Another Printer With An Infinite Build Volume

May 12, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

Very rarely do we see a 3D printer that is more than just a refinement of what’s currently standard practice. [Prusa]’s single-hotend, four-color printer makes the list, but that came out a while ago. The novel 32-bit controller board found in last year’s $200 Monoprice printer has the potential to change a cottage industry. Save those two exceptions, innovation in 3D printing really isn’t seeing the same gains we saw in 2010 or 2011.

A company out of the Netherlands, Blackbelt 3D, is bringing out the most innovative 3D printer we’ve seen since last March. It’s an infinite volume 3D printer that’s built for autonomous production. This printer can produce row after row of 3D printed parts, or it can print an object longer than the build plate. If you have enough time, filament, and electricity, there’s no reason you couldn’t print a plastic beam hundreds of meters long.

The specs on this printer are about what you would expect from a large machine meant for industry or prototyping, as opposed to a machine designed to print out tugboats and fidget spinners. The Blackbelt uses interchangeable print heads for the hotend with 0.4, 0.6 or 0.8 mm nozzles. The filament feed is a Bowden with the extruder hidden under the control panel. The frame is explicitly Bosch extrusion, and the machine’s build volume is 340 mm by 340 mm by whatever. Retail price (on Kickstarter) comes in at €9,500, but for an extra €3,000 you can also get a neat stand with casters on the bottom. Of course, with an infinite build volume, you could also print a stand. Continue reading “Another Printer With An Infinite Build Volume” →

3D-Printed Tiger Lopes With The Help Of A Motor

May 9, 2017 by John Baichtal 9 Comments

[Greg Zumwalt], master of 3D-printed mechanisms, has published his Saber 2 project as well as an assembly Instructable telling you how to put it together.

Saber 2 is a 3D-printed gear-and-cam saber-toothed tiger that can be motorized to show an excellent loping movement. It’s 14” long and 10” tall and consists of 108 components of which 34 are unique parts, and it all moves with the help of a 6 VDC 60 RPM gearmotor. With threaded PLA rods to keep it all together, and tapped holes to secure the rods, one imagines the printer would have to be pretty finely tuned and leveled for the parts to move as elegantly as you see in the video.

Hackaday readers might recall [Greg]’s 3D-printed projects such as his balloon-powered engine as well as his toy car also powered by balloons.

Continue reading “3D-Printed Tiger Lopes With The Help Of A Motor” →

Monoprice Select Mini Gets Smooth

May 9, 2017 by Al Williams 19 Comments

We’ve had a love affair with the Monoprice Select Mini since it came out. The cheap printer has its flaws, though. One of them is that the controller is a bit opaque. On the one hand, it is impressive that it is a 32-bit board with an LCD. On the other hand, we have no way to modify it easily other than loading the ready-built binaries. Want to add bed leveling? Multiple fans? A second extruder and mixing head? Good luck, since the board doesn’t support any of those things. [mfink70] decided the controller had to go, so he upgraded his Mini with a Smoothie board.

On the plus side, the Smoothie board is also a 32-bit board with plenty of power and expansion capability. On the downside, it costs about half as much as the printer does. Just replacing the board was only part of the battle. [mfink70] had to worry about the steppers, the end stops, and a few other odds and ends.

Continue reading “Monoprice Select Mini Gets Smooth” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: RepRap Helios

May 7, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

Did you know that most of the current advances in desktop consumer 3D printing can be traced back to a rather unknown project started in 2005? This little-known RepRap project was dedicated to building Open Source hardware that was self-replicating by design. Before the great mindless consumerization of 3D printing began, the RepRap project was the greatest hope for Open Source hardware, and a sea change in what manufacturing could be.

While the RepRap project still lives on in companies like Lulzbot, Prusa, SeeMeCNC, and others, the vast community dedicated to creating Open Hardware for desktop manufacturing has somehow morphed into YouTube channels that feature 3D printed lions, 3D printed Pokemon, and a distinct lack of 3D printed combs. Still, though, there are people out there contributing to the effort.

[Nick Seward] is famous in the world of RepRap. He designed the RepRap GUS Simpson, an experimental 3D printer that is able to print all of its components inside its own build volume. The related LISA Simpson is an elegant machine that is unlike any other delta robot we’ve seen. He’s experimented with Core XZ machines for years now — a design that is only now appearing on AliBaba from random Chinese manufacturers. In short, [Nick Seward] is one of the greats of the RepRap project.

[Nick] is designing a new kind of RepRap, and he’s entered it in the Hackaday Prize. It can print most of its own component parts, it has an enormous build volume, and it’s unlike any 3D printer you’ve seen before. It’s a SCARA — not a, ‘robotic arm’ because SCARA is an acronym for Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm — that puts all the motors in the non-moving portion of the base. Its design is inspired by the RepRap Morgan, a printer whose designer won $20,000 in the GADA prize for being mostly self-replicating.

Improvements over the RepRap Morgan include a huge build volume (at least three 200x200mm squares can be placed in this printer’s build volume), a relatively fast print speed, high accuracy and precision, and auto bed leveling. Despite being more capable than some RepRap printers in some areas, the RepRap Helios should wind up being cheaper than most RepRap printers. It can also print most of its component parts, bringing us ever closer to a truly self-replicating machine.

You can check out a few of the videos of this printer in action below.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: RepRap Helios” →

Printing Bed Off-Kilter? Blu-Tack To The Rescue!

April 30, 2017 by James Hobson 9 Comments

For all their applications, 3D printers can be finicky machines. From extruder problems, misaligned or missing layers, to finding an overnight print turned into a tangled mess, and that’s all assuming your printer bed is perfectly leveled. [Ricardo de Azambuja’s] new linear delta printer was frustrating him. No matter what he did, it wouldn’t retain the bed leveling calibration, so he had to improvise — Blu-Tack to the rescue.

It turns out [Azambuja]’s problem was so bad that the filament wouldn’t even attempt to adhere to the printing bed. So, he turned to Printrun Pronterface and a combination of its homing feature and the piece-of-paper method to get a rough estimate of how much the bed needed to be adjusted — and a similar estimate of how big of a gob of Blu-Tack was needed.

Pressing the bed into place, he re-ran Pronterface to make sure he was on the level. [Azambuja] notes that you would have to redo this for every print, but it was good enough to print off a trio of bed leveling gears he designed so he doesn’t have to go through this headache again for some time.

Continue reading “Printing Bed Off-Kilter? Blu-Tack To The Rescue!” →

Sexiest Tiny Metal Core-XY 3D Printer

April 27, 2017 by Elliot Williams 36 Comments

That’s a lot of qualifications, but we’re pretty sure that you can’t accuse us of hyperbole in the title: this is one of the tightest little 3D printer builds we’ve ever seen. Add in the slightly esoteric CoreXY kinematics and the thick aluminum frame, and it’s a speed demon in addition to being a looker.

[René] had built a few 3D printers before, so he had a good feel for the parameters and design tradeoffs before he embarked on the DICE project. Making a small print volume, for instance, means that the frame can be smaller and thus exponentially more rigid. This means that it’s capable of very fast movements — 833 mm/s is no joke! It also looks to make very precise little prints. What could make it even more awesome? Water-cooled stepper motors, magnetic interchangeable printheads, and in-built lighting.

The build looks amazing, and there is video documentation of the whole thing on [René]’s site, including a full bill of materials and designs. It’s certainly not the cheapest 3D printer we’ve ever seen, and the tiny build platform makes it a bad choice for a general-purpose machine, but if you need a second printer and you want one with style, the DICE looks hard to beat.

Thanks [Laimonus Mockus] for the tip!

Hackaday Prize Entry: MCXY – Mini Laser Cut Aluminum 3D Printer

April 24, 2017 by Jenny List 11 Comments

With the easy availability of cheap and 3D printers from the usual Chinese websites, you might think that there could be little room for another home-made 3D printer project. fortunately, the community of 3D printer making enthusiasts doesn’t see it that way.

[Bobricius] has a rather nice 3D printer design in the works that we think you’ll like. It follows the MakerBot/Ultimaker style of construction in that it is a box rather than a gantry, and it is assembled from CNC-cut aluminum for a sturdy and pleasing effect. Whar sets it apart though is its size, at only 190x190x251mm and with an 80x80x80mm print volume, it’s tiny. You might wonder why that could be an asset, but when you consider that he already has a much larger printer it becomes obvious that something small and portable for quick tiny prints could be an asset.

Unusually for a home-made 3D printer, it has no 3D printed parts, instead, it is laser cut throughout. And also unusually all the CAD work was done in EAGLE, better known for PCB work. It’s a work in progress we’re featuring today because it’s a Hackaday Prize entry, but it looks as though the finished item will be something of a little gem.

Homemade 3D printers can be particularly impressive, for example, we’ve shown you this excellent SLA printer.