ERRF 18: Slice Engineering Shows Off The Mosquito

July 11, 2018 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

With few exceptions, it seemed like every 3D printer at the first inaugural East Coast RepRap Festival (ERRF) was using a hotend built by E3D. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; E3D makes solid open source products, and they deserve all the success they can get. But that being said, competition drives innovation, so we’re particularly interested anytime we see a new hotend that isn’t just an E3D V6 clone.

The Mosquito from Slice Enginerring is definitely no E3D clone. In fact, it doesn’t look much like any 3D printer hotend you’ve ever seen before. Tiny and spindly, the look of the hotend certainly invokes its namesake. But despite its fragile appearance, this hotend can ramp up to a monstrous 500 C, making it effectively a bolt-on upgrade for your existing machine that will allow you to print in exotic materials such as PEEK.

We spent a little time talking with Slice Engineering co-founder [Dan], and while there’s probably not much risk it’s going to dethrone E3D as the RepRap community’s favorite hotend, it might be worth considering if you’re thinking of putting together a high-performance printer.

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3D Printed Arduino Bot Is Limbo Master

July 10, 2018 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about in regards to the coming robot uprising, [Ali Aslam] of Potent Printables has recently wrapped up work on a 3D printed robot that can flatten itself down to the point it can fit under doors and other tight spaces. Based on research done at UC Berkeley, this robot is built entirely from printed parts and off the shelf hardware, so anyone can have their own little slice of Skynet.

On display at East Coast RepRap Festival

The key to the design are the folding “wings” which allow the robot to raise and lower itself on command. This not only helps it navigate tight spaces, but also gives it considerable all-terrain capability when it’s riding high. Rather than wheels or tracks, the design uses six rotors which look more like propellers than something you’d expect to find on a ground vehicle. These rotors work at the extreme angles necessary when the robot has lowered itself, and allow it to “step” over obstructions when they’re vertical.

For the electronics, things are about what you’d expect. An Arduino Pro Mini combined with tiny Pololu motor controllers is enough to get the bot rolling, and a Flysky FS-X6B receiver is onboard so the whole thing can be operated with a standard RC transmitter. The design could easily be adapted for WiFi or Bluetooth control if you’d rather not use RC gear for whatever reason.

Want to build your own? All of the STL files, as well as a complete Bill of Materials, are available on the Thingiverse page. [Ali] even has a series of videos on YouTube videos walking through the design and construction of the bot to help you along. Outside of the electronics, you’ll need a handful of screws and rods to complement the 50+ printed parts. Better start warming up the printer now.

As an interesting aside, we got a chance to see this little critter first hand at the recent East Coast RepRap Festival in Maryland, along with a number of other engineering marvels.

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3D Printed Upgrade For Cheap Foam Glider

July 9, 2018 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

We know you’ve seen them: the big foam gliders that are a summertime staple of seemingly every big box retailer and dollar store in the world. They may be made by different companies or have slight cosmetic differences, but they all adhere to the basic formula: a long plastic bag containing the single-piece fuselage and two removable wings and a tail. Rip open the bag, jam the wings into the fuselage, and go see if you can’t get that thing stuck on a roof someplace.

But after you toss it around a few times, things start to get a little stale. Those of us in the Hackaday Collective who still retain memories of our childhood may even recall attempting to augment the glider with some strategically attached bottle rockets. But [Timothy Wright] has done considerably better than that. With the addition of a 3D printed “backpack”, he managed to add not only a motor to one of these foam fliers but an RC receiver and servos to move the control surfaces. The end result is a cheap and surprisingly capable RC plane with relatively little work required.

[Timothy] certainly isn’t claiming to be the first person to slap a motor on a foam glider to wring a bit more fun out of it, but his approach is very slick and of course has the added bonus of being available for other grownup kids to try thanks to the Creative Commons license he released the designs under. He mentions that variations in the different gliders might cause some compatibility issues, but with the generous application of some zip ties and tape, it should be good to go.

This particular hunk of foam might not set any altitude or distance records, and it certainly won’t be carrying you aloft, but it’s a pretty approachable summer project if you’ve got some RC gear laying around.

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Tinkercad Coding Tricks To Automate Modeling

July 6, 2018 by Al Williams 19 Comments

If you want to do a quick design for 3D printing, Tinkercad is pretty easy to use. Although it was briefly in danger of going out of business, it was bought by AutoDesk who have made a lot of improvements. It is possible to program and simulate an Arduino in the same tool — which always strikes us as an odd juxtaposition. However, [Chuck] shows us in the video below how you can use the same Codeblocks to automate Tinkercad 3D modeling thanks to a beta feature in the software. Think of it as a GUI-based OpenSCAD in your browser.

You have to start a Codeblocks project, and when you do you can pick a starter design or just press the button for a new design to get a blank slate. The blocks look like other Scratch-related programming languages. You can create variables, repeat groups of commands, and create items. [Chuck] mentions the starter codes have no comments in them, which is a fair critique. There is a comment block you can use.

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Open Source DIY Printers Are Alive And Well: What We Saw At ERRF 18

July 5, 2018 by Tom Nardi 24 Comments

If you follow the desktop 3D printer market, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that nearly every 3D printer on display at the inaugural East Coast RepRap Festival (ERRF) was made in China. Even Printrbot CEO Brook Drumm had to admit that this was the year his company may finally bite the bullet and begin selling a branded and customized printer built overseas.

When you can get a decent (but let’s be clear, not great) 3D printer for $200 USD, it’s no surprise that American and European manufacturers are having a hard time staying competitive. But not everyone is seduced by low-cost printers. They know they could buy a decent printer for a couple hundred bucks, but for them that’s not the point. Some hackers are just as (if not more) interested in designing and building the machines than they are churning out little plastic boats with the finished product.

Luckily for us, these are also the type of folks who document their builds and make all their collected information and design files available for others under an open source license. Such builders exemplify the true spirit of the RepRap movement, and we’re happy to report that in a sea of imported printers, there were several interesting home built open source printers.

Whether you want to build your own copy of one of these machines, or simply get inspired by some of the ideas their creators had, these machines are physical proof that just because you can order a cheap 3D printer on eBay right now doesn’t mean you have to.

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Tattoo Your 3D Prints With Velocity Painting

July 5, 2018 by Sonya Vasquez 9 Comments

Just when it seems like we’ve juiced all the creative potential out of our 3D printers, a bold new feature lands on the table. Enter Velocity Painting, a concept brought to life by [Mark Wheadon] that textures our 3D prints with greyscale images.

At its core, the technique is straightforward: skin an image onto a 3D print by varying the print speed in specific locations and, thereby, varying just how much plastic oozes out of the nozzle. While the concept seems simple, the result is stunning.

Velocity Painting opens up new ways of expression on top of an existing print with all the skinning opportunities. Imagine adding a texture for realism like this rook that’s been patterned with a brick layout, or imagine an aesthetic embellishment like the flames on [Mark’s] dragon print.

The results speak for themselves, and the growing number of users are proving it. Head on over to the gallery to indulge yourself in this delightful oozing aesthetic that’s sure to turn a few heads.

[Mark Wheadon’s] hack takes the mechanics of how we print and adds another creative tuning knob. If you’re looking for other embellishments for your prints, have a look at [David Shorey’s] work on texturizing fabrics.

Neat 3D Printer Hack Makes Printing Multiples Possible

July 4, 2018 by Richard Baguley 24 Comments

One of the promises of 3D printing is that you can mass produce objects at home, printing out multiple copies of whatever you want. Unfortunately, the reality is a bit different: once you have printed something out, you usually need to remove it manually from the print bed. Unless you are [Replayreb], that is: he’s come up with a neat hack to remove a print from the print bed by using a custom bit of G-code to move the print head to knock the print off, into a waiting box.

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