3D Printering: Will A Resin Printer Retire Your Filament-based One?

April 30, 2020 by Donald Papp 25 Comments

Adding a resin printer to one’s workbench has never looked so attractive, nor been so affordable. Complex shapes with effortlessly great detail and surface finish? Yes, please! Well, photos make the results look effortless, anyway. Since filament-based printers using fused deposition modeling (FDM) get solid “could be better” ratings when it comes to surface finish and small detail resolution, will a trusty FDM printer end up retired if one buys a resin printer?

The short answer is this: for users who already use FDM, a resin-based stereolithography (SLA) printer is not likely to take over. What is more likely to happen is that the filament printer continues to do the same jobs it is good at, while the resin printer opens some wonderful new doors. This is partly because those great SLA prints will come at a cost that may not always justify the extra work.

Let’s go through what makes SLA good, what it needs in return, and how it does and doesn’t fit in with FDM.

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Signal The End Of A Print With MIDI Of Your Choice

April 25, 2020 by Danie Conradie 6 Comments

The end of every 3D print should be a triumphant moment, and deserves a theme song. [FuseBox2R] decided to make it a reality, and wrote tool for converting MIDI tracks to G-code that uses the buzzer on your 3D printer.

The tool is up on GitHub, and uses the M300 speaker command that is available in Marlin and some other 3D printer firmware packages. It takes the form of a static HTML page with in-line JavaScript that converts a midi track to series of speaker commands with the appropriate frequency and duration parameters, using the Tone.js framework. Simply add to your slicer G-code to add a bit of spice to your prints. You can also build a MIDI jukebox using the RAMPS board and LCD you probably have gathering dust somewhere. See the video after the break for a demonstration, including a rendition of the DOOM theme song, and off course Mario Bros.

For more quarantine projects, you can also play MIDI using the stepper motors on your printer, or build a day clock if time is becoming too much of a blur.

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Queue Up Your Tracks With A Well Placed Hexagon

April 24, 2020 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Besides a few stalwart holdouts, most of us have have switched over listening to music in digital form, often via an online stream. As long as no data caps stand in your way, it’s a quick and easy way to listen to your favorite artists or discover new ones. But there’s something visceral about act of loading a piece of physical media into a player that can’t be replicated by just clicking or tapping on a screen.

Which is why [InfiniteVideo] put together this RFID playlist launcher peripheral. There’s an important distinction to be made here, as this device isn’t actually playing or even storing audio. A nearby Raspberry running Volumio handles the actual playback. This device is just an RFID reader with some clever tokens that the listener can use to select their favorite artists and albums with physical tokens. It’s certainly not a new concept, but we think the nuances of this particular build warrant a closer look.

The “player” consists of a ESP8266 with a MFRC522 RFID reader wired directly to the GPIO pins. The pair are housed in a rather large 3D printed enclosure, which at first might seem a bit excessive. But it turns out that [InfiniteVideo] is actually trying to replicate a crowd sourced project called Qleek which is based around a similarly chunky reader.

Likewise, the hexagon tiles are also lifted from the Qleek concept. But rather than being made out of wood as in the original, [InfiniteVideo] is printing those as well. Halfway during the process, the print is paused and an RFID sticker is placed in the middle of the hexagon. Once resumed, the RFID tag becomes permanently embedded in the tile with no visible seams to reveal how the trick was pulled off. With the addition of a suitable label, each printed hexagon gets associated with the desired album or artist in software.

This project is notable for its convenience and visual flair, but using RFID tags for media identification can also be a practical choice. It can be used as an assistive technology, or as a way for young children to easily interact with devices.

3D-Printed COVID Stuff That’s Not Face Shields Or Ventilators

April 23, 2020 by Mike Szczys 42 Comments

The coolest stories from the hacker community this year are the rapid manufacturing efforts that have gone on in response to COVID-19. But [Mark Rehorst], frequently featured on these pages for his clever takes on 3D printing, shared a couple of really useful prints that are out of the ordinary for what we’ve been seeing: bias tape folders and ear savers.

Initial bias tape folding jig design by ongaroo

Tailors around the world have threaded the needle on grass-roots face mask production. One of the more labor intensive parts of sewing a face mask is the fastening mechanism. With elastic straps, the size of the loops needs to be just right, but when you run out of elastic you need to sew straps. Bias tape is a popular material for that, but it’s finicky to fold and hold it for sewing.

[Mark] heard of the need and grabbed a bias tape folder design from Thingiverse. These work kind of like a zipper, pulling in the unfolded tape on one side and feeding it out the other, folded nicely for the needle and thread to take over. But of course he did one better, refining the original design to use less plastic to get more parts, faster, with less material use — win, win, win.

Speaking of those mask straps, it turns out the backs of your ears don’t like being rubbed raw for back-to-back-to-back 12-hour shifts at the hospital. We’ve seen health workers, themselves skilled hackers, recommend sewing buttons onto a headband to hold the mask straps.

Button/Headband earsaver

3D-printed earsaver

Mark’s revised earsaver design

But the 3D-printing world has an “earsaver” that provides a series of hooks on a plastic band that loops behind your head. Once again, [Mark] iterated on the standard design, finding ways to reduce material use while also fitting more units onto a single printer bed.

These functional prints are glamorous in their own ways. We love seeing hard-working 3D-printed items, but we love it even more when we see them getting better and better with each new version. The back story and the design files for the improved versions are available on his project writeup. Go [Mark]!

Printed It: Collet Drill Stop

April 22, 2020 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

You’d think that being quarantined in your home would be perfect for hackers and makers like us, as we all have a project or two that’s been sitting on the back burner because we didn’t have the time to tackle it. Unfortunately, some are finding that the problem now is actually getting the parts and tools needed to do the job. When there’s a bouncer and a line outside the Home Depot like it’s a nightclub on Saturday night, even the simplest of things can be difficult to source when making in the time of COVID.

Which is exactly the situation I found myself in recently when I needed to drill a bunch of holes to the same depth. The piece was too big to put in the drill press, and while I contemplated just wrapping the bit in some tape to serve as a makeshift stop, I wasn’t convinced it would be accurate or repeatable enough. It occurred to me that a set of drill stop collars would be easy enough to design and 3D print, but before I fired up OpenSCAD, I decided to see what was already available online.

Which is how I found the “Collet Drill Stop” from Adam Harrison. Rather than the traditional ring and setscrew arrangement, his design uses a printable collet that will clamp down on the bit at an arbitrary position without tools. So not only could I avoid a trip to the store by printing this design out, it looked like it would potentially be an upgrade over what I would have bought.

Of course, it’s wise not to take anything for granted when dealing with 3D printing. The only way I could be sure that Adam’s design would work for me was to commit it to plastic and try it out.

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Maker Therapy Joins The Fight Against COVID-19

April 21, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett No comments

We love talking about makerspaces here at Hackaday. We love hearing about the camaraderie, the hacks, the outreach, the innovation, everything. Even more, we love seeing all the varying forms that makerspaces take, either in the hacks they create, the communities they reach out to, and especially their unique environments.

Recently, we came across Maker Therapy, a makerspace right inside a children’s hospital. Now, we’ve heard about hospital makerspaces here on Hackaday before, but what makes Maker Therapy particularly unique is it’s the first hospital makerspace that gives patients the opportunity to innovate right in the pediatric setting.

Inspired by patients and founded by Dr. Gokul Krishnan, Maker Therapy has been around for a few years now but recently popped up on our radar due to their unique position on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a makerspace located right inside a hospital, Maker Therapy is in the unique position to be the hospital’s very own rapid prototyping unit. Using 3D printing and other tools, Maker Therapy is able to make face shields and other important PPE right where they are needed the most.

Here at Hackaday, we salute and give our eternal gratitude to all the health care professionals fighting for our communities. Maybe some of your hacks and other designs could be used by initiatives like Maker Therapy? Until then, stay home and stay safe Hackaday. The only way we’ll get through this is together.

Printed Brain Implants Give New Meaning To Neuroplasticity

April 14, 2020 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

3D printing has opened up a world of possibilities in plastic, food, concrete, and other materials. Now, MIT engineers have found a way to add brain implants to the list. This technology has the potential to replace electrodes used for monitoring and implants that stimulate brain tissue in order to ease the effects of epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and severe depression.

Existing brain implants are rigid and abrade the grey matter, which creates scar tissue over time. This new material is soft and flexible, so it hugs the wrinkles and curves. It’s a conductive polymer that’s been thickened into a viscous, printable paste.

The team took a conductive liquid polymer (water plus nanofibers of a polystyrene sulfonate) and combined it with a solvent they made for a previous project to form a conductive, printable hydrogel.

In addition to printing out a sheet of micro blinky circuits, they tested out the material by printing a flexible electrode, which they implanted into a mouse. Amazingly, the electrode was able to detect the signal coming from a single neuron. They also printed arrays of electrodes topped with little wells for holding neurons so they can study the neurons’ signals using the electrode net underneath.

This particular medical printing hack is pretty far out of reach for most of us, but not all of them are. Fire up that printer and check out this NIH-approved face shield design.