We all understand the risk of someone taking over our computers or phones for nefarious purposes. But remote access to printers and fax machines was something most people took a little less seriously. After all, you might get some obscene printouts or someone wasting some paper, but in general, those are not big deals. Some researchers however have lately been pondering what might happen should someone break into your 3D printer. Of course, you could bring a printer down to deny service, or cause things to malfunction — maybe even in ways that could be dangerous if the printer didn’t have sufficient safety features. But these researchers are more crafty. They are studying how you know what you’ve printed hasn’t been subtly sabotaged. They also think they have an answer.
If you are printing another Benchy at home this probably isn’t a real concern. However, according to the paper, 3D printing now accounts for over $6 billion of revenue with 33.8% of all parts having some function. This includes a recent FAA approval for a 3D-printed fuel nozzle for a jet engine. So indulge us in a little science fiction. You are about to fly your drone to take video of an important social function. You are worried about one of your props, so you 3D print a new one. Too bad your competitor has hacked your computer with a phishing e-mail and modified your STL files so that the new prop will have built-in weak spots internally. The prop will look fine and you’ll be able to install it. But it is going to fail right when you are taking those critical shots.
Toast falls face down. Your car always breaks after the warranty period. A 3D print only fails after it is has been printing for 12 hours. Those things might not always be true, but they are true often enough. Another pessimistic adage is “no good deed goes unpunished.” [Shippey123] did a good deed. He agreed to make a 3D printed mask for his friend to give as a gift. It was his first print he attempted for someone else after about four months’ experience printing at all. After 20 hours of printing, he noticed the head was moving around in the air doing nothing — a feeling most of us are all too familiar with. But he decided not to give up, but to recover the print.
Luckily, he’s a CNC machinist and is perfectly capable of reading G-code. The first thing he did was to shut everything down and clear the head. Then he rehomed the printer and used the head to determine what layer the printer had been working on when it failed. He did that by moving over a hidden part of the print and lowering the head by 100 microns. Then he’d move the head a few millimeters in the X direction to see if the head was touching.
It’s with a heavy heart that we must report Printrbot has announced they are ceasing operations. Founded in 2011 after a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, the company set out to make 3D printing cheaper and easier. Their first printer was an amalgamation of printed parts and wood that at the time offered an incredible deal; when the Makerbot CupCake was selling for $750 and took 20+ hours to assemble, the Printrbot kit would only run you $500 and could be built in under an hour.
Brook Drumm, Founder of Printrbot
Printrbot got their foot in the door early, but the competition wasn’t far behind. The dream of Star Trek style replicators fueled massive investment, and for a while it seemed like everyone was getting into the 3D printing game. Kit built machines gave way to turn-key printers, and the prices starting coming down. Printrbot’s products evolved as well, dropping wood in favor of folded steel and pioneering impressive features like automatic bed leveling. In 2014 they released the Printbot Simple Metal, which ultimately became their flagship product and in many ways represents the high water mark for the company.
Eventually, overseas manufacturers saw an opportunity and started flooding the market with 3D printers that were cheaper than what many would have believed possible only a few years earlier. Today you can go online and buy a perfectly serviceable starter printer for under $200, even less if you’re still willing to build it yourself. For an American company like Printrbot, competing at this price point was simply an impossibility.
Rather than give up, Brook decided to take things in a different direction. If he couldn’t compete with imported machines on price, he would start building high end printers. A new version of the Simple Metal was introduced in 2016 with premium features such as linear rails and cloud-based slicing, complete with a premium price. From that point on, most new Printrbot products would release at over $1,000; putting them more in line with “prosumer” machines from companies like Ultimaker. For hacker types who got their first taste of 3D printing thanks to a cheap wooden Printrbot kit, this was something of a bittersweet moment.
At the same time, Brook’s natural hacker spirit and love of the open source community lead to a number of interesting side projects that never quite got off the ground. Most recently, he’d been putting the finishing touches on the Printrbelt, a 3D printer with a conveyor belt in place of a traditional bed. Such a machine could finally bridge the gap between desktop 3D printing and true small scale production capability.
When we saw Brook at the East Coast RepRap Festival, he brought along a new machine that the more cynical observer might have taken as foreshadowing. The Printrbot Easy was going to be a modified and rebranded FlashForge Finder, a final acknowledgement that the only way to compete with the Chinese manufactured 3D printers was to sell one of your own.
It’s always sad to see a tech company go under, but seeing the end of Printrbot is especially hard. Built in America with locally sourced components and with a commitment to keeping their machines open source, there was a lot to love about the plucky little 3D printer company from Lincoln, California. Printrbot was the quintessential hacker success story, and we’re proud to say we’ve been in their corner from the start. Here’s to wishing Brook Drumm and the entire Printrbot team success in their future endeavors; we’ll be keeping an eye out.
For years, the undisputed king of desktop 3D printing conferences has been the Midwest RepRap Festival (MRRF). Hosted in the tropical paradise that is Goshen, Indiana, MRRF has been running largely unopposed for the top spot since its inception. There are other conferences focused on the industrial and professional end of the 3D printing spectrum, and of course you’d find a Prusa or two popping up at more or less any hacker con; but MRRF is focused on exploring what the individual is capable of once they can manifest physical objects from molten plastic.
But on June 23rd, 2018, MRRF finally got some proper competition. As the name might indicate, the East Coast RepRap Festival (ERRF) is an event very much inspired by its Hoosier State predecessor. Held in Bel Air, Maryland, hackers on the right side of the United States for the first time had the opportunity to attended a true 3D printing festival without having to get on a plane. Not to say it was a neighborhood block party; people from all over the country, and indeed the globe, descended on the APG Federal Credit Union Arena for the two-day celebration of everything plastic.
We have no doubt that ERRF will return again next year, but until then, you’ll have to settle for the following collection of selected highlights from this year’s show.
Some devices have one job to do, but that job can have many facets. To [jmcservv], an example of this is the job of protecting against worst-case failures in a 3D printer, and it led him to develop the 3D Printer Watchdog Guardian. When it comes to fire, secondary protection is the name of the game because it’s one thing to detect thermal runaway and turn off a heater, but what if that isn’t enough? The MOSFET controlling the heater could have failed closed and can no longer be turned off in a normal sense. In such cases, some kind of backup is needed. Of course, a protection system should also notify an operator of any serious problem, but what’s the best way to do that? These are the kinds of issues that [jmcservv] is working to address with his watchdog, which not only keeps a careful eye on any heating elements in the system, but can take a variety of actions as a result.
Some outcomes (like fire) are bad enough that it’s worth the extra work and cost of additional protection, and that’s the thinking that has led [jmcservv] to submit his watchdog system for The Hackaday Prize.
We’re getting to the point that seeing 3D printed parts in a project or hack isn’t as exciting as it was just a few years ago. The proliferation of low-cost desktop 3D printers means that finding a printer to squirt out a few parts for your build isn’t the adventure it once was. Gone are the days of heading to a local hackerspace or college hoping their janky Mendel felt like working that day. But all that really means is that hackers and makers now have the ability to utilize 3D printing even more. Forget printing one or two parts of your design, just print the whole thing.
That’s exactly what [Nik Ivanov] did with Watney, his fully 3D printed rover project. After lamenting that many so-called 3D printed rovers were anything but, he set out to design one that was not only made primarily of printed parts, but was robust enough to put some real work in. Over the course of several design iterations, he built a very capable all-wheel drive platform that needs only some electronics and a handful of M3 screws to leap into action.
As long as you’ve got a 3D printer big enough to handle the roughly 120mm x 190mm dimensions of this bot’s body, you’re well on the way to owning your very own video rover. [Nik] recommends printing everything in PETG, no doubt for its increased strength when it comes to things like the drive gears. Plus it’s low warp, which is really going to help when printing the top and bottom sections of the body. TPU is advised for the tires, but if you don’t have any (or your printer chokes on flexible filaments) you can just wrap the wheels with wide rubber bands.
[Nik] is using a Raspberry Pi Zero W as the brains of the operation, but the beauty of an open platform like this is that you could easily swap out the controls for something else to meet your needs. In addition to the Pi, there’s a L298N H-bridge motor controller to interface with the dual geared motors, as well as a servo to provide tilt for the SainSmart camera module.
If you’ve ever seen the back end of a military jet, you’ve likely seen variable area nozzles. They’re used to adjust the exhaust flow out of the rear of a jet engine during supersonic flight and while the afterburner is engaged. Commercial aircraft, with the exception of the Concorde, don’t need such fancy hardware since a static exhaust nozzle works well enough for the types of flying they’ll be doing. For much the same reasons, RC aircraft don’t need variable area nozzles either, but it doesn’t keep builders from wanting them.
Which brings us to this utterly gorgeous design by [Marco Colucci]. Made up of 23 individual PETG parts, this variable area nozzle is able to reduce its diameter by 50% with just a twist of the rotating collar. When paired with a hobby servo, this mechanism will allow the operator to adjust the nozzle aperture with an extra channel on their RC transmitter. The nozzle hasn’t flown yet, but a test run is being planned with a 40mm Electric Ducted Fan (EDF) motor. But thanks to the parametric design, it shouldn’t be a problem to scale it up to larger motors.
But the big question: does it have an effect on the EDF’s performance? The answer is, of course, no. This doesn’t actually do anything. An EDF motor has no need for this sort of nozzle, and even if you tried to fit this on a scale jet engine, it would melt in seconds from the exhaust temperature. This is purely a decorative item, to give the plane a more accurate scale look. To that end, it looks fantastic and would definitely be impressive on the back of a large scale RC military fighter.
If anything, [Marco] says he expects performance to be worse with the nozzle fitted. Not only is it adding dead weight to the plane, but restricting the air coming out of the back of the fan isn’t going to do anything but reduce thrust. But on the bright side: if it’s flying slower, it will be easier to see how awesome your adjustable nozzles look.
