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.

5 Kilowatts In A 3D Printed Jet Boat

November 14, 2019 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

Radio control projects used to be made of materials such as metal or wood, and involve lots of hand crafted parts. That’s still one way to go about things, but 3D printing has become a popular tool in recent years. [RCLifeOn] has been working on a 3D printed jet boat, which recently got a serious power upgrade.

The boat in question received a 5000W brushless motor – significant power for a vehicle weighing less than 2kg. Powered by a 12S lithium pack, and outfitted with a water jacket for cooling, it drives the boat through an off-the-shelf turbine after initial attempts to DIY the drivetrain were unsuccessful.

The biggest problem in the project came from coupling the motor to the turbine. A 3D printed coupler was unable to hold up to the strain, while attempts to make a metal part failed due to the lack of a lathe. Eventually the solution was found by daisy chaining two off-the-shelf parts together.

The boat proved itself ably on the water, with the large motor proving more than capable of shifting the boat at a strong clip. It’s an excellent shakedown for the parts that will eventually find themselves in a powered surfboard build. We’ve seen [RCLifeOn]’s work before, too, like these stylish 3D printed sneakers. Video after the break.

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Jubilee: A Toolchanging Homage To 3D Printer Hackers Everywhere

November 14, 2019 by Sonya Vasquez 36 Comments

I admit that I’m late to the 3D printing game. While I just picked up my first printer in 2018, the rest of us have been oozing out beautiful prints for over a decade. And in that time we’ve seen many people reimagine the hardware for mischief besides just printing plastic. That decade of hacks got me thinking: what if the killer-app of 3D printing isn’t the printing? What if it’s programmable motion? With that, I wondered: what if we had a machine that just offered us motion capabilities? What if extending those motion capabilities was a first class feature? What if we had a machine that was meant to be hacked?

One year later, I am thrilled to release an open-source multitool motion platform I call Jubilee. For a world that’s hungry for toolchanging 3D printers, Jubilee might be the best toolchanging 3D printer you can build yourself–with nothing more than a set of hand tools and some patience. But it doesn’t stop there. With a standardized tool pattern established by E3D and a kinematically coupled hot-swappable bed, Jubilee is rigged to be extended by anyone looking to harness its programmable motion capabilities for some ad hoc automation.

Jubilee is my homage to you, the 3D printer hacker; but it’s meant to serve the open-source community at large. Around the world, scientists, artists, and hackers alike use the precision of automated machines for their own personal exploration and expression. But the tools we use now are either expensive or cumbersome–often coupled with a hefty learning curve but no up-front promise that they’ll meet our needs. To that end, Jubilee is meant to shortcut the knowledge needed to get things moving, literally. Jubilee wants to be an API for motion.

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This Arduino Keeps Its Eyes On You

November 13, 2019 by Al Williams 5 Comments

[Will] wanted to build some animatronic eyes that didn’t require high-precision 3D printing. He wound up with a forgiving design that uses an Arduino and six servo motors. You can see the video of the eyes moving around in the video below.

The bill of materials is pretty simple and features an Arduino, a driver board, and a joystick. The 3D printing parts are easy to print with no supports, and will work with PLA. Other than opening up holes there wasn’t much post-processing required, though he did sand the actual eyeballs which sounds painful.

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Core XY Explained

November 12, 2019 by Al Williams 28 Comments

If you are building a CNC machine, a 3D printer, or even a plotter, you have a need for motion in both the X and Y directions. There are many ways to accomplish this, for example, some printers move the tool in the X direction and the bed in the Y direction while others move the entire X carriage in the Y direction and yet more use a delta mechanism. However, one of the oldest means of doing this is the Core XY method. It is interesting because both motors remain stationary and the business end moves entirely on belts or cords. This is similar to the H-Bot technique, but with some differences. [Michael Laws] has a video (see below) that explains how two stationary motors can move a tool anywhere in an XY region.

The idea behind Core XY goes back to at least old drafting tables. You can think of it as an object held by two ends of the same belt. As one end of the belt gets shorter the other end gets longer. The belts are arranged so that motion of one motor causes the tool to move at a 45 degree angle. That means you have to move both motors to go in a straight line.

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Improving Exposure On A Masked SLA Printer

November 12, 2019 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

It’s taken longer than some might have thought, but we’re finally at the point where you can pick up an SLA 3D printer for a few hundred bucks. These machines, which use light to cure a resin, are capable of far higher resolution than their more common FDM counterparts, though they do bring along their own unique issues and annoyances. Especially on the lower end of the price spectrum.

[FlorianH] recently picked up the $380 SparkMaker FHD, and while he’s happy with the printer overall, he’s identified a rather annoying design flaw. It seems that the upgraded UV backlight in the FHD version of the SparkMaker produces somewhat irregular light, which in turn manifests itself as artifacts on the final print. Due to hot spots on the panel, large objects printed on the SparkMaker show fairly obvious scarring.

Now you might expect the fix for this problem to be in the hardware, but he’s taken it in a different direction. These printers use an LCD panel to block off areas of the UV backlight, thereby controlling how much of the resin is exposed. This is technique is officially known as “masked SLA”, and is the technology used in most of these new entry level resin printers.

As luck would have it, the SparkMaker FHD allows showing various levels of grayscale on the LCD rather than a simple binary value for each pixel. At least in theory, this allows [FlorianH] to compensate for the irregular backlight by adjusting how much the UV is attenuated by the LCD panel. He’s focusing on the printer he personally owns, but the idea should work on any masked SLA printer that accepts grayscale values.

The first step was to map the backlight, which [FlorianH] did by soaking thin pieces of paper in a UV reactant chemical, and draping them over the backlight. He then photographed the illumination pattern, and came up with some OpenCV code that takes this images and uses the light intensity data to compensate for the local UV brightness underneath the sliced model.

So far, this method has allowed [FlorianH] to noticeably reduce the scarring, but he thinks it’s still possible to do better. He’s released the code for this backlight compensation script, and welcomes anyone who might wish to take a look at see how it could be improved.

An uneven backlight is just one of the potential new headaches these low-cost “masked” SLA printers give you. While they’re certainly very compelling, you should understand what you’re getting into before you pull the trigger on one.