Chamber Master: Control Your 3D Printer Enclosure Like A Pro

December 31, 2025 by Matt Varian 10 Comments

Having an enclosed 3D printer can make a huge difference when printing certain filaments that are prone to warping. It’s easy enough to build an enclosure to stick your own printer in, but it can get tricky when you want to actively control the conditions inside the chamber. That’s where [Jayant Bhatia]’s Chamber Master project comes in.

This system is built around the ESP32 microcontroller, which provides control to various elements as well as hosts a web dashboard letting you monitor the chamber status remotely. The ESP32 is connected to an SSD1306 OLED display and a rotary encoder, allowing for navigating menus and functions right at the printer, letting you select filament type presets and set custom ones of your own. A DHT11 humidity sensor and a pair of DS18B20 temperature sensors are used to sense the chamber’s environment and intake temperatures.

One of the eye-catching features of the Chamber Master is the iris-controlled 120 mm fan mounted to the side of the chamber, allowing for an adjustable-size opening for air to flow. When paired with PWM fan control, the amount of airflow can be precisely controlled.

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FibreSeeker 3: Continuous Carbon Fiber Vs Chopped CF

December 25, 2025 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

Although you can purchase many types of FDM filaments containing ‘carbon fiber’ these days, they are in no way related to the carbon fiber (CF) composite materials used for rocket hulls and light-weight bicycles. This is because the latter use continuous fibers, often in weaved CF mats, whereas the FDM filaments just use small, chopped, fragments of CF. Obviously this will not result in the same outcome, which makes it interesting that a company called Fibre Seek is now running a KickStarter for a very affordable co-extrusion FDM printer that can add continuous CF to any part. They also sent a few test parts to [Dr. Igor Gaspar] for testing against regular FDM CF prints.

It should be noted here that continuous CF with FDM is not new, as Markforged already does something similar, though at a ‘Contact us for a price quote’ level. The advantage of the Fibre Seek solution is then the co-extrusion that would make printing with continuous CF much more flexible and affordable. Based on the (sponsored) [CNC Kitchen] video of a few weeks ago at a tradeshow, the FibreSeeker 3 printer is effectively a standard CoreXY FDM printer, with the special co-extrusion dual print head that allows for CF to be coated with the target thermoplastic before being printed as normal.

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Printing With Metal On The Ender 3 Using Only A Friction Wheel

December 24, 2025 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Printing metal as easily as it is to print with thermoplastics has been a dream for a very long time, with options for hobbyists being very scarce. This is something which [Rotoforge] seeks to change, using little more than an old Ender 3 FDM printer and some ingenuity. Best of all is that the approach on which they have been working for the past year does not require high temperature, molten metals and no fussing about with powdered metal.

Additive manufacturing using friction welding. (Credit: Ruishan Xie, et al., j.mtcomm, 2021)

Rather than an extruder that melts a thermoplastic filament, their setup uses metal wire that is fed into a friction welding tool head, the details of which are covered in the video as well as on the GitHub project page. Unlike their previous setup which we reported on last year, this new setup is both safer and much riskier. While there’s no more molten metal, instead a very loud and very fast spinning disk is used to provide the friction required for friction welding, specifically friction and rolling-based additive manufacturing (FRAM) as in the cited 2021 paper by [Ruishan Xie] et al. in Materials Today Communications. By the same lead author there’s also a 2025 paper that explores more complex implementations of FRAM.

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Breathe Easy While Printing With This VOC Calculator

December 23, 2025 by Tyler August 3 Comments

We love 3D printing here, but we also love clean air, which produces a certain tension. There’s no way around the fact that printing produces various volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and that we don’t want to breathe those any more than necessary. Which VOCs, and how much? Well, [Jere Saikkonen] has created a handy-dandy calculator to help you guesstimate your exposure, or size your ventilation system, at least for FDM printing.

The emissions of most common FDM filaments are well-known by this point, so [Jere] was able to go through the literature and pull out values for different VOCs of concern like styrene and formaldehyde for ABS, PLA, Nylon, HIPS and PVA. We’re a bit disappointed not to see PETG or TPU on there, as those are common hobbyist materials, but this is still a great resource.

If you don’t like the numbers the calculator is spitting out, you can play with the air exchange rate setting to find out just how much extra ventilation you need. The one limitation here is that this assumes equilibrium conditions, which won’t be met save for very large prints. That’s arguably a good thing, since it errs on the side of over- rather than underestimating your exposure.

If you want to ground-truth this calculator, we’ve featured VOC-sensing projects before. If you’re convinced the solution to pollution is dilution, check out some ventilated enclosures. If you don’t want to share chemistry with the neighborhood, perhaps filtration is in order.

Thanks to [Jere] for the tip!

A grey and blue coreXY 3D printer is shown, with a small camera in place of its hotend. On the print bed is a ChArUco pattern, a grid of square tiles containing alternating black fill and printed patterns.

Calibrating A Printer With Computer Vision And Precise Timing

December 22, 2025 by Aaron Beckendorf 17 Comments

[Dennis] of [Made by Dennis] has been building a Voron 0 for fun and education, and since this apparently wasn’t enough of a challenge, decided to add a number of scratch-built improvements and modifications along the way. In his latest video on the journey, he rigorously calibrated the printer’s motion system, including translation distances, the perpendicularity of the axes, and the bed’s position. The goal was to get better than 100-micrometer precision over a 100 mm range, and reaching this required detours into computer vision, clock synchronization, and linear algebra.

To correct for non-perpendicular or distorted axes, [Dennis] calculated a position correction matrix using a camera mounted to the toolhead and a ChArUco board on the print bed. Image recognition software can easily detect the corners of the ChArUco board tiles and identify their positions, and if the camera’s focal length is known, some simple trigonometry gives the camera’s position. By taking pictures at many different points, [Dennis] could calculate a correction matrix which maps the printhead’s reported position to its actual position.

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Origami On Another Level With 3D Printing

December 21, 2025 by Ian Bos 12 Comments

Origami has become known as a miracle technique for designers. Elegant compliant mechanisms can leverage the material properties of a single geometry in ways that are sometimes stronger than those of more complicated designs. However, we don’t generally see origami used directly in 3D printed parts. [matthew lim] decided to explore this uncharted realm with various clever designs. You can check out the video below.

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Pause Print, Add Hardware, And Enjoy Strength

December 21, 2025 by Tyler August 16 Comments

3D Printing is great, but it is pretty much the worst way to make any given part– except that every other technique you could use to make that part is too slow and/or expensive, making the 3D print the best option. If only the prints were stiffer, stronger, more durable! [JanTech Engineering] feels your plight and has been hacking away with the M601 command to try embedding different sorts of hardware into his prints for up to 10x greater strength, as seen in the video embedded below.

It’s kind of a no-brainer, isn’t it? If the plastic is the weak point, maybe we could reinforce the plastic. Most concrete you see these days has rebar in it, and fiber-reinforced plastic is the only way most people will use resin for structural applications. So, how about FDM? Our printers have that handy M601 “pause print” command built in. By creatively building voids into your parts that you can add stronger materials, you get the best of all possible worlds: the exact 3D printed shape you wanted, plus the stiffness of, say, a pulltruded carbon-fiber rod.

[JanTech] examines several possible inserts, including the aforementioned carbon rods. He takes a second look at urethane foam, which we recently examined, and compares it with less-crushable sand, which might be a good choice when strength-to-weight isn’t an issue. He doesn’t try concrete mix, but we’ve seen that before, too. Various metal shapes are suggested — there are all sorts of brackets and bolts and baubles that can fit into your prints depending on their size — but the carbon rods do come out ahead on strength-to-weight, to nobody’s surprise.

You could do a forged carbon part with a printed mold to get that carbon stiffness, sure, but that’s more work, and you’ve got to handle epoxy resins that some of us have become sensitized to. Carbon rods and tubes are cheap and safer to work with, though be careful cutting them.

Finally, he tries machining custom metal insets with his CNC machine. It’s an interesting technique that’s hugely customizable, but it does require you to have a decent CNC available, and, at that point, you might want to just machine the part. Still, it’s an interesting hybrid technique we haven’t seen before.

Shoving stuff into 3D-printed plastic to make it a better composite object is a great idea and a time-honored tradition. What do you put into your prints? We’d love to know, and so would [Jan]. Leave a comment and let us know.

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