Way back in 2010, Makerbot released the Automated Build Platform, a neat heated conveyor belt for the Cupcake or Thing-O-Matic that would spit parts out when a print was done. It’s a great invention if you need to produce 20 of something, and the perfect invention if you want to sit on a patent and not innovate anything ever.
You won’t need to wait until the year 2030 to get a device that automatically removes a print from a print bed. The folks at MatterHackers came up with an Automatic Print Ejector that removes a print in the most [Rube Goldberg]-ish way possible: with a boxing glove.
The Automatic Print Ejector is pretty much taken straight out of a [Buster Keaton] movie. It’s a series of scissor mechanisms with a 3D printed boxing glove on the end, driven by a stepper motor. When the print finishes, the boxing glove simply punches a print off the bed of a printer.
Does it work? It does, brilliantly. Check out the video below.
The folks over at Lunchbox Electronics are working on a very cool prototype: embedding LEDs inside standard 1×1 Lego bricks. Being a prototype, they needed a cheap way to produce Lego bricks stuffed with electronics. It turns out a normal 3D printer has okay-enough resolution, but how to put the electronics in the bricks? Gcode wizardry, of course.
The electronics being stuffed into the bricks isn’t much – just a small PCB with an LED. It does, however, need to get inside the brick. This requires stopping the 3D printer at the right layer, moving the print head out of the way, inserting the PCB, and moving the head back to where it stopped.
Gcode to the rescue. By inserting a few lines into the Gcode of the print, the print can be paused, the print head raised and returned, and the print continued.
If you want to check out what these light up Lego look like, There’s a Kickstarter happening now. It’s exactly what the 80s space sets needed, only thirty years late.
There are a lot of neat toys and accessories that rely on 3D printing filament. The 3Doodler is a 3D printing pen, or pretty much an extruder in a battery-powered portable package. You can make your own filament with a Filastruder, and of course 3D printers themselves use up a lot of filament. [Bodet]’s project for this year’s Hackaday Prize gives those tiny scraps of leftover filament a new life by welding filament together.
The EasyWelder [Bodet] is designing looks a little bit like a tiny hair straightener; it has a temperature control, a power switch, and two tips that grip 1.7 or 3mm diameter filament and weld them together. It works with ABS, PLA, HIPS, Nylon, NinjaFlex, and just about every other filament you can throw at a printer. By welding a few different colors of filament together, you can create objects with different colors or mechanical properties. It’s notas good as dual extrusion, but it does make good use of those tiny bits of filament left on a mostly used spool.
Since the EasyWelder can weld NinjaFlex and other flexible filaments, it’s also possible to weld NinjaFlex to itself. What does that mean? Custom sized O-rings, of course. You can see a video of that below.
We’ve seen a lot of experimenting with 3D printers over the years, and that is a good thing. However, [Tyler] has had a bad experience with experimenting. He has a Printrbot Simple Metal and decided to try nylon weed wacker line. Since he wanted to get straight to printing, he skipped the apparently important step of drying the trimmer line before printing. This experimentation ended in several clogged nozzles. Removing and cleaning the nozzle several times put undo stress on the Ubis hot end wires and they broke. Things were not going well.
In an effort to make his printer more repairable, [Tyler] ordered up an aluminum RepRap heater block, heating resistor and thermistor. The heater block was tapped with standard M6 threads but the Ubis was 1/4 inch. This was remedied by drilling and tapping the M6 hole to 1/4-20.
Now for the nozzles, [Tyler] bought a handful of cheap brass acorn nuts. He drilled a hole for the molten plastic to exit the nozzle, then used a Dremel to grind the acorn nut’s dome into a cone. He reports it only took him about 5 minutes per nozzle.
It looks like [Tyler] got back to printing with a little creative thinking. Unfortunately, the Ubis and J-Head hot ends are not interchangeable. A couple of other ex-Ubis users have made J-Head adapters for their Printrbots.
Syringe pumps are valuable tools when specific amounts of fluid must be dispensed at certain rates and volumes. They are used in many ways, for administering IV medications to liquid chromatography (LC/HPLC). Unfortunately, a commercial pump can cost a pretty penny. Not particularly thrilled with the hefty price tag, [Aldric Negrier] rolled up his sleeves and made a 3D-printed version for 300 USD.
[Aldric] has been featured on Hackaday before, so we knew his latest project would not disappoint. His 3D Printed Syringe Pump Rack contains five individual pumps that can operate independently of each other. Five pieces are 3D-printed to form the housing for each pump. In addition, each pump is composed of a Teflon-coated lead screw, an Arduino Nano V3, a Pololu Micro stepper motor driver, and a NEMA-17 stepper motor. The 3D Printed Syringe Pump Rack runs on a 12V power supply using a maximum of 2 amps per motor.
While the standard Arduino IDE contains the Stepper library, [Aldric] wanted a library that allowed for more precise control and went with the Accelstepper library. The 3D Printed Syringe Pump Rack has a measured accuracy of 0.5µl in a 10ml syringe, which is nothing to laugh at.
Syringe pump racks like [Aldric’s] are another great example of using open source resources and the spirit of DIY to make typically expensive technologies more affordable to the smaller lab bench. If you are interested in other open source syringe pump designs, you can check out this entry for the 2014 Hackaday Prize.
It seems almost every day 3D scanning is becoming more and more accessible to the general DIYer. The hardware required is minimal and there are several scanning softwares and workflows to choose from. However, if you have slowly walked around a subject while holding a Kinect and trying to get a good scan, you know this is not an easy task. A quick internet search will result in several DIY scanning setup solutions that have been cobbled together and lack substantial documentation…. until now! [aldricnegrier] is fighting back and has designed and documented a rotary table that will spin at a constant speed while a subject is 3D scanned, making person scanning just that much easier.
The project starts off with a plywood base with a Lazy Susan bearing assembly attached to the top. The Lazy Susan supports the rotating platform for the subject person to stand on, but it’s not just a platform, it’s also a huge gear! The platform teeth mesh with a much smaller 3D printed gear mounted on the shaft of a DC motor and reduction gearbox assembly.
Another goal of the project was to make the rotary table autonomous. There is an ultrasonic sensor mounted to the base aimed above the rotating platform. The ultrasonic sensor is connected to an Arduino and if the system senses someone or something on the platform for 3 seconds, the Arduino will command a DC motor driver to start spinning the platform.
As cool as this project is so far, [aldricnegrier] wanted to make it even cooler: he added speech recognition. Using Microsoft’s Speech Toolkit, saying the words ‘Start Skanect‘ will start the scanning process on the PC. Now, a sole person can scan themselves easily and reliably.
[aldricnegrier] has made all of his CAD files, STL files and Arduino code available so anyone wanting to build this clearly capable setup can do so!
Of course Maker Faire was loaded up with 3D printers, but we’re no longer in the era of a 3D printer in every single booth. Filament-based printers are passé, but that doesn’t mean there’s no new technology to demonstrate. This year, it was stereolithography and other resin-based printers. Here’s the roundup of each and every one displayed at the faire, and the reason it’s still not prime time for resin-based printers.
Formlabs
Of course the Formlabs Form 1+ was presented at the Bay Area Maker Faire. They were one of the first SLA printers on the market, and they’ve jumped through enough legal hoops to be able to call themselves the current kings of low-cost laser and resin printing. There were a few new companies and products at the Faire vying for the top spot, and this is where things get interesting.
The folks at Formlabs displayed the only functional print of all the resin-based 3D printing companies – a tiny, tiny Philco Predicta stuffed with an LCD displaying composite video. The display is covered by a 3D printed lens/window. That’s the closest you’re going to get to an optically clear 3D printed part at the Faire.
XYZPrinting Nobel
The Eiffel tower, an architectural model, and a Bratz doll, all printed on the XYZPrinting Nobel
XYZPrinting, the company famous for the $500 printer that follows the Gillette model: sell the printer cheap, sell expensive replacement filament cartridges, and laugh all the way to the bank. Resetting the DRM on the XYZPrinting Da Vinci printer is easy, the proprietary host software is done away with, and bricked devices are not. Time for a new market, huh?
Enter the XYZPrinting Nobel, a resin printer that uses lasers to solidify parts 25 microns at a time. The build volume is 125x125x200mm (5x5x7.9″), with an X and Y resolution of 300 microns. Everything prints out just as you would expect. As far as laser resin printers go, it’s incredibly cheap: $1500. It does, however, use XYZware, the proprietary toolchain forced upon Da Vinci users, although the Nobel is a stand-alone printer that can pull a .STL file from a USB drive and turn it into an object without a computer. There was no mention of how – or if – this printer is locked down.
DWS Lab XFAB
This Shrek is the highest resolution 3D printed object I’ve ever seen.
You’ve seen the cheapest, now check out the most expensive. It’s the DWS Lab XFAB, an enormous and impressive machine that has incredible resolution, a huge build area, and when you take into account other resin printers, a price approaching insanity.
First, the price: $5000 officially, although I heard rumors of $6500 around the 3D printing tent. No, it’s not for sale yet – they’re still in beta testing. Compare that to the Formlabs Form 1+ at $3300, or the XYZPrinting Nobel at $1500, and you would expect this printer to be incredible. You would be right.
The minimum feature size of the XFAB is 80 microns, and can slice down to 10 microns. Compare that to the 300 micron feature size of the Form 1+ and Nobel, and even on paper, you can tell they really have something here. Looking at the sample prints, they do. These are simply the highest resolution 3D printed objects I’ve ever seen. The quality of the prints compares to the finest resin cast objects, machined plastic, or any other manufacturing process. If you’re looking for a printer for very, very high quality work, this is what you need.
Sharebot Voyager
Also on display – but not in the 3D printing booth, for some reason – was the Sharebot Voyager. Unlike all the printers described above, this is a DLP printer; instead of lasers and galvos, the Voyager uses an off-the-shelf 3D DLP projector to harden layers of resin.
Strangely, the Sharebot Voyager was stuck in either the Atmel or the Arduino.cc (the [Massimo] one) booth. The printing area is a bit small – 56x96x100mm, but the resolution – on paper, mind you – goes beyond what the most expensive laser and galvo printers can manage: 50 microns in the X and Y axes, 20 to 100 microns in the Z. Compare that figure to the XFAB’s 80 micron minimum feature size, and you begin to see the genius of using a DLP projector.
The Sharebot Voyager is fully controllable over the web thanks to a 1.5GHz quad core, 1GB RAM computer that I believe is running 32 bit Windows. Yes, the spec sheet said OS: 32 bit Windows.
There were no sample prints, no price, and no expected release date. It is, for all intents and purposes, vaporware. I’ve seen it, I’ve taken pictures of it, but I’ve done that for a lot of products that never made it to market.
The Problem With Resin Printers
Taking a gander over all the resin-based 3D printers, you start to pick up on a few common themes. All the software is proprietary, and there is no open source solution for either moving galvos, lasers, or displaying images on a DLP projector correctly to run a resin-based machine. Yes, you heard it here first: it’s the first time in history Open Source hardware folk are ahead of the Open Source software folk. Honestly, open source resin printer hosts is something that should have been done years ago.
This will change in just a few months. A scary, tattooed little bird told me there will soon be an open source solution to printing in resin by the Detroit Maker Faire. Then, finally, the deluge of resin.
The electronics being stuffed into the bricks isn’t much – just a small PCB with an LED. It does, however, need to get inside the brick. This requires stopping the 3D printer at the right layer, moving the print head out of the way, inserting the PCB, and moving the head back to where it stopped.
