clear. It can also use the cable to climb a wall, sort of.

The bot’s ability to fling a 3D printed hook on a tether is remarkable. Details are scarce, but it looks like the mechanism is spring-loaded with a servo motor to release it. Even trailing a bit of string behind it, the range of the hook is impressive and can support the weight of the robot when it winches itself up. There’s even a release mechanism that reminds us more of Batman than Spiderman.

If we were going full autonomous, we’d consider a vision system. On the other hand, you could probably tell a lot by the tension on the cable and some way to measure the angle of it coming out of the robot. If you come up with a practical use for any of this, we’d love to see it.

We’ve seen robots that fly, jump, and can climb walls before. We don’t remember one that swings like Tarzan.

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