NASA says that Electronic Alchemy’s eForge 3D printer is another space program spinoff. The printer looks a lot like a conventional 3D printer but unlike its mundane cousin it can print sensors, lights, and other electronic components. It does that by using one of six or eight different materials.
Six of the eight spools each have some sort of electronic property. According to the company they have conductive filament, resistive filament, insulating filament, capacitive filament, and both N- and P-type semiconductors.
[Jan Mrázek]’s success with 3D printing a solder paste stencil is awfully interesting, though he makes it clear that it is only a proof of concept. There are a lot of parts to this hack, so let’s step through them one at a time.
First of all, it turns out that converting a PCB solder paste layer into a 3D model is a bit of a challenge. A tool [Jan] found online didn’t work out, so he turned to OpenSCAD and wrote a script (available on GitHub) which takes two DXF files as input: one for the board outline, and one for the hole pattern. If you’re using KiCad, he has a Python script (also on GitHub) which will export the necessary data.
The result is a 3D model that is like a solder paste mask combined with a raised border to match the board outline, so that the whole thing self-aligns by fitting on top of the PCB. A handy feature, for sure. [Jan] says the model pictured here printed in less than 10 minutes. Workflow-wise, that certainly compares favorably to waiting for a stencil to arrive in the mail. But how do the actual solder-pasting results compare?
3D printed solder stencil on PCB, after applying solder paste.
[Jan] says that the printed stencil had a few defects but it otherwise worked fine for 0.5 mm pitch ICs and 0402 resistors, and the fact that the 3D printed stencil self-registered onto the board was a welcome feature. That being said, it took a lot of work to get such results. [Jan]’s SLA printer is an Elegoo Mars, and he wasn’t able to have it create holes for 0.2 mm x 0.5 mm pads without first modifying his printer for better X/Y accuracy.
In the end, he admits that while a functional DIY solder stencil can be 3D printed in about 10 minutes, it’s not as though professionally-made stencils that give better results are particularly expensive or hard to get. Still, it’s a neat trick that could come in handy. Also, a quick reminder that we stepped through how to make a part in OpenSCAD in the past, which should help folks new to OpenSCAD make sense of [Jan]’s script.
We see a lot of 3D printers here at Hackaday, but as over the years the 3D printer has moved from being an exciting item in its own right to being an everyday tool, it’s increasingly rare for us to feature a build of one as a project. It’s especially rare for us to see a 3D printer that isn’t a variation of either an XYZ Cartesian design or a delta printer, but that’s what [bondus] has done with a printer based upon a parallel SCARA mechanism. If SCARA isn’t something you’re familiar with, it’s a design used in the world of industrial robots in which an almost humanoid jointed arm works in two dimensions, with the third being provided by raising or lowering the whole construction. It has the advantage of greater speed than Cartesian designs, at the expense of higher quality joints being required to maintain accuracy of positioning.
This is the second SCARA printer he’s built, and has a sturdy set of aluminium arms and substantial bearings. Drive comes via a pair of belts to some very large pulleys, and calibration is extremely important to ensure that both arms are in exactly the same plane. The curcular bed is on a lead screw that provides the Z axis.
The results are certainly impressive, both is speed and in print quality. We’ve placed a video of it in action below the break. Whether or not SCARA printers improve to the point of being ubiquitous isn’t something we can supply an answer to, but we’ve featured a small number of them in the past. Particularly memorable is this one using an industrial robotic arm.
Resin 3D printers are finally cheap enough that peons like us can finally buy them without skipping too many meals, and what means we’re starting to see more and more of them in the hands of hackers. But to get good results you’ll also want a machine to cure the prints with UV light; an added expense compared to more traditional FDM printers. Of course you could always build one yourself to try and save some money.
An earlier prototype build of the interface.
To that end, [sjm4306] is working on a very impressive controller for all your homebrew UV curing needs. The device is designed to work with cheap UV strip lights that can easily be sourced online, and all you need to bring to the table is a suitable enclosure to install them in. Here he’s using a metal paint can with a lid to keep from burning his eyes out, but we imagine the good readers of Hackaday could come up with something slightly more substantial while still taking the necessary precautions to not cook the only set of eyes you’ll ever have.
Of course, the enclosure isn’t what this project is really about. The focus here is on a general purpose controller, and it looks like [sjm4306] has really gone the extra mile with this one. Using a common OLED display module, the controller provides a very concise and professional graphical user interface for setting parameters such as light intensity and cure time. While the part is cooking, there’s even a nice little progress bar which makes it easy to see how much time is left even if you’re across the room.
At this point we’ve seen a number of hacked together UV cure boxes, but many of them skip the controller and just run the lights full time. That’s fine for a quick and dirty build, but we think a controller like this one could help turn a simple hack into a proper tool.
COVID-19 can seem like a paper tiger, when looking at bare mortality rates. The far greater problem is the increase in fatalities as health systems are stretched to the limit. With thousands of patients presenting all at once, hospitals quickly run out of beds and resources and suddenly, normally survivable conditions become life threatening. One Italian hospital found themselves in such a position, running out of valves for a critical respirator device needed to save their patients. Supplies were running out – but additive manufacturing was able to save the day.
The original part, left, with its 3D-printed replacement.
While the article uses the term “reanimation device”, it’s clear we’re talking about respirators here, necessary to keep patients alive during respiratory distress. The valve in question is a plastic part, one which likely needs to be changed over when the device is used with each individual patient to provide a sterile flow of air. After the alarm was raised by Nunzia Vallini, a local journalist, a ring around of the 3D printing community led to a machine being sent down to the hospital and the parts being reproduced. Once proven to work, things were stepped up, with another company stepping in to produce the parts in quantity with a high-quality laser fusion printer.
The price of resin printers has dropped significantly in the last couple of years, and it’s down to the point where you can pick up a fairly decent DLP machine for less than $500. While this is great news, you still need several things beyond resin for successful prints, like a way to do post-process UV curing.
It’s a great idea, but unfortunately prints don’t cure as fast as fingernails. So the first order of business was to bypass the dual 555-based timing system by wiring the UV LEDs directly to power. The manufacturer never intended for the lights to run continuously, so to keep the board from melting, [Inhibit] added in a small 12 V computer fan for cooling. There’s even a little printed grille with angled fins to keep UV light from leaking out and burning nearby retinas.
[Inhibit] also designed and printed a tray for the prints to sit on, and a front enclosure piece to focus as much light on the parts as possible. Files for both parts are floating around the Thingiverse, and we’ve got the build video all cured queued up after the break.
Printed in PLA, with 80% infill and 12 walls, the tool (right) failed at 5 tons.
In a press, material such as sheet metal is formed into a shape by forcing the material around the tooling. Some types of tooling can be 3D printed, and it turns out that printed tools are not only fast and economical, but can be surprisingly resilient. You can see such tools in action in our earlier coverage of this approach here and here.
[Thetelltalehart]’s previous work was printed at 80% infill and 12 walls, and failed at 5 tons. The new hybrid tool adds some common hardware that has the effect of reinforcing the tool for very little added expense or complexity. The new tool made it up to 7 tons before failure. It’s a clever idea, and an apparently effective one.
The goal with these 3D printed tools is twofold: doing short-run work, and reducing costly rework when developing “real” tooling. Having to re-cut a tool because it isn’t quite right in some way is expensive and costly, and it’s much easier and cheaper to go through that process with 3D printing instead of metal.
