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.

Continue reading “Printed It: Collet Drill Stop” →

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.

Using Spiral Mode To Rapidly Print Enclosures

April 13, 2020 by Tom Nardi 24 Comments

We’ve often said that one of the best applications of desktop 3D printing is the production of custom enclosures. A bespoke case adds a touch of professionalism to any project, and considering the materials needed to print one will cost less than even the cheapest generic project box, it’s a no-brainer. There’s only one problem: it can take hours to print even a simple case.

To try and speed things up, [Electrobob] has been experimenting with running off enclosures using spiral or “vase” mode on his 3D printer. Unlike the normal layer-by-layer approach, in this mode, the printer’s hotend continually rises at a steady rate during the entire print. Think of it as akin to printing out a Slinky and you should get the idea.

Spiral printed boxes may need manual retouching

As you might expect, there are some trade-offs here. For one, the walls of the box can’t be very thick since the printer is only making one pass. The nozzle on most printers is 0.4 mm, but in his experiments, [Electrobob] has found he’s able to reliably double that to a wall thickness of 0.8 mm by adjusting the extrusion rate.

You also need to approach the design a bit differently during the CAD phase. Printing holes in the side of the enclosure, which would be easy enough to do normally, doesn’t really work when running in spiral mode. For those situations, [Electrobob] recommends designing a “pocket” into the side that you can come back and cut out with a knife. It will add a little time to the post-processing stage, but the time saved during the print will more than make up for it.

So how much faster are we talking about? In the example [Electrobob] shows in his write-up, the print time went from nearly two hours to just 18 minutes. The resulting enclosure obviously looks a bit different than the traditionally printed version, and isn’t as strong, but the concept still clearly holds promise for some applications. If you’re building a sensor network that needs a bunch of enclosures, those time savings will really add up.

Don’t Let Your PLA Filament Hang Loose With This 3D-Printed Surfboard

April 13, 2020 by Moritz v. Sivers 8 Comments

People always tend to push the boundaries of what is doable with a 3D printer. This is also true for [AndrewW1977] when he decided to 3D print a full-sized functional surfboard.

With just over nine full days of printing time, 95 individual pieces, and using 3.1 kg of PLA (not counting all the test prints), this is certainly a monumental project. One of the bigger issues [AndrewW1977] had to solve was avoiding air pockets inside the board. Ideally, you would want to end up with only one continuous hollow chamber in order to easily vent all the air inside the board when it heats up. [AndrewW1977] chose to overcome this problem by using zero infill for each individual piece. The pieces were then connected with the help of alignment pins that have a central hole thereby connecting all hollow chambers.

By using a triangular shape, he managed to print all pieces without using supports. After gluing them together the whole board was covered with fiberglass and epoxy resin similar to traditional surfboard building. Unfortunately, due to the current situation with Covid19 [AndrewW1977] remains short of showing us the board in action. In case you have a 3D printer at home and lots of spare time during lockdown, [AndrewW1977] has published all files for his surfboard on Thingiverse.

As [AndrewW1977] points out in the video embedded below other people have already done similar projects. From jet boats to electric hydrofoils it seems that water sports and 3D printing are a perfect match.

Continue reading “Don’t Let Your PLA Filament Hang Loose With This 3D-Printed Surfboard” →

Stitching Up Custom Belts

April 12, 2020 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

If you’ve got a 3D printer, you’re probably familiar with the reinforced belts that are commonly used on the X and Y axis. These belts either come as long lengths that you attach to the machine on either end, or as a pre-sized loop. Traditional wisdom says you can’t just take a long length of belt and make your own custom loops out of it, but [Marcel Varallo] had his doubts about that.

This is a simple tip, but one that could get you out of a bind one day. Through experimentation, [Marcel] has found that you can use a length of so-called GT2 belt and make your own bespoke loop. The trick is, you need to attach the ends with something very strong that won’t hinder the normal operation of the belt. Anything hard or inflexible is right out the window, since the belt would bind up as soon as it had to go around a pulley.

It seems the key is to cut both ends of the belt very flat, making sure the belt pattern matches perfectly. Once they’ve been trimmed and aligned properly, you stitch them together with nylon thread. You want the stitches to be as tight as possible, and the more you do, the stronger the end result will be.

[Marcel] likes to follow this up with a bit of hot glue, being careful to make sure the hardened glue takes the shape of the belt’s teeth. The back side won’t be as important, but a thin layer is still best. The end result is a belt strong enough for most applications in just a few minutes.

Would we build a 3D printer using hand-stitched GT2 belts? Probably not. But during a global pandemic, when shipments of non-essential components are often being delayed, we could certainly see ourselves running some stitched together belts while we wait for the proper replacement to come in. Gotta keep those face shields printing.