Additive manufacturing techniques like fused deposition modeling, aka 3D printing, are often used for rapid prototyping. Another advantage is that it can create shapes that are too complex to be made with traditional manufacturing like CNC milling. Now, 3D printing has even found its way into particle physics as an international collaboration led by a group from CERN is developing a new plastic scintillator production technique that involves additive manufacturing.
A scintillator is a fluorescent material that can be used for particle detection through the flashes of light created by ionizing radiation. Plastic scintillators can be made by adding luminophores to a transparent polymer such as polystyrene and are usually produced by conventional techniques like injection molding.
[Jorvon Moss] a.k.a. [Odd_Jayy] is known as a maker of “companion robots” which he carriers perched on top of his shoulders. (I don’t know about you, but we’re getting some pretty strong Ash and Pikachu vibes.)
In one of his recent builds, he decided to give his companion bot a bit of sizzle. His Widget Dragon Companion Bot is an impressive 3D printed build, divided into a surprisingly few parts. The robot is controlled using an Adafruit Crickit, marketed specifically for robotics projects, and is easily programmed using the increasingly popular Microsoft MakeCode.
With a few servos, [Odd Jay] was able to animate his bot giving it more of an “alive” feel. Finally, he added a vape pen to give the dragon some pyrotechnic effects.
We agree with you. We can never have enough cosplay hacks. And the ones that include some electronics element definitely have a special place in our hearts. That’s why when we ran across [Maddogg0’s] 3D printed Neuralyzer on Instructables, we knew we had to share.
We love the elegant simplicity of [Maddogg0’s] design. The entire enclosure is printed in two halves that are held together by magnets. One half of the enclosure houses a single coin cell battery and a tiny circuit board for holding the LEDs in place, really giving the Neuralyzer some shine. In true maker fashion, [Maddogg0] released the necessary design files on TinkerCAD so anyone can reuse, remix, and reshare.
We probably don’t have to promote the benefits of a third hand or PCB holders in general, such is their obvious utility. While you can arrange some boxes and pile up tools on your bench to get a similar result, a good grip and flexibility to move the PCB around during soldering or performing any other work on it makes life just so much easier. Thanks to 3D printing there have been plenty of inspiring designs that go beyond the usual clumsy-yet-cheap croc clip version of it, and [SunShine] adds one on to the list with his spring-loaded print-in-place PCB gripper, demonstrated in this video and available on Thingiverse.
The gripping part’s design is based on a spring-loaded box [SunShine] created a little while back — which you can read more about in his Instructable. The holder itself comes in two varieties: one that brings its own stand, and one that has a GoPro mount. The first one is really more to show off the design, and while the gripping part is fully functional, it might not perform too well with heavier boards and easily tip over. Sure, a bigger bottom or mounting it to something more sturdy will fix that, but so will the GoPro-mount version, which also adds the whole flexibility aspect.
Most folks that have been poking around at multi-tool 3D printing know that lining up nozzles can be a gnarly, but necessary pain point. Existing methods either have us measure offsets with a vernier scale or with a series of pictures taken with an upwards-facing camera. And this step is not to be ignored! Any mismatch between nozzles, and your multicolor prints end up looking like Scotty really screwed up those sliders on that transporter beam console. Fear not, however! [Danal] took this problem as an opportunity to write something that’s completely automated and brought to you by some machine vision.
Dubbed TAMV, for Tool Align Machine Vision, [Danal] added a Raspberry Pi alongside his existing 3D printing motion controller in addition to an upwards facing camera. A few lines of code (and a few hours of compiling OpenCV) later, and he had himself a circle-detecting script that automatically cycles through each tool, detects the nozzle center, and calculates an offset for each tool that’s stored into the machine’s configuration file. If that’s not nifty enough, he’s made the entire setup open-source, and he included both an installation script for compiling OpenCV and a well-written set of step-by-step instructions.
In a world where most hobbyists approaches still solve this problem manually, this is leaps and bounds ahead of what we know, and it’s a great application of machine vision built on top of a stack of recognizable hardware and software. While this project was outfitted for a Jubilee running a Duet3 controller with a Raspberry Pi connected in “single-board computer” mode, the core features are readily adaptable to any other multi-tool machine with a similar control board stack. And for folks willing to poke under the hood, the project could even be extended to a standalone script that you can run on your PC locally to simply print the tool offsets separately.
Alongside TAMV, it’s refreshing that even a decade after 3D printers have been with us, we’re still finding ways to make these machines more capable. For more fresh hacks in this category, check out a new spin on using sharpie ink as a support material release agent.
When it comes to computers, it seems like the only thing that matters is speed. The more the better, in general, and the same applies to peripherals. We want the fastest network adapters, the fastest video card, and the fastest printer. So why in the world would anyone intentionally build a really slow inkjet printer? For art, of course.
At least that’s the story [HomoFaciens] tells us in the video below. His efforts are in support of a friend’s art project, which seeks to print slowly but continuously on a roll of paper. [HomoFaciens]’s printer is based on an H-P C6602 inkjet cartridge, one of those high-priced consumables that make buying a new printer more attractive than replacing them once depleted. After figuring out how to drive the printhead — 5 to 6 μs pulses of 18 volts through a ULN2803 Darlington array driver chip seemed to do the trick — he mounted everything to the gantry of an old 3D printer. It’s interesting to watch the images slowly being built up — something that printers usually hide from prying eyes — and to see how the DPI count of the printer can be increased by interlacing each printed line.
Last week, [Danal Estes] passed away. This comes as a shock to many of us who had the pleasure of interacting with him online. Not only was [Danal] an active contributor to the 3D printing community, he was simply a warm-hearted character who was just fun to get along with. I met [Danal] online less than a year ago. But I owe him a debt in helping transform a set of design files that I posted online into a full blown community of hardware enthusiasts.
Here’s my best shot at recounting some of this fellow human’s legacy as seen from the fellow tool changing 3D printing enthusiasts who knew him.
Getting to Know an Online Community Builder
I first met [Danal] online last September through Thingiverse when he posted a make of Jubilee, a tool changing machine design that I posted a few weeks prior. At a time when Jubilee was just a set of files and instructions on the internet, I was stoked that someone in the world was out there building a duplicate. To get to know these people better and work out any pinch points in their assembly process, I started a Discord Chat Server. [Danal] was the first to join and start telling his story in pictures.
As a community of curious people on Discord grew, questions about the machine started to arise. How big was it? How did the tool changing work? I tried answering as many as I could, putting an FAQ blurb on Thingiverse, But a few weeks in, something else happened: [Danal] started answering the questions. Not only that, he was greeting nearly every single person who introduced themselves on the server. I didn’t understand the value of a simple “welcome aboard!” that follows someone’s first post in a budding online community, but [Danal] did. So he did just that. He made you feel welcome to have landed in this corner of the internet. In a world full of engineers who don’t like repeating themselves, [Danal] seemed to get that his repeat interaction was new for the person on the other end; and that made it worth doing.
Danal’s first tool changes
As the days passed, questions continued, and [Danal] continued to fill people in with answers to questions–even repeat questions. All the while, he posted progress pictures of his own machine. In a way, the rest of the community seemed to be holding their breath during this time, watching [Danal] post status reports; waiting for some conviction that these files actually turned into something that worked. Then, less than a month later, [Danal] posted a video of his first successful tool change. It did work! Almost certainly inspired by [Danal’s] success, a few more folks started building machines of their own. But [Danal] was the first person to duplicate a Jubilee.
More than twenty machines have been built in the wild since I posted the project files back in September. I believe that the inspiration to start draws from the success of people who have finished before, which chains down to the inspiration drawn from the success of the first person to finish: [Danal Estes]. I owe him one for that: for inspiring a community of folks to follow in this adventure.
Commoditized Automatic Nozzle Alignment
[Danal] did more than affirm the machine design to a new Jubilee community. Over the short span of the project, [Danal] put his software hat on and developed an automated machine-vision based tool alignment system that he called TAMV. It turns out that tool tip calibration is one of the gnarly problems for any multi-nozzle 3D printer. Tools must be aligned relative to each other such that each of the unique materials they print are aligned in the resulting print. The current ways of doing this are cumbersome and manual. Either you measure offsets by printing a vernier scale or by taking pictures with an upwards-facing microscope. [Danal] took this gnarly problem as an opportunity to automate the process completely, so he did.
In just two months, [Danal] returned with an announcement on the Jubilee Discord to present TAMV, aka: Tool Align Machine Vision. By mounting an upwards facing webcam to the front of his Jubilee, [Danal] simply ran his one-button script, and his machine automatically calibrated each available tool both automatically and better than most humans could with the prior methods. It did this by sequentially picking up tools, putting them in the camera field of view, and then measuring their offsets. What’s more, he released the entire code base as open-source, literally transforming a gnarly problem into a thing of the past with a commodity solution made usable with a simple installation script and setup instructions that he also wrote.
Here on Hackaday, it’s humbling to read about the amazing feats folks are overcoming all from the comfort of their home workbenches. But it’s invigorating to see that same feat unfolded in a way that lets us unpack it, learn from it, build on top of it. The act of documenting work you’ve already done with the intent that others could follow it is an act of grace. [Danal] was gracious.
A Shared Story Told in Projects
As [Danal] became one of the most active community members on Discord, we started to learn more about his other projects. For [Danal], 3D printers were as much a side project as they were tools in a family of other tools for creative projects. Armed with these machines, [Danal] put them to work on machines for flight, from extraordinary remote control aircraft (3D printed of course) that could barely work their wingspan through a doorway to the consoles of real world aircraft that could carry a pilot.
It was always a pleasure to get a slice of [Danal’s] adventures. Getting to hear about his excitement in projecting was food for a growing community of hobbyists eager to get back to our workbenches. And the framing of his adventures was warm enough to make you feel not just that you wanted a bit of this lifestyle for yourself, but that you could have it too. I hope that this part of [Danal’s] legacy is something that we online folk can continue: the shared courtesy and warm attitude to newcomers in a hardware hacking community.
