Custom Prusa MK3 Fan Duct Gives Camera Perfect View

November 25, 2022 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

A growing trend is to mount a borescope “inspection camera” near a 3D printer’s nozzle to provide a unique up-close view of the action. Some argue that this perspective can provide valuable insight if you’re trying to fine tune your machine, but whether or not there’s a practical application for these sort of nozzle cams, certainly everyone can agree it makes for a pretty cool video.

[Caelestis Cosplay] recently decided to outfit his Prusa i3 MK3S+ with such a camera, and was kind enough to share the process in a write-up. The first step was to find a community-developed fan duct, which he then modified to hold the 7 mm camera module. Since the duct blows right on the printer’s nozzle, it provides an ideal vantage point.

The camera module included a few tiny SMD LEDs around the lens, but [Caelestis Cosplay] added holes to the fan duct to fit a pair of 3 mm white LEDs to really light things up. While modifying the printed parts took some effort, he says the hardest part of the whole build was salvaging a 5X lens from a handheld magnifier and filing it down so it would fit neatly over the camera. But judging by the sharp and bright demo video he’s provided, we’d say the extra effort was certainly worth it.

After covering how the camera rig was put together, [Caelestis Cosplay] then goes over how it was integrated into OctoPrint, including how the external LEDs are switched on and off. He’s running OctoPrint on a Raspberry Pi, though as we’ve covered recently, a small form factor desktop computer could just as easily run the show.

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Electroplated 3D Printed Sword: Shiny!

November 24, 2022 by Al Williams 13 Comments

We all want to 3D print metals, but the equipment to do that is still beyond most home workshops. However, [HEN3DRIK] takes resin 3D-printed items and electroplates them. Might not be as good as printing in metal, but it sure looks metallic. As you can see in the video below, the sword looks like it was crafted from highly-polished steel.

The sword comes out in four pieces. He repeats several times that sanding is the key because you must have flat surfaces. Using sandpaper and steel wool, he worked the parts to a fine finish. The parts assemble along an M8 threaded rod to form a whole. The next step was to electroplate with copper.

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IRL minesweeper render showing game on top of a campaign map

Meat-Space Minesweeper Game Hits The Mark

November 24, 2022 by Dave Walker 9 Comments

Hackers of a certain age will remember that before the Internet was available to distract us from our work, we had to find our own fun. Luckily, Windows was there to come to our aid, in the shape of “Minesweeper” – a classic of the age that involved figuring out/occasionally just guessing where a selection of mines had been hidden on a grid of squares via numerical clues to their proximity. For those missing such simple times, [Martin] has brought the game into physical space with his 3D-printed travel-game version.

A number of pre-determined game fields can be inserted (by a friend… or enemy, we presume!) and covered by tiles, which the mine-clearing player can then remove with their plastic shovel to reveal the clues. The aim of the game is to avoid uncovering a bomb, and to place flags where the bombs are hiding.

Aficionados of the game may remember that a little guessing was often inevitable, which sometimes ended in disaster. On the computer version, this merely entailed clicking the Smiley Face button for a new game, but in this case would require a new sheet to be inserted. Blank sheet templates are included for producing your own fiendish bomb-sites, and all the pieces pack away neatly into a handy clam-shell design that would be ideal for long car journeys when the data package on the kids’ tablets has run out.

We wonder what other classic games may lend themselves to a travel remake and look forward to the first 3D-printed travel set of Doom with anticipation!

If you’re above solving your own Minesweeper games, then you can learn how to write a solver in Java here. Continue reading “Meat-Space Minesweeper Game Hits The Mark” →

A 3D printed cat treat dispenser on a table with a laptop in the background and with a treat in it's tray and a cat on the left about to eat the treat.

Local IOT Cat Treat Dispenser

November 22, 2022 by Abe Connelly 9 Comments

[MostElectronics], like many of us, loves cats, and so wanted to make an internet connected treat dispenser for their most beloved. The result is an ingenious 3D printed mechanism connected to a Raspberry Pi that’s able to serve treats through a locally run web application.

From the software side, the Raspberry Pi uses a RESTful API that one can connect to through a static IP. The API is implemented as a Python Flask application running under a stand alone web server Python script. The web application itself keeps track of the number of treats left and provides a simple interface to dispense treats at the operators leisure. The RpiMotorLib Python library is used to control a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor through its ULN2003 controller module, which is used to rotate the inside shaft of the treat dispenser.

The mechanism to dispense treats is a stacked, compartmentalized drum, with two drum layers for food compartments that turn to drop treats. The bottom drum dispenses treats through a chute connected to the tray for the cat, leaving an empty compartment that the top drum can replenish by dropping its treats into through a staggered opening. Each compartmentalized treat drum layer provides 11 treats, allowing for a total of 22 treats with two layers stacked on top of each other. One could imagine extending the treat dispenser to include more drum layers by adding even more layers.

Source code is available on GitHub and the STL files for the dispenser are available on Thingiverse. We’ve seen cat electronic feeders before, sometimes with escalating consequences that shake us to our core and leave us questioning our superiority.

Video after the break!

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Move Aside Planar, I’m Slicing My Cone Way

November 21, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 12 Comments

Fleetwood Mac puns aside, very little has changed about how we “slice” models for printers in the last 30 years. However, [Stefan Hermann] of CNC Kitchen has a demo that tries to change all that by slicing conically.

For the uninitiated in the dark arts of printing in the third dimension, the canonical definition of non-conical slicing has been to bisect the model at layer height intervals and generate the perimeter and the infill, then output that as g-code. This is easy to implement mathematically and works reasonably well, except when you have overhangs of more than about 60 degrees on most printers. The idea of slicing in a cone rather than a plane isn’t entirely novel as we previously covered RotBot, which offers a vertical axis of rotation and a print head at 45 degrees. What is extraordinary is that the technique [Stefan] walks you through is done with a stock printer without a complex 45-degree tilt and is a software modification rather than a hardware tweak.

[Stefan] references earlier work done by [Michael Wüthrich] of ZHAW School of Engineering, who wrote some scripts that apply the transformation. The slicer is SuperSlicer, a fork of the PrusaSlicer, which is itself a fork of slic3r. The modified g-code is exported and can be sent to a printer of your choice. He even has a link to a pre-sliced model to try it out.

Of course, different printers have different clearance levels, but the Prusa Mini he uses has 16 degrees of clearance with the sensor pushed up. The code is on GitHub. It’s fascinating to note how all these techniques and forks interact and build off each other. Whether tilted slices, conical slices, or something else ultimately becomes the de facto standard, we’re looking forward to more options for slicing.

Video after the break.

Continue reading “Move Aside Planar, I’m Slicing My Cone Way” →

New Part Day: Exotic Filament For RF Dielectric Structures

November 20, 2022 by Jenny List 10 Comments

The world of microwave RF design appears to the uninitiated to be full of unimaginably exotic devices, as engineers harness the laws of physics to tame radio signals to their will. Among the weapons in their arsenal are materials of known dielectric properties, from which can be made structures with the desired effects on RF that encounters them. This has traditionally been a difficult and expensive process, but it’s one now made much easier by the availability of 3D printer filaments with a range of known dielectric values.

It’s best to think of the structures which can be designed using these materials as analagous to Fresnel lenses we’re all used to in the light domain. The example piece given by Microwave Journal is a metasurface for use in a steerable antenna, something that would be a much more difficult piece of work by more traditional means.

Normally when we inform you of a new special filament we’d expect it to be more costly than standard PLA, but this filament is in a class of its own at 275 euros per kilogram. So the interest for most readers will probably be more in the technology than the expectation of use, but even then we can see that there will still be microwave experimenters in our range who might be tempted by its unique properties. We look forward to what is developed using it.

Via Microwave Journal. Thanks to [Eric Mockler] for the tip!

Brainstorming

November 19, 2022 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

One of the best things about hanging out with other hackers is the freewheeling brainstorming sessions that tend to occur. Case in point: I was at the Electronica trade fair and ended up hanging out with [Stephen Hawes] and [Lucian Chapar], two of the folks behind the LumenPnP open-source pick and place machine that we’ve covered a fair number of times in the past.

Among many cool features, it has a camera mounted on the parts-moving head to find the fiducial markings on the PCB. But of course, this mean a camera mounted to an almost general purpose two-axis gantry, and that sent the geeks’ minds spinning. [Stephen] was talking about how easy it would be to turn into a photo-stitching macrophotography rig, which could yield amazingly high resolution photos.

Meanwhile [Lucian] and I were thinking about how similar this gantry was to a 3D printer, and [Lucian] asked why 3D printers don’t come with cameras mounted on the hot ends. He’d even shopped this idea around at the East Coast Reprap Festival and gotten some people excited about it.

So here’s the idea: computer vision near extruder gives you real-time process control. You could use it to home the nozzle in Z. You could use it to tell when the filament has run out, or the steppers have skipped steps. If you had it really refined, you could use it to compensate other printing defects. In short, it would be a simple hardware addition that would open up a universe of computer-vision software improvements, and best of all, it’s easy enough for the home gamer to do – you’d probably only need a 3D printer.

Now I’ve shared the brainstorm with you. Hope it inspires some DIY 3DP innovation, or at least encourages you to brainstorm along below.