How To 3D Print Your Identical Twin

November 23, 2019 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

It’s possible to have an enjoyable weekend touring a city with a stolen cardboard cutout from some advertising display or other. However, it’s 2019, and 3D printing means you can go so much further. [Simon] of RCLifeOn went so far as to print a lifesized body double of himself, and it’s only slightly creepy! (Video, embedded below.)

The model was sourced from a 3D scan [Simon] had done with commercial hardware. An Optimus P1 industrial-grade 3D printer was used to print the parts, with total printing time being around 200 hours. Adhesive was used to join the various segments together, and the assembly was then sanded and primed, ready for paint.

Unwilling to tackle the task alone, [Simon] enlisted a professional painter to help put the finishing touches on the piece. The end result is impressive, particularly from a distance. [Simon 2.0] was then sent out to the city centre, aiming to raise money from bewildered passers by.

We suspect the market for custom body doubles will only increase as the technology to create them becomes more widespread. If you’ve tackled a similar project, be sure to let us know. Video after the break.

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IREnE Goes Around

November 23, 2019 by Richard Baguley 3 Comments

Timelapse rigs are awesome because you can spice up your videos with more interesting panning and tilting timelapse shots. So, why not build yourself one? That’s what [td0g] decided to do, and the result is IREnE, a rather nice homemade 3DOF rig that fits onto a standard tripod. 3DOF means that it has three degrees of freedom: the camera can be rotated on the tripod, moved linearly on an extending arm away from the tripod head and rotated around its own axis. In other words: it can pan past an object while rotating the camera to keep the object centered in the frame.

IREnE stands for Inverted Radial Extension Eggtimer, a play on the dual radial nature of the device and how photographers use egg timers for this sort of thing. It’s also a sneaky tribute to a foe of Sherlock Holmes. The rig is driven by three NEMA 17 motors and an ATMega328p, all powered by a Dewalt powertool battery and his own DeWatt power adapter. the rig also has a secondary function with minor modifications as a pancake printer.

Breakfast aside, there are a few caveats to this project. While a tripod is fine for stabilizing a camera on the top of it, offsetting the weight like this makes the tripod unstable. [td0g] did add a few welded stabilizer bars that brace it to more stable, but the whole thing should be used with some caution. The camera sits on a 1-inch square aluminium extruder that [td0g] claims is robust enough to hold his Canon D7, but I am not sure I would trust it with my expensive equipment.

This is the fifth high-quality build we have seen from [td0g]: we previously covered the excellent high-speed LED flash, great telescope mount, high-speed chronograph, and wood-burning ATX power supply hack.

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East Coast RepRap Festival Comes Alive In Second Year

November 22, 2019 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

By pretty much any metric you care to use, the inaugural East Coast RepRap Festival (ERRF) in 2018 was an incredible success. There was plenty to see, the venue was accommodating, and the ticket prices were exceptionally reasonable. But being a first-time event, there was an understandable amount of trepidation from both exhibitors and the attendees. Convincing people to travel hundreds of miles to an event with no track record can be a difficult thing, and if there was a phrase that would best describe the feel of that first ERRF, it would probably have been “cautious optimism”.

But this year, now that they had some idea of what to expect, the 3D printing community descended on Bel Air, Maryland with a vengeance. In 2019, everything at ERRF was bigger and better. There were more people, more printers, and of course, more incredible prints. Activities like the 3D Printed Derby returned, and were joined by new attractions including full-body 3D scanning and a shooting gallery where attendees could try out the latest in printable NERF weaponry.

The official tally shows that attendance nearly doubled over last year, and with growth like that, we wouldn’t be surprised if the ERRF organizers consider relocating to a larger venue for 2020 or 2021. As far as problems go, growth so explosive that it requires you to rethink where you hold the event isn’t a bad one to have. The Midwest RepRap Festival, which served as the inspiration for ERRF, found they too needed to move into more spacious digs after a few years. Something to keep in mind the next time somebody tells you the bubble has burst on desktop 3D printing.

Trying to distill an event as large and vibrant as ERRF 2019 into a few articles is always difficult. Even after spending hours walking around the show floor, you would still stumble upon something you hadn’t seen previously. As such, this article is merely a taste of what was on hand. The East Coast RepRap Festival 2020 should absolutely be marked on your calendar for next year, but until then let’s take a look at just some of what made this year’s event such a smash.

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University Makes Bulletproof 3D Prints

November 20, 2019 by Al Williams 68 Comments

Researchers at Rice University are studying 3D printing plastic structures that mimic tubulanes — theoretical nanotube structures predicted to have extraordinary strength. The result has been very strong and very compressible structures that can actually resist bullets.

As an experiment, the researchers fired projectiles at 5.8 km/s at a block of plastic and at a block of simulated tubulanes. The structure of the tubulane block stopped the bullet at the second layer with no significant structural damage beyond the second layer. The reference block had a large hole and cracks throughout its volume.

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Fail Of The Week: The 3D Printer Nozzle Wipe That Won’t

November 20, 2019 by Donald Papp 56 Comments

Some of you will be familiar with the idea of using a brush as a nozzle wipe on a 3D printer. The idea is that passing the hot end over the brush cleans any stray plastic from the nozzle, ensuring that those plastic bits don’t end up in unwelcome places. [Mark Rehorst] attempted to implement a nozzle brush system in his own printer, but hasn’t so far been successful.

One of the things [Mark] makes is 3D printed lamp shades and this led to his experiments in setting up an automatic nozzle cleaner. Despite best efforts, the hot ends of 3D printers can occasionally accumulate bits of molten plastic which can sometimes end up deposited on the print. Because the lamp shades are so thin and so big, having a charred blob end up on the print is pretty unwelcome. Having the nozzle automatically wiped clean would be a very handy feature, but is proving to be a troublesome one.

[Mark] based his design on a small, dense wire brush used for cleaning the print nozzle of a Stratasys printer. Sadly, he found no combination of motion or brush height that got the nozzle reliably clean every time. Sometimes a blob would be dislodged, but the hot end would pick it back up again on subsequent passes. You can see it in slow motion from a variety of angles in the video below.

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Improved Outdoor Solar Harvester Now Handles All The Parts

November 19, 2019 by Donald Papp 6 Comments

[Vadim Panov]’s 3D printed solar harvester is in effect a rechargeable outdoor battery, and the real challenge he faced when designing it was having it handle the outdoors reliably. The good news is that part is solved, and his newest design is now also flexible enough to handle a variety of common and economical components such as different battery connectors, charge controllers, and solar panel sizes. All that’s left is to set it up using the GoPro-style mounting clamp and let it soak up those solar rays.

We saw his first version earlier this year, which uses inventive and low-cost solutions for weatherproofing like coating the 3D print with epoxy (the new version makes this easier and less messy, by the way.) It was a fine design, but only worked with one specific solar panel size and one specific configuration of parts. His newest version makes a few mechanical improvements and accommodates a wide variety of different components and solar panel sizes. The CAD files are all available on the GitHub repository but he’s conveniently provided STL files for about a dozen common sizes.

When it comes to harvesting light, staying indoors offers less power but requires a far less rugged setup. If that interests you, be sure to check out the Tiny Solar Energy Module (TSEM) which can scrape up even indoor light.

SiCK Mechanical Keyboard Is 3D Printed

November 18, 2019 by Al Williams 25 Comments

We’ve noticed a rash of builds of [ FedorSosnin’s] do-it-yourself 3D-printed mechanical keyboard, SiCK-68 lately. The cost is pretty low — SiCK stands for Super, Inexpensive, Cheap, Keyboard. According to the bill of materials, the original cost about $50. Of course, that doesn’t include the cost of the 3D printer and soldering gear, but who doesn’t have all that already?

The brains behind this is a Teensy that scans the hand-wired key matrix. So the only electronics here are the switches, each with a companion diode, and the Teensy. The EasyAVR software does all the logical work both as firmware and a configuration GUI.

If you look at the many different builds, each has its own character. Yet they look overwhelmingly professional — like something you might buy at a store. This is the kind of project that would have been extremely difficult to pull off a decade ago. You could build the keyboard, of course, but making it look like a finished product was beyond most of us unless we were willing to make enough copies to justify having special tooling made to mold the cases.

PCBs are cheap now and we might be tempted to use one here. There are quite a few methods for using a 3D printer to create a board, so that would be another option. The hand wiring seems like it would be a drag, although manageable. If you need wiring inspiration, we can help.

For ultimate geek cred, combine this with Ploopy.