3D Printing Metal In Mid Air

May 24, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 41 Comments

Published only 3 days before our article on how it is high time for direct metal 3D printers, the folks at Harvard have mastered 3D metal printing in midair with no support (as well as time travel apparently). Because it hardens so quickly, support isn’t necessary, and curves, sharp angles, and sophisticated shapes are possible.

The material is silver nanoparticles extruded out of a nozzle, and shortly after leaving it is blasted with a carefully programmed laser that solidifies the material. The trick is that the laser can’t focus on the tip of the nozzle or else heat transfer would solidify the ink inside the nozzle and clog it. In the video you can see the flash from the laser following slightly behind. The extrusion diameter is thinner than a hair, so don’t expect to be building large structures with this yet.

If you want big metal 3D printing, you should probably stick to the welders attached to robotic arms.

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3D Print It Or Fix It?

May 22, 2016 by Elliot Williams 20 Comments

[Tim Trzepacz] is working on a pretty cool MIDI controller project over on Hackaday.io. It involves, naturally, a bunch of knobs and buttons. And it’s one of these nice arcade-style buttons that broke when he slammed on his car brakes and it went flying.

He tried gluing the plastic bits back together, but we all know how that works — temporarily. Next, he thought that maybe he could 3D-print a model of the arcade button’s housing. Besides being a lot of work, [Tim] didn’t have a reliable printer on hand. But he did have filament and a soldering iron.

The rest of the story is a slightly ugly mess, but it looks like it’ll work. (And it’s on the inside of the case, after all.) A working part is a good part.

The irony here is that the original choice of 3 mm ABS filament as a printing material is that it’s cheap and available because it’s commonly used in plastic welding. And there are more elegant ways to melt the plastic than with a soldering iron. And more ways to get it melted than direct heating, like ultrasonic welding and friction welding, for instance.

But we still like to see the occasional quickly hacked together effort, at least one per day. What’s your craziest plastic welding success or failure?

Hacklet 108 – Simple Functional 3D Prints

May 21, 2016 by Adam Fabio 4 Comments

We featured 3D printer projects on last week’s Hacklet. This week, we’re looking at a few awesome projects created with those printers. Trying to pick great 3D printed projects on Hackaday.io is a bit like staring at the sun. There are just way too many to choose from. To make things a bit easier, I’ve broken things down into categories. There are artistic prints, complex mechanical or electronic prints, and then there are simple functional prints, which is the topic we’re featuring today. Simple functional prints are designs which perform some function in the world. By simple, I mean they have only a few moving parts or electronic components. Let’s get right to it!

We start with [Scott] and L Extrusion Endcaps. Every Home Depot, Lowes, or hardware store has a selection of extruded aluminum. Typically there are a few flat bars, and some L brackets. L brackets are great, but they can be a pain to work with. Most of us don’t have the skills or the tools to weld aluminum, so nuts and bolts are the only way to go. [Scott’s] given us another option. He’s designed a set of 3D printable brackets that slip onto the ends of the brackets. The brackets make quick work of building boxes, racks, or anything with 90° or 45° angles.

Next up is [Joe M] with 3D Printed Molds: Custom Silicone Earbuds. [Joe] had a set of Bluetooth earbuds he enjoyed, but the rubber tips left a bit to be desired. Not a problem when you have a 3D printer on hand. [Joe] measured the plastic part of his earbuds and the rubber tips from a different set he liked. A bit of CAD magic later, and he had a model for the perfect earbud tip. While he could have directly printed the tip in a flexible filament like NinjaFlex, [Joe] opted for a pure silicone tip. He printed molds, then mixed silicone caulk with cornstarch (as a catalyst). The resulting earbuds sound and feel great!

Next we have [Jetty] with Highly Configurable 3D Printed Helmholtz Coil. Helmholtz coils are used to create uniform magnetic fields. Why would you want to do that? It could be anything from measuring magnets to cancelling out the effect of the earth’s magnetic field on a device being tested. [Jetty’s] wrote an OpenScad program which allows the user to enter parameters for their coil. [Jetty’s] program then calculates the coil’s magnetic properties, and outputs a printable .stl file. Building the coil is as simple as printing it and wrapping some copper wire. [Jetty] found that his coil was within 60nT (nanoTesla) of the expected value. Not bad for a bit of plastic and wire!

Finally we have StickScope, [SUF’s] entry in the 2016 Hackaday Prize. Like many of us, [SUF] loves his StickVise. Sometimes you need a bit of magnification to see those tiny 0201 resistors though. [SUF] had a cheap USB microscope on hand, so he designed StickScope, a USB microscope mount designed especially for the StickVise. Two 6mm steel rods are the backbone of the design. 3D printed clamps hold the system together like a miniature boom microscope. This is actually the third revision of the design. [SUF] found that the original design couldn’t be used with parts close to the bar which holds the microscope. A small jaw extender was the perfect tweak.

If you want to see more simple functional 3D printed projects, check out our new simple functional 3D prints list! If I missed your project, don’t be shy, just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

It’s Time For Direct Metal 3D-Printing

May 19, 2016 by Moritz Walter 75 Comments

It’s tough times for 3D-printing. Stratasys got burned on Makerbot, trustful backers got burned on the Peachy Printer meltdown, I burned my finger on a brand new hotend just yesterday, and that’s only the more recent events. In recent years more than a few startups embarked on the challenge of developing a piece of 3D printing technology that would make a difference. More colors, more materials, more reliable, bigger, faster, cheaper, easier to use. There was even a metal 3D printing startup, MatterFab, which pulled off a functional prototype of a low-cost metal-powder-laser-melting 3D printer, securing $13M in funding, and disappearing silently, poof.

This is just the children’s corner of the mall, and the grown-ups have really just begun pulling out their titanium credit cards. General Electric is on track to introduce 3D printed, FAA-approved fuel nozzles into its aircraft jet engines, Airbus is heading for 3D-printed, lightweight components and interior, and SpaceX has already sent rockets with 3D printed Main Oxidizer Valves (MOV) into orbit, aiming to make the SuperDraco the first fully 3D printed rocket engine. Direct metal 3D printing is transitioning from the experimental research phase to production, and it’s interesting to see how and why large industries, well, disrupt themselves.

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3D Printing And Modelling On The Fly

May 17, 2016 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

3D printing is supposed to be about rapid prototyping. Design, print, use, re-design, print, test — iterate until happy. But when you’re laying down filament at 60 mm/s, it can seem anything but rapid.

[Huaishu Peng], [Rundong Wu], and their supervisors at Cornell have come up with a 3D printer that can print almost as fast as you can model, and is able to add and subtract from the model on the fly. The goal is to get an initial model out so quickly that designing and printing can be truly interactive. They look to have succeeded — check out the video below.

3ders.org has a brilliant writeup of the machine that you should also go read once the video’s magic has worn off. There’s a lot going on to make this all work. The printer adds two extra degrees of freedom and a cutter head so that it can make additions and subtractions from the side, and is not constrained to layer-by-layer construction. To get the ABS to cool fast enough to make solid strands, water jets mist it down to temperature just after it’s printed.

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Super Strong 3D Component Carbon Fiber Parts

May 15, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 20 Comments

[prubeš] shows that parts printed with carbon fiber filament are as strong, or at least as stiff, as you’d expect. He then shows that his method for producing carbon fiber parts with a mixture of traditional lay-up and 3D printing is even stronger and lighter.

[prubeš] appears to be into the OpenR/C project and quadcopters. These things require light and strong parts for maximum performance. He managed to get strength with carbon fiber fill filament, but the parts weren’t light enough. Then he saw [RichMac]’s work on Thingiverse. [RichMac] designed parts with pre-planned grooves in which he ran regular carbon fiber tow with epoxy. This produced some incredibly strong parts. There’s a section in his example video, viewable after the break, where he tests a T joint. Even though the plastic starts to fail underneath the carbon fiber, the joint is still strong enough that the aluminum tube inside of it fails first.

[prubeš] innovation on [RichMac]’s method is to remove as much of the plastic from the method as possible. He designs only the connection points of the part, and then designs a 3D printable frame to hold them in place. After he has those in hand, he winds the tow around the parts in a sometimes predetermined path. The epoxy cures onto the 3D print creating a strong mounting location and the woven carbon fiber provides the strength.

His final parts are stronger than 100% infill carbon fill prints, but weighs 8g instead of 12g. For a quadcopter this kind of saving can add up fast.

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Hacklet 107 – 3D Printing Projects

May 14, 2016 by Adam Fabio 7 Comments

3D printers have forever changed the hardware hacker movement. From the original RepRap project on up through current commercial offerings, 3D printers have become an indispensable tool for hackers, makers, and engineers. While printers may not have started a desktop manufacturing revolution, they are a desktop prototyping evolution. It’s rare for a day to go by on Hackaday without a project that uses a 3D printed part in some way shape or form. These printers also continue to evolve, with new projects pushing the technology ever forward. This week’s Hacklet is all about some of the best 3D printer projects on Hackaday.io!

We start with [TTN] and Icepick Delta. [TTN’s] passion is creating 3D printers as cheaply as possible. The Icepick definitely succeeds at this. Icepick’s frame is made of wood. The motors are commodity steppers. Control is via the long proven Ramps 1.4 board, which can be picked up with drivers and an Arduino Mega clone for under $35 these days. A few ball bearings and metal parts fill out the vitamins of this design. Just about everything else is 3D printed in true RepRap style. The printer is currently running Marlin firmware, but [TTN] plans to move to Repetier in the future.

Even with these humble origins, Icepick manages to print at a very respectable 50 mm/s before frame flex becomes a problem. Prints at 0.1mm layer height look great, on par with any current commercial printer.

Next up is [Machinist] with 3D printer brain retrofit. Commercial 3D printers have been available for decades now. This means some of the older models are getting a bit long in the tooth. [Machinist] has a very tired 15 year old Stratasys Dimension 768. The mechanics of the Dimension are still in good shape, but the electronics have seen better days. [Machinist] is ditching all the old electronic hardware (and the DRM which goes with it) and setting this machine up with a Smoothieboard 5X. So far the Dimension has been gutted, and [Machinist] has gotten the monster stepper motors playing sweet music with his new control board. I can’t wait to see how this project progresses.

Next we have [jcchurch’s] Coffee Maker Delta 3D Printer. [jcchurch] has managed to convert an old Norelco coffee maker into a mini sized 3D printer. The warmer plate has even become a heated bed for ABS prints. Unlike Icepick up top, the aim of this design is to use as few 3D printed parts as possible. The idea is that this would be the first printer to build when you don’t have another printer handy. Think of it as a caffeinated RepStrap. According to [jcchurch], this printer has been running strong at Tropical Labs for over a year. You can even pull the delta assembly off and make a pot of coffee! The coffee maker printer is still somewhat of a teaser project. If you see [jcchurch] online, tell him to head over and give us more details!

Finally, we have [DeepSOIC] with linear stepper motor 3d printer. 3D printers all use good old fashioned rotary stepper motors. [DeepSOIC] is trying to eliminate all that rotary motion, along with the belts and pulleys required to convert to linear motion. Linear stepper motors can be thought of as regular stepper motors, just unrolled. They tend to be very expensive though, so [DeepSOIC] is building DIY versions. His first attempt was to print motor parts using BlackMagic3D’s ferromagnetic filament. This lead to a whole separate project to measure the permeability of the filament. Unfortunately, the filament isn’t permeable enough to act as a motor for a printer. [DeepSOIC] hasn’t given up though. This is the type of project we love – one that might not work out, but really gets people thinking. Check out the comment thread on the project to see Hackaday.io collaboration at work!

If you want to see more 3D printer projects, check out our updated 3D printer list! If I didn’t wake up early enough to catch your project, don’t be shy, just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!