3d Printer hacks

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Art of 3D printer in the middle of printing a Hackaday Jolly Wrencher logo

Microsculptures 3D Printed With Advanced Macromolecular “Inks”

June 5, 2023 by 3 Comments

When we think about 3D printing, our mind often jumps to hot nozzles squirting out molten plastic. Other popular techniques include flashing bright light into resin, or using lasers to fuse together metal powders. All these techniques are great at producing parts with complicated geometries at desktop scales.

However, it’s also possible to 3D print at altogether microscopic scales. Researchers in Germany have now developed advanced macromolecular “inks” that can be used to create microscopic 3D sculptures with finer control than ever before.

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3D Printing Safety (According To The UL)

June 4, 2023 by 17 Comments

If you want to start a heated discussion in 3D printing circles, ask people about the requirements to print safely. Is ABS safe to print without ventilation? Can you drink out of a PLA cup? How nasty is that photo resin if you spill it on yourself? If you are at home, it’s more or less up to you. But if you are building a shared hackerspace, a corporate workstation, or a classroom, these questions might come up, and now, the UL has your answer. The UL200B document is aimed at 3D printers in “institutions of higher education,” but we imagine what’s good for the university is good for us, too.

The 45-page document isn’t an easy read. It does cover both “material extrusion” and “vat photopolymerization” technology. In fact, they identify seven “most common” processes ranging from powder bed fusion, energy deposition, and more.  The work results from a UL task force with participants from Harvard, Princeton, and Carnegie-Mellon. We were surprised there didn’t seem to be any industry representation, but maybe that was on purpose.

With extrusion printing — what we’d call FDM — the focus seems to be on ultra-fine particles and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). However, the level of VOCs rose up to six times with resin printers when compared to FDM. Filters helped with ABS, nylon, and ASA, and polycarbonate/ABS. The paper does acknowledge that PLA is probably safer, although it is quick to point out that PLA with additives may not be as safe as plain PLA. If you want a quick summary, check out Table 2, starting on page 23.

The rest of the document is about creating a safety plan for all the printers that might be on a college campus — that might not be as interesting. However, you’ll want to skip forward to the appendix section. It has some data about relevant industrial standards and other data.

This is a great step in analyzing the risks of 3D printing. Of course, laser printers and copiers also spew micro-particles, and we seem to have survived those for a number of decades. Still, more data is good — you should be informed to make decisions about your health and safety. We didn’t see much in the document that covered food safety, something we’ve talked about before. If you want to monitor your VOC exposure, we got you.

3D Printing Bores Without Support

May 28, 2023 by 14 Comments

If you’ve done even a small amount of 3D printing, you probably ran into the challenge of printing a small hole on top of a larger hole. The conventional solution is just to add support, but in the video after the break, [Angus] of Maker’s Muse demonstrates an alternative solution you can implement in CAD, without having to do manual post-processing.

This is a common problem when you have a countersink feature for a bolt head or captured nut on the bottom of the part. [Angus] first demonstrates some other techniques, including printing the bore over empty space, adding a sacrificial bridge, and making the overhang 45°. Each of these work but have some trade-offs. The proposed solution is what [Angus] calls sequential overhangs. It involves bridging the sides of the open space in steps to create supporting edges onto which the bore perimeter can print. It starts with 2 or 3 bridging layers to create a rectangle the same width as the bore, and then a second set of bridges at 90° to turn the opening into a square. For smaller holes this should create enough of a support to start the bore perimeter, but for larger holes three sets of bridges at 60° offsets might be needed.

[Angus] does not claim to have invented the technique but states he borrowed the idea from parts printed by Prusa Research for their popular line of 3D printers. One of the comments on the [Maker’s Muse] video referenced a 2014 blog post by [nophead] showing the same approach. Regardless of the idea’s lineage, it’s a great addition to anyone’s 3D printing design toolbox.
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3D Model Subscriptions Are Coming, But Who’s Buying?

May 25, 2023 by 51 Comments

We’ve all been there before — you need some 3D printable design that you figure must be common enough that somebody has already designed it, so you point your browser to Thingiverse or Printables, and in a few minutes you’ve got STL in hand and are ready to slice and print. If the design worked for you, perhaps you’ll go back and post an image of your print and leave a word of thanks to the designer.

Afterwards, you’ll probably never give that person a second thought for the rest of your life. Within a day or two, there’s a good chance you won’t even remember their username. It’s why most of the model sharing sites will present you with a list of your recently downloaded models when you want to upload a picture of your print, otherwise there’s a good chance you wouldn’t be able to find the thing.

Now if you really liked the model, you might go as far as following the designer. But even then, there would likely be some extenuating circumstances. After all, even the most expertly designed widget is still just a widget, and the chances of that person creating another one that you’d also happen to need seems exceedingly slim. Most of the interactions on these model sharing sites are like two ships passing in the night; it so happened that you and the creator had similar enough needs that you could both use the same printable object, but there’s no telling if you’ll ever cross paths with them again.

Which is why the recent announcements, dropped just hours from each other, that both Thangs and Printables would be rolling out paid subscription services seems so odd. Both sites claim that not only is there a demand for a service that would allow users to pay designers monthly for their designs, but that existing services such as Patreon are unable to meet the unique challenges involved.

Both sites say they have the solution, and can help creators turn their passion for 3D design into a regular revenue stream — as long as they get their piece of the action, that is.

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Handheld PC Looks Great

May 22, 2023 by 13 Comments

[Bytewelder] fondly remembers the Palm III and Sharp HC-4500, so taking on the design of Decktility, a custom handheld cyberdeck , was a natural next step. The blog post goes into much detail about the design decisions and challenges throughout the project. The end result, though, looks great.

The device uses a Raspberry Pi CM4 and an IPS touchscreen. The bulk of the design work was to get the power system working. There is a custom FET board and an Arduino that manages charging and battery state.

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Hexed Home Assistant Monitors 3D Printers

May 20, 2023 by 6 Comments

You can babysit your 3D printer 100% of the time, or you can cross your fingers and hope it all works. Some monitor their printers using webcams, but [Simit] has a more stylish method of keeping tabs on six 3D printers.

The idea is to use a 3D printed hex LED display found online. Adding an ESP32 and Home Assistant allows remote control of the display. The printers use Klipper and can report their status using an API called Moonraker. Each hexagon shows the status of one printer. You can tell if the printer is online, paused, printing, or in other states based on the color and amount of LEDs lit. For example, a hex turns totally green when printing is complete.

Once you have a web API and some network-controlled LEDs, it is relatively straightforward to link it together with Home Automation. Of course, you could do it other ways, too, but if you already have Home Automation running for other reasons, why not?

We have seen other ways to do this, of course. If you need an easy monitor, the eyes have it. If you don’t use Klipper, OctoPrint can pull a similar stunt.

3D Printing Blueprints And Other Wall Art

May 19, 2023 by 3 Comments

Today if you want to reproduce a big schematic or a mechanical drawing, you just ask it to print or plot from the CAD model. But back in the day, you drew on big sheets at a drafting table. How do you make copies? Sure, there were a few large-format copiers, but they were expensive. A more common method was to use a heliographic copier which, often but not always, resulted in a blueprint — that is a blue page with white lines or vice versa. These days, you are more likely to see a blueprint as an artistic wall hanging, and since [Basement Creations] wanted some, he figured out how to make them with a 3D printer.

These prints aren’t really blueprints. They use the printer as a plotter and deposit white ink on a blue page. In the video below, he shows a number of ways to use a printer to create interesting wall art, even if you want it to be bigger than the print bed. Some of the wall art uses multiple 3D printed parts, and others use the printer as a plotter.

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