Welcome To Ziptie City

August 5, 2022 by Elliot Williams 36 Comments

Gravity, magnetism, the weak and strong nuclear forces; sure they hold a lot of stuff together. But the other binding force of nature that demands your utmost respect? Zip ties.

Or at least that’s [Alan Reiner]’s take on the combination of cable ties and 3D printing. (Video, embedded below.) So he’s designed a demo model, Zip Tie City, that goes through a number of the possibilities that designing in zip-tie channels offer.

He then designs a multi-output battery box with a ton of zip tie holds that keep wiring in check and hold modules and batteries where they belong. (And releases some magic smoke, but even zip ties can’t keep that stuff inside.)

We love zip ties for those situations where screws are overkill or a simple solution is sufficient. Designing channels for zip ties is a pure win, and makes use of the unique advantage of 3D printing; these would be horrible to try to subtractively machine into a part.

Zip ties aren’t the only game in town, though. If you need a glue, our own [Tom Nardi] went through his local hardware store and tested out the options in this must-read classic piece.

Thanks for the tip to [Keith Olson], who wants you to check out Zip Tie Guy (video) while you’re in the mood.

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Adding Perlin Noise To 3D Printed Parts, With Python

July 31, 2022 by Donald Papp 16 Comments

Want to add a bit of visual flair to 3D printed parts that goes maybe a little more than skin-deep? That’s exactly what [volzo] was after, which led him to create a Python script capable of generating a chunk of Perlin noise, rendered as an STL file. What does that look like? An unpredictably-random landscape of hills and valleys.

The script can give printed parts a more appealing finish.

The idea is to modify a 3D model with the results of the script, leaving one with something a bit more interesting than a boring, flat surface. [volzo] explains how to use OpenSCAD to do exactly that, but it’s also possible to import the STL file the script creates into the CAD program of one’s choice and make the modifications there with some boolean operations.

If the effect looks a bit bit familiar, it’s likely because he used the method to design part of the 3D printed “toy” camera that we featured recently.

[volzo]’s method isn’t entirely plug and play, but it could still be a handy thing to keep in your back pocket when designing your next part. There are also other ways to modify the surfaces of prints for better aesthetics; we’ve previously covered velocity painting (also known as ‘tattooing’ in some slicers) and also fuzzy skin.

Perlin noise was created by [Ken Perlin] in the early 80s while working on the original Tron movie as a way to help generate more realistic-looking textures. It still fulfills that artistic function in a variety of ways, even today.

Upgraded Film Scanner Handles Bigger Formats At No Cost

July 30, 2022 by Donald Papp 2 Comments

Film scanners are a useful tool for digitizing slides and negatives, and the Plustek 8100 that [Christian Chapman] had was capable, but limited to small format film only. Rather than pay for a much more expensive medium format scanner that could handle 120 film, he modified his 8100 to accomplish the same thing with a combination of good old software and hardware tampering.

On the software side, [Christian] modified a driver for the Plustek 8100 so that it sweeps the scan head further than usual. At the application level, to scan medium format frames, it does a total of four scans: one for each quadrant. The results get stitched together in software with a thoughtfully-designed shell script that provides previews and handles failures and restarts gracefully.

Hardware-wise, the scanning carriage needs modification to ensure nothing interferes with the scan head as it moves further than originally designed. Some CAD and 3D printing made short work of this. Incidentally, this hardware mod is an excellent demonstration of one of the core strengths of 3D printing: the ability to make geometrically-straightforward objects that would nevertheless be troublesome or impractical to construct in any other way.

Go Big Or Go Home: 0.6 Mm Nozzles Are The Future

July 29, 2022 by Al Williams 51 Comments

Most desktop fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printers these days use a 0.4 mm nozzle. While many people have tried smaller nozzles to get finer detail and much larger nozzles to get faster printing speed, most people stick with the stock value as a good trade-off between the two. That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. However, [Thomas Sanladerer] asserts that with modern slicers, the 0.4 mm nozzle isn’t the best choice and recommends you move up to 0.6 mm.

If you know [Thomas], you know he wouldn’t make a claim like that without doing his homework. He backs it up with testing, and you can see his thoughts on the subject and the test results in the video below. The entire thing hinges on the Ultimaker-developed Arachne perimeter generator that’s currently available in the alpha version of PrusaSlicer.

We’ve experimented with nozzles as small as 0.1 mm and, honestly, it still looks like an FDM 3D print and printing takes forever at that size. But these days, if we really care about the detail we are probably going to print with resin, anyway.

There are a few slicer settings to consider and you can see the whole setup in the video. The part where an SLA test part is printed with both nozzles is particularly telling. This is something that probably shouldn’t print well with an FDM at all. Both nozzles had problems but in different areas.

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Large Format 3D Printer Is A Serious Engineering Challenge

July 27, 2022 by Danie Conradie 14 Comments

When you want to build a large format 3D printer, you can’t just scale up the design of a desktop machine. In an excellent four-part build series (videos after the break), [Dr. D-Flo] takes us through all the engineering challenges he had to contend with when building a 3D printer with a 4x4x4 ft (1.2 m cube) print volume.

For such a large print volume you won’t be printing with a 0.4 mm nozzle. The heart of the printer is a commercial Massive Dimension MDPH2 pellet extruder, capable of extruding ~1 kg of plastic per hour through 1.5 mm to 5 mm nozzles. To feed the extruder, [Dr. D-Flo] used a Venturi vacuum system to periodically suck pellets from a large hopper. The system is driven by compressed air, which can introduce moisture back into the carefully dried pellets. To reduce the humidity levels, the compressed air passes through a series of vertical aluminum tubes to allow moisture to condense and drain out the bottom.

At 8.4 kg, it needs a powerful motion platform to move it. [Dr. D-Flo] went with a stationary bed design, with the extruder pushed around by seven high torque NEMA23 motors on a large gantry built from C-beam aluminum extrusions. A machine this size needs to be very rigid with well-fitting parts, so [Dr. D-Flo] made heavy use of CNC machined aluminum parts.

To allow dynamic bed leveling, [Dr. D-Flow] made use of a Quad Gantry Leveling (GQL) scheme. This means that each of the four Z-actuators will dynamically adjust its position based on inputs from the leveling probe. The avoid stressing the corner mountings that hold the X-Y gantry to the Z carriage plates, he used radial spherical bearings at the mounting points to allow a few degrees of play.

The build plate consists of an aluminum plate bolted onto the base in 25 positions with springs for adjustability. A massive 6000 watt 220 V heating pad sticks to the bottom, while the actual printing surface is a large sheet of borosilicate glass. One major concern was the deflection of the build plate when heated to working temperature, but with all the adjustment options [Dr. D-Flo] was able to get height variation down to about 0.25 mm. This is within the acceptable range when printing with layer heights of 1 mm or more.

We’ve featured large scale 3D printers in the past, but none are quite as big the University of Maine’s building-sized 3D printer that can print a motorboat in one piece.

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A New Way To Produce PCBs With Your 3D Printer

July 26, 2022 by Tom Nardi 49 Comments

With the low-cost PCB fabrication services available to hackers and makers these days, we’ll admit that making your own boards at home doesn’t hold quite the appeal that it did in the past. But even if getting your boards professionally made is cheaper and easier than it ever has been before, at-home production still can’t be beat when you absolutely must have a usable board before the end of the day.

If you find yourself in such a situation, this new method of DIY PCB production detailed by [Adalbert] might be just what you need. This unique approach uses a desktop fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer throughout all of its phases, from creating a stencil based on the exported board design, to warming the UV soldermask to accelerate the curing process. It may not be an ideal choice for densely packed boards with fine-pitch components, but could definitely see it being useful for many prototypes.

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Custom Raspberry Pi Case Shows The Whole Workflow

July 25, 2022 by Donald Papp 29 Comments

If you are a process junkie and love seeing the end-to-end of how a thing is made and with what tools, then watch [Michael Klements] show off his Raspberry Pi case design. His case has quite a few cool-looking elements to it, and incorporates 3D printing as well as laser-cut and clear bent acrylic for a gorgeous three-quarter view.

[Michael]’s write-up (and accompanying video, embedded below) are partly a review of his Creality 3D printer, and partly a showcase of his Raspberry Pi case design (for which he sells the design files for a small fee on his Etsy store.) But the great part is seeing the creation of every piece that goes into the end product. Not everyone is familiar with the way these tools work, or what they can create, so it’s nice to see attention paid to that side of things.

Both the blog post and the video nicely show off what goes into every part. The video opens with unpacking and setting up the 3D printer (skip ahead to 4:58 if you aren’t interested), followed by printing the parts, laser-cutting the acrylic on a K40 laser cutter, bending the acrylic using a small hand tool, and finally, assembling everything. For the curious, there are also links to the exact parts and equipment he uses.

Like we said, it’s part 3D printer review and part showcase of a design he sells, but it’s great to see each of the parts get created, watch the tools get used, and see the results come together in the final product. And should you wish to go in the opposite direction? A one-piece minimalist case for your Raspberry Pi is only a 3D printer away.

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