Have a nice, refreshing IPA sitting in the fridge along with a ton of other beers that have ‘Light’ or ‘Ice’ in their name? Obviously one variety is for guests and the other is for hosts, but how do you make sure the drunkards at your house tell the difference? A beer bottle lock, of course.
Because all beer bottles are pretty much a standard size, [Jon-A-Tron] was able to create a small 3D printed device that fit over the bottle cap. The two pieces are held together with a 4-40 hex screw, and the actual lock comes from a six-pack of luggage padlocks found at the hardware store.
It’s a great device to keep the slackers away from the good stuff, and also adds a neat challenge to anyone that’s cool enough to know basic lock picking. Of course, anyone with a TSA master key can also open the beer lock, but if you’re hosting a party with guest who frequently carry master keys around with them, you’re probably having too good of a time to care.
With resin printers slowly making their way to hackerspaces and garages the world over, there is a growing need for a place to cure these UV resin prints. No, they don’t come out of the machine fully cured, they come out fully solid. And no, we’re not just leaving them in the sun, because that’s not how we do things around here.
[Christopher] whipped up a post-cure lightbox meant to sit underneath his Form 1 printer. It’s made of 1/2″ MDF, with adjustable feet (something the Form 1 lacks), a safety switch to keep the lights off when the door is open, and a motor to rotate the parts around the enclosure.
The light source for this lightbox is 10 meters of ultraviolet LED strips. The LEDs shine somewhere between 395-405nm, the same wavelength as the laser diode found in the Form 1 printer. Other than a bit of wiring for the LEDs, the only complicated part of the build was the motor; [Christopher] bought a 2rpm motor but was sent a 36rpm motor. The vendor was out of 2rpm motors, so a PWM controller was added.
It’s a beautiful build that shows off [Christopher]’s ability to work with MDF. It also looks great sitting underneath his printer, and all his parts are rock solid now.
A while ago, when 3D printing was the new hotness, a few people looked around and said, ‘our printers are open source, why can’t we just build the machines that make our 3D printing filament?’ There was a $40,000 prize for the first person to build an open source filament extruder, resulting in a few filament fabrication machines being released into the wild. [Rupin] over in the Mumbi hackerspace has one of these filament extruders – a Filastruder – and decided to take a look at what it could do.
The experimentations began with a few kilograms of ABS pellets he found at the market, with bags of red, blue, green, and white masterbatch pellets showing up at the Hackerspace. Experimenting with these pellets, [Rupin] was able to create some very nice looking filament that printed well and changed color over the course of a print.
There were a limitations of the process, though: the filastruder has a long melt zone, so colors will invariably mix. If you’re thinking about doing a red to blue transition with filament created on a Filastruder, you’ll end up with a filament with a little bit of red, a little bit of blue, and a lot of a weird purple color. The time to create this filament is also incredibly long; over the course of two days, [Rupin] was able to make about half a kilo of filament.
Still, the results look fantastic, and now that [Rupin] has a source for masterbatch and ABS pellets, he’s able to have a steady supply of custom color filament at the hackerspace.
Filament printers are here to stay, and in the past year there have been a number of SLA and DLP resin printers that can create objects at mind-boggling high resolutions. Both of these technologies have their place, but printing really complex objects without also printing supports is out of the question.
[Brandon] has been working to create an open source printer using a different technology, selective laser sintering. That’s a laser melting tiny particles of stuff to create an object. This printer can work with any material that can be turned into a powder and melted by a laser, and also has the neat bonus of printing without any supports.
[Brandon]’s printer, Ester, uses small meltable polyester dust as both a print material and support structure. The object to be printed is created by shining a laser over a bed filled with polyester, drawing one layer, and putting another small layer of material over the previous layer.
The machine is using a diode laser, with a few experiments with a 1 Watt diode providing some very nice parts. The mechanics of the machine were built at [Brandon]’s local TechShop, and already he has an IndieGoGo for future development and a $3000 development kit. That’s a bit expensive as far as project printers go, but SLS is an expensive technology to get right; ‘pro’ SLS printers are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Hackaday European tour continues, this time in Prague with Josef Průša (Google translate), core developer in the RepRap project, feature at all the Maker Faires and cons, and creator of his namesake, the Prusa Mendel and i3 printers.
[Prusa]’s involvement with the RepRap project started with a RepRap Mendel, the second iteration of RepRap hardware, but the first popular and easy to build version. [Jo] found the Mendel rather difficult to build, so he loaded OpenSCAD and started to design his own version of the hardware. This version became the de facto standard RepRap for a few years, with many inspired by and derivative printers making their way to hackerspaces and workshops around the world.
The first Prusa printer, derived from the RepRap Mendel.
A few years ago, [Prusa] was one of the first to make a complete break with the traditional ‘threaded rod and nut’ construction of RepRaps with the introduction of the Prusa i3. This was the first model that had a metal plate as the frame, another feature that would be seen in dozens of other models. It’s not something that was without controversy, either; using a metal plate for the frame doesn’t allow for as much self-replication, something that’s a core value of the RepRap project. That didn’t matter to the community; the Prusa i3 or a similar design is the third most popular printer on 3Dhubs.
The first Prusa printer showing off its Makerbot heritage
What’s the future of the Prusa name? There is an i4 in the works, and I’m pretty sure that’s all I can tell you. Someone already bought the Prusai4 domain, so there may be a name change.
In the interview below, [Prusa] goes over his involvement with the RepRap project, his business, what he considers to be the latest advances in 3D printing for the past year, what the worst things about the 3D printing scene is (it’s Kickstarter), the state of the RepRap project, and thoughts on SLS, DLP, and SLA printing technologies. Video below.
Whenever the question of metal 3D printers comes up, someone always chimes in that a MIG welder connected to a normal 3D printer would work great. A bit of research would tell this person that’s already been done, but some confirmation and replication is nice. A few students at TU Delft University strapped a welder to a normal, off-the-shelf 3D printer and made a few simple shapes.
This project builds on the work of [Joshua Pearce] et al. at Michigan Tech where an MIG welder and delta bot was used to lay down rather complex shapes on a metal plate substrate. The team at TU Delft used a cartesian bot – a Prusa i3 – for their replication because of the sheer mass of moving a metal build plate, firebricks, and welder around.
In the first few prints on their machine, the team was able to lay down enough metal to build a vertical wall. It’s not much, and to turn this into a finished part would require some machining, but these are only the beginning steps of what could become a legitimate way of creating metal parts. Video below.
A speaker is just about the simplest electronic component possible, just barely more complex than resistors and wire. They’re also highly variable in their properties, either in size, shape, frequency response, and impedance. Obviously, building custom speakers would be of interest to a lot of people, but there aren’t many people out there doing it. [Madaeon] is one of those people. He created a speaker from scratch, using nothing but magnets, wire, and a bit of UV curing resin.
The frame of the speaker contains a magnet, and the coil of wire is carefully attached to the 0.1mm thin speaker cone with a bit of UV curing resin. All the parts are available on Thingiverse, but you will need a UV resin printer with a low layer height to print this thing out.
The speaker was built by [madaeon] as a demonstration of what the printer he built can do. It’s a fairly standard resin-based 3D printer built around a DLP projector. It’s also cheap, and unlike some other cheap resin-based 3D printers, there’s a reasonable likelihood his will ship within the next few months.
