3d Printer hacks

2740 Articles

Closed Loop Control For 3D Printers

January 20, 2015 by 129 Comments

One of the bigger problems with any CNC machine or 3D printer is the issue of missed steps when moving the toolhead. If a stepper motor misses a step, the entire layer of the print – and every layer thereafter – will be off by just a tiny bit. Miss a few more steps, and that print will eventually make its way into the garbage. [Misan] has the solution to this: closed loop control of DC motors for a 3D printer.

Most printer firmwares use an open loop control system for moving their motors around. Step a few times in one direction, and you know where the nozzle of a 3D printer will be. Missed steps confound the problem, and there’s no way for the firmware to know if the nozzle is where it should be at any one time.

[Misan]’s solution to this was a DC motor coupled to an optical encoder. Both the motor and the encoder are connected to an Arduino Pro Mini which receives step and direction commands from the printer controller. The controller takes care of telling the motor where to go, the Arduino takes care of making sure it gets there.

The entire build is heavily derived from ServoStrap, but [Misan] has a very cool demo of his hardware: during a print, he can force the X and Y axes to either side, and the Arduino in each motor will move the print head back to where it needs to be. You can check that out below.

Continue reading “Closed Loop Control For 3D Printers” →

A Cute Little 3D Printed Skateboard

January 19, 2015 by 23 Comments

[Julian] has been wanting a tiny little skateboard for a while now, and decided to make something useful on his 3D printer. A little more than twenty hours later a tiny and cute printed skateboard popped out.

[Julian] got the files for his 3D printed skateboard from Thingiverse and printed them off on a MakerGear M2. The parts printed easily, each part taking about six hours to print. The parts are bolted together with five threaded rods, the trucks were screwed on, and the wheels popped into place.

While a normal skateboard probably wouldn’t stand up to the 3D printed parts and threaded rod construction, this Pennyboard is tiny, and most of [Julian]’s weight is right over the trucks at all times. This is also not a board that’s going to see a lot of tricks; it’s basically a micro longboard for moving from one place to another, not something you’ll need to find an abandoned in-ground pool to use properly.

You can check out the video below.

Continue reading “A Cute Little 3D Printed Skateboard” →

Make Awesome, Win Smoothieboard

January 16, 2015 by 21 Comments

If you haven’t looked around the RepRap project in a while, you probably haven’t heard about the Smoothieboard. It’s an extremely unique electronics board for 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC machines that is trying to get away from Atmel and AVR microcontrollers and towards more powerful ARM micros. On the Smoothieboard, you’ll find enough five motor drivers, six big ‘ol MOSFETs for hot ends, fans, and beds, enough thermistor inputs for just about anything, and an Ethernet jack, because all 3D printers should be able to run headless.

The team behind the Smoothieboard has decided there’s not enough awesome included in the Smoothieboard already. To fix this, they’re opening up a contest where coders, documentarians, graphic artists, and creatives of all types can contribute to the Smoothieboard project. What’s the prize? A Smoothieboard, duh.

The Smoothieboard team is looking for a few good coders, builders, or anyone else to contribute to the Smoothieboard project. If you have an idea that would work with the Smoothieboard – a web interface like Octoprint running on the Smoothieboard, better documentation, graphics, or just want to build a five-axis CNC mill, this is where you sign up. The prize is a Smoothieboard 5XC, the top of the line board with five motor drivers.

Of course you’re always welcome to not contribute to open source projects, and for those consummate consumers, we have the Smoothieboard 5XC available in the Hackaday Store.

You have until February 15th to come up with a great project idea for a Smoothieboard. The best 30 project ideas will be chosen, and those projects will get a Smoothieboard. Actually building a project in a month isn’t a condition of the contest; the best idea wins.

Knitting In The Round

January 15, 2015 by 12 Comments

There have been a few posts on Hackaday over the years involving knitting, either by modifying an old Brother knitting machine to incorporate modern hardware, or by building a 3D printed knitting machine. All of these hacks are examples of flat knitting, and are incapable of making a seamless tube. Circular Knitic bucks that trend by using 3D printing and laser cutters to create an open source circular knitting machine.

Circular Knitic is an expansion on an earlier build that gave a new brain to old Brother knitting machines from the 70s. This build goes well beyond simple manipulation of electrons and presents an entire knitting machine specifically designed for circular knitting. It’s completely automated, so once the machine is set up, a giant tube of knit yarn is automagically created without any human intervention.

This isn’t the first completely open source knitting machine; OpenKnit can be made with aluminum extrusion, some electronics, and a few 3D printed parts. Circular Knitic is, however, the first circular knitting machine we’ve seen, and according to the Github is completely open source.

The creators of Circular Knitic, [Varvara] and [Mar] have been showing off their machine at an exhibition in Zaragoza, Spain called DOERS, where they’ll be knitting for the better part of six months. You can see some video of that below.

Continue reading “Knitting In The Round” →

Choctopus Chocolate Printer X8

January 14, 2015 by 14 Comments

Valentine’s Day is about a month away, long enough for everyone to butcher upgrade their 3D printers to squirt out chocolate. Food printing was a hot item at this year’s CES, but it is hardly new. Before many of you were born [Hans] left his job at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to produce chocolate out of his garage in South Africa. This one prints 8 at a time!

HAD - Choctopus1Many years before he was extruding lawnmowers from raw pellets, [Hans] built the 8-tentacled Choctopus. He gets away with using only one chocolate pump – from some experience, by far the most challenging component – by simply splitting the ooze pipe with three tiers of T intersections. The whole design is actually patented and revolutionary for 19 years ago but to our readers probably unremarkable.

HAD - Choctopus4There is a business lesson here too. Once upon a time the Choctopus was a  3D printer but economic constraints have led to him downgrading to 2D. Any 3D requirements are served from an alternate RepRap. The purpose of an 8-armed printer is to mass produce, but for the price, most clients were only interested in a one-off. The products that pay the bills are the much more affordable 2d extrusions in bulk.

Any of our readers looking to impress their date make lots of money next month, consider this the kick in your pants to get started.

Check out these videos of the Choctopus churning out delicious delicatessens.

Continue reading “Choctopus Chocolate Printer X8” →

Copper Plated print

Electroplating Copper And Silver Onto 3D Prints

January 12, 2015 by 63 Comments

While researching copper plating graphite for a project, [Dave] stumbled upon a blog post illustrating a brilliant approach to metal plating 3D printed parts.

Our pioneers in this new technique are [Aaron], who runs a jewelry business, and [Bryan], a professor of Digital Media. By mixing graphite powder into an acetone solution, it is possible to make a kind of graphite paint that sticks extremely well to ABS plastic.

Using the graphite painted part as the cathode, and a chunk of copper as the anode, it becomes possible to electroplate the part with a variety of electro-forming solutions. In the first test (seen above), [Bryan] uses a Midas Bright Electro-forming Copper Solution (copper sulfate solution).

Continue reading “Electroplating Copper And Silver Onto 3D Prints” →

Circuit Printers: Voltera And Voxel8

January 9, 2015 by 42 Comments

There are two printers being shown off at the 2015 Consumer Electronics shows which really spark our interest. They are the Voltera and the Voxel8. Each is taking on the challenge of printing circuits. They use similar techniques but approach the problem in very different ways.

Voxel8

[Michael Bell] poses with the Voxel8
Quad on the print bed of the Voxel8
3D printed quadcopter — conductive traces and all

The Voxel8 marries the idea of a 3D printer with a silver conductive ink dispenser. You start by modeling your entire design, hardware and electronics, all in one. The printer will then begin the 3D print, pausing when necessary for you to add electronics and mechanicals. With the parts — and their pins — in place it lays out the conductive ink to connect the components and then continues with the 3D printing to finish the object.

Voltera

[Alroy Almeida] poses with the Voltera
PCB demo, colored traces are for insulation between layers
PCB with components populated

The Voltera is a PCB printer that uses silver conductive ink. It prints the ink onto a substrate. Pads made of the ink are used to solder the components in place after the printing is finished. The trick added to this design is the ability to print two layers, both on the same side of the board. There is a second ink material which is an insulator. It is laid over the first conductive layer before the second is printed, allowing traces to cross over each other.

Congratulations to the Voltera team who won $50k from the 2015 Hardware Battlefield at CES.

Our Thoughts

We didn’t see enough to shake our skepticism about the viability of silver conductive ink to take the place of copper on prototype boards. But if anyone is going to make the case that it is plausible these two offerings will.

One interesting thing about the Voxel8 is the ability to specify point-to-point wiring as a “part”. If you do so, the machine will pause while you solder the wires in place before it encapsulates them with the rest of the print. Of course if you’re going to do this manually it shouldn’t really matter which printer you use for it.

What do think about the future of conductive ink for prototyping? Lets us know in the comments.