3d Printer hacks

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New Part Day: Exotic Filament For RF Dielectric Structures

November 20, 2022 by 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!

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

Brainstorming

November 19, 2022 by 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.

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Madness Or Genius? FDM Printing With Resin

November 17, 2022 by 29 Comments

We aren’t sure what made him think of it, but [Proper Printing] decided to make an FDM printer lay down resin instead of filament. Why? We still aren’t sure, but we admire the effort nonetheless. In principle, extruding resin shouldn’t be much different than other liquid things you print like icing or concrete. Then you’d need to UV-cure the viscous liquid quickly. In fact, they wound up making up a paste-like resin using several chemicals and a filler.

Armed with the paste, it would seem like the big obstacles would be over. Instead of part cooling fans, the printer now has two laser heads focused on the print area. Printing in vase mode avoids some problems, but the first few attempts were not very successful.

With a bit of perseverance, the setup did work — for a while. More fine tuning got acceptable results. However, he eventually changed the filler material and got a passable Benchy to print. Nothing to be proud of, but recognizable. Honestly, we were surprised that the laser’s didn’t cure the material still inside the nozzle and cause terrible clogs.

Why put this much effort into doing this? We have no idea. Should you try it? Probably not. Of course, being able to print a paste has its own value. Perhaps delivering glue or solder paste, for example. But you generally won’t need to make tall prints with that kind of material. Then again, we’ve never been opposed to doing something “just because.”

After all, why make a musical instrument out of a Game Boy? Why make a modem with tin cans? You might as well extrude resin.

Continue reading “Madness Or Genius? FDM Printing With Resin” →

Better Sheet Metal Parts With Chemistry

November 16, 2022 by 7 Comments

[Applied Science] wanted to make some metal parts with a lot of holes. A service provider charged high tooling costs, so he decided to create his own parts using photochemical machining. The process is a lot like creating PC boards, but, of course, there are some differences. You can see the video of the results, below.

Some of the parts could be made in different ways like water jet cutting or even stamping. However, some things — like custom screens — are only really feasible to do with a chemical process like this.

Continue reading “Better Sheet Metal Parts With Chemistry” →

3D Printer Z Sensor Claims 0.01 Mm Resolution

November 14, 2022 by 54 Comments

Early 3D printers usually had a microswitch that let you know when the Z axis was at the zero point. There was usually an adjustment screw so you could tune for just the right layer height. But these days, you most often see some sort of sensor. There are inductive sensors that work with a metal bed and a few other styles, as well. However, the most common is the “BL touch” style sensor that drops a probe below the nozzle level, measures, and then retracts the probe. However, nearly all of these sensors work by detecting a certain height over the bed and that’s it.

A new probe called BDsensor is inductive but can read the height over the bed in real time. According to information from the developer, it achieves a resolution of 0.01 mm and a repeatability of +/- 0.005mm. We don’t know if that’s true or not, but being able to take real-time soundings of the nozzle height leads to some interesting possibilities such as real-time adjustments of Z height, as seen in the video below.

Continue reading “3D Printer Z Sensor Claims 0.01 Mm Resolution” →

3D Printer Repurposed For Light-Duty Lab Automation Tasks

November 11, 2022 by 3 Comments

Laboratory automation equipment is expensive stuff, to such a degree that small labs are often priced out of the market. That’s a shame, because there are a lot of tedious manual tasks that even modest labs would benefit from automating. Oh well — that’s what grad students are for.

But it actually isn’t that hard to bring a little automation to the lab, if you follow the lead of [Marco], [Chinna], and [Vittorio] and turn a 3D printer into a simple lab robot. That’s what HistoEnder is — a bog-standard Creality Ender 3 with a couple of special modifications that turn it into a tool for automating histology slide preparation. Histology is the study of the anatomy of tissues and uses various fixing and staining techniques to make microscopic features visible. In practice, this means moving baskets of glass slides back and forth between jars of different solutions, a job that’s perfect for a simple Cartesian gantry lab robot with a small work envelope and light loads.

None of the printer modifications are permanent; the 3D printed accessories — a hook for the slide basket and a carrier for standard histology staining jars — can quickly come off the printer to return it to its regular duty. All it takes to run HistoEnder is a bit of custom G-code and some careful alignment of the jar carrier on the print bed. We suppose the bed heater could even be used to warm up the fixing and staining solutions. There’s a brief video of HistoEnder in action embedded in the tweet below.

This isn’t the first time this team has repurposed technology for the lab — remember the fitness band that was turned into an optical densitometer?

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Oh Snap! 3D Printing Snapping Parts Without Breakage

November 11, 2022 by 22 Comments

One of the great things about plastic is that it can be relatively flexible. We see things all the time that snap together, but when 3D printing, you don’t often run into snap fit designs. [Engineers Grow] has a video to help you design snap fittings that don’t break.

In the first video that you can see below, he covers three parameters that can help. The first is the length of the snap element. Secondly, the undercut size can be reduced. You can also try making the snap; as thin as possible, although in the example he went too thin and wound up breaking the snap anyway.

The final suggestion, covered in detail in the second video below, is to change the material you use. The key parameter is known as elongation at break. For PLA the typical value for this is 8%. ABS is 10%, PETG is 24% and Nylon is 100%. Simplistically, you could assume that a PETG piece could deform up to 25% before breaking. That may be true, but it will permanently deform long before that. The video suggests using 10 or 15% of the value to assure the part doesn’t lose its shape.

In the third video, you’ll learn, too, that print orientation counts. Making the hooks grow off the build plate leads to a weak hook as you might expect.

We’ve looked at the mechanics behind these before. You can find a lot of detailed technical data about joints, too.

Continue reading “Oh Snap! 3D Printing Snapping Parts Without Breakage” →