LittleRP, The Latest Of The Resin Printers

August 11, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

LitleRP Over the last few years, a few resin / stereolithography printers have been made a few headlines due to print quality that cannot be matched by the usual RepRap style filament printers. These used to be extremely expensive machines, but lately there have been a few newcomers to the field. The latest is the LittleRP, an affordable DLP projector-based resin printer that can be put together for under a kilobuck.

Instead of proprietary resins, the LittleRP is designed to use as many different formulations of UV curing resin as possible, including those from MadeSolid and MakerJuice. These resins are cured with a DLP projector, providing a print area of 60x40x100mm with the recommended 1024×768 projector, or 72x40x100mm with the alternative 1080p projector.

This isn’t the only resin printer that’s come out recently; SeeMeCNC recently announced their cleverly named DropLit resin printer kit, going with the same ‘bring your own projector’ idea as the LittleRP. With the price of the printer, both of these kits should cost less than $1000 USD. With the price of UV resin dropping over the last few years, it might be just the time to get in the resin printer game.

George Crowdsourcington: A 3D Printed, Community Built Statue

August 7, 2014 by James Hobson 7 Comments

George Crowdsourcington and Distributed Ben Franklin

Macro 3D printing is some cool stuff — but it’s extremely time consuming and can be very expensive. Introducing We The Builders, a 3D printing crowd source site which creates large scale projects the whole country can enjoy.

Their first project was George Crowdsourcington — a 1:1 copy of the Baltimore George Washington statue made out of 110 individual pieces. They chopped the model up into 4″ cubes and created the website in order to organize and distribute the files. One of their sponsors, Tinkerine Studio, reimbursed the shipping costs for makers who helped print out parts! Since his creation, Crowdsourcington has traveled all over the country, making stops at 3D printing shows in New York, mini-Maker Faires, art galleries, science centers and more — he even did a short residency in the Adafruit office in Manhattan!

It was quite the success, so they’re starting a new statue called the Distributed Ben Franklin. This one has a whopping 198 pieces, and they hope to have it built in time for the Silver Spring and World Maker Faires.

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Restarting 3D Prints

August 2, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 18 Comments

If a 3D printer is interrupted during a print, it will usually result in a junk part. Resuming the print can be very difficult. A group of researchers at MIT have built an add-on for 3D printers that uses a laser scanner to evaluate the state of the print, and allows the printer to restart.

While this will allow you to salvage some partially competed prints, the interesting application is switching between materials. In the image above, the lower piece was printed in ABS. The print was interrupted to change materials, and the top cube was printed in PLA. This allows for prints to mix materials and colors.

The add-on was tested with the Solidoodle 3D printer, and can be built for about $60. It requires a laser mounted to the print head, and a low-cost webcam for performing the measurements. While the group will not be continuing work on this project, they plan to open source their work so others can continue where they’ve left off.

After the break, we have a video of the printer performing a scan and resuming a print.

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A 3D(ollar) Scanner

July 31, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

Once you have a 3D printer, making copies of objects like a futuristic Xerox machine is the name of the game. There are, of course, 3D scanners available for hundreds of dollars, but [Joshua] wanted something a bit cheaper. He built his own 3D scanner for exactly $2.73 in parts, salvaging the rest from the parts bin at his local hackerspace.

[Josh]’s scanner is pretty much just a lazy suzan (that’s where he spent the money), with a stepper motor drive. A beam of laser light shines on whatever object is placed on the lazy suzan, and a USB webcam feeds the data to a computer. The build is heavily influenced from this Instructables build, but [Josh] has a few tricks up his sleeve: this is the only laser/camera 3D scanner that can solve a point cloud with the camera in any vertical position. This potentially means algorithmic calibration, and having the copied and printed object come out the same size as the original. You can check out that code on the git.

Future improvements to [Josh]’s 3D scanner include the ability to output point clouds and STLs, meaning anyone can go straight from scanning an object to slicing it for a 3D printer. That’s a lot of interesting software features for something that was basically pulled out of the trash.

A 3D Printed Brushless Motor

July 30, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

brushless Building electronics with 3D printers is something we see hitting the tip line from time to time, but usually these are printed circuits, not electromechanical parts like motors, solenoids, and relays. [pitrack] thought he could do better than printing out a few blinking LED circuits and designed and built a brushless motor, the same kind you would find on electric model planes and quadcopters.

In every brushless DC motor, there are a few common parts: the rotor has a few powerful magnets embedded in it, a stators with coils of wire, and the an enclosure to keep everything together. [pitrack] printed all these parts off on his Makerbot, winding each of the three coils with about 400 turns of 26 AWG magnet wire. Also embedded in the stator are a trio of hall effect sensors to make the control via an Arduino and an L6234 motor driver easy.

For his next trick, [pitrack] is going to test the efficiency of the motor and attempt to optimize it. In the long term, it should be possible to parameterize the design of one of these printed motors, effectively allowing anyone to type in the torque and Kv rating of a desired motor, plug that into an equation, and have a motor design come out the other end.
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Clay 3D Printer Keeps It Simple

July 28, 2014 by Rich Bremer 23 Comments

Clay 3D Printer

Artist [Jonathan] has built a 3D printer specifically for printing in clay. The part count is kept to a minimum and the printer was designed to be made with basic tools and beginner skills. The intent was to not require access to a plastic 3D printer in order to build this printer. Although this build’s goal was clay printing, the extruder could certainly be swapped out for a typical plastic printer version.

This Delta uses quite a bit of MDF. The top and bottom plates are MDF, as are the bearing carriages and extruder mount plate. 12mm rods are solely responsible for the support between the top and bottoms plates as well providing a surface for the LM12UU linear bearings. These bearings are zip tied to the MDF bearing carriages. The 6 arms that support the extruder mount plate are made from aluminum tubing and Traxxas RC car rod-ends. NEMA17 motors and GT2 belts and pulleys are the method used to move the machine around.

Getting the clay to dispense was a tricky task. Parts scavenged from a pneumatic dispensing gun was used. If you are unfamiliar with this type of tool, think: Power Caulk Gun. Clay is fed into the re-fillable syringes and an air compressor provides the 30 psi required to force the clay out of the nozzle. The pressure alone controls the rate of clay flow so it is a little finicky to get the extrusion rate correct. Depending on the size of the final sculpture, 1 to 2mm diameter nozzles could be used. For larger work, 1mm layer height works well. For the smaller pieces, 0.5mm is the preferred layer height.

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A Better Google Glass For $60 (This One Folds)

July 28, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

glass For [Tony]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize, he’s doing something we’ve all seen before – a head mounted display, connected to a Bluetooth module, displaying information from a smartphone. What we haven’t seen before is a cheap version of this tech, and a version of Google Glass that folds – you know, like every other pair of glasses on the planet – edges this project over from ‘interesting’ to ‘nearly practical’.

For the display, [Tony] is using a 0.96″ OLED connected to an Arduino Nano. This screen is directed into the wearer’s eye with a series of optics that, along with every other part of the frame, was 3D printed on a Solidoodle 2. The frame itself not only folds along the temples, but also along the bridge, making this HMD surprisingly compact when folded up.

Everything displayed on this head mounted display is controlled by either an Android phone or a Bluetooth connection to a desktop. Using relatively simple display means [Tony] is limited to text and extremely simple graphics, but this is more than enough for some very interesting applications; reading SMS messages and checking email is easy, and doesn’t overpower the ‘duino.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.