E3D On Patents And Not Being Evil About Them

September 27, 2021 by Jenny List 24 Comments

In our community it’s certain that there will be many people with very strong views about patents. It’s fair to say that the patents system is at times not fit for purpose, with such phenomena as patent trolls, submarine patents, and patent war chests doing nothing but leading it into disrepute. So it’s interesting to read the words of 3D printer hotend manufacturer E3D, as they talk about why they feel the need to patent some of their inventions, and how they intend to proceed with them.

The result is a no-nonsense explanation of why their work being reproduced by overseas competitors has brought them to this point, and in short: they’re patenting very specific inventions rather than broad catch-alls, they are making what they call a legally binding promise not to enforce the patents against non-commercial or academic experimenters, and they will continue to open-source as much as they can.

Will it work for them, or is it the start of a slippery slope? We can see why the E3D folks have taken this step, and we hope that they will continue to act in a responsible manner. If not, as those who have followed the maker-oriented 3D printing business for a long time will know: treading the line between open-source and closed-source can be fraught with danger.

DuoLux Is A Stylish Lamp And You Should Definitely Print Your Own

September 27, 2021 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Lamps are interesting pieces of homeware. They can be purely functional, but often they become expressions of the true vibrancy of industrial design. The “DuoLux” from [seabirdhh] may not yet have graced the cover of prestigious European design journals, but this folding lamp does have some great style for a 3D-printed design.

The lenses themselves are cut from scrap polycarbonate twin-wall sheet with a linear pattern which does much to add some art-deco flair. They’re placed inside a pair of 3D-printed tubes mounted on a zig-zag arm, with the tubes themselves carrying G4 lamp sockets for use with compact plug-in LED modules. 3D-printed knurled knobs allow the easy adjustment and aiming of the lamp as required. Power is from a 12 V DC adapter as you might expect, and everything is mounted upon a simple round base.

It’s a tidy build, and one that could be improved further by adding a weighted base for more flexibility in aiming the lights. It’s something we’d love to have on our own desk given the clean geometric style and presumably great light output from the LEDs. Alternatively, consider modelling your lamp on Earth’s very own moon itself!

How Good Are The Head(amame) 3D Printed Headphones?

September 27, 2021 by Lewin Day 25 Comments

3D printing lets the average maker tackle building anything their heart desires, really, and many have taken to using the technology for audio projects. Printable speaker and headphone designs abound. The Head(amame) headphones from [Vector Finesse] are a design that combines 3D printed parts with hi-fi grade components to create a high-end listening experience. [Angus] of Maker’s Muse decided to try printing a set at home and has shared his thoughts on the hardware.

Printing the parts has to be done carefully, with things like the infill settings crucial to the eventual sound quality of the final product. Using a properly equipped slicer like CURA is key to getting the parts printed properly so the finer settings can be appropriately controlled. The recommendation is to print the pieces in PETG, which [Angus] notes can be difficult to work with, and several prints were required to get all the parts made correctly.

Assembly is straightforward enough with kits available with all the fasteners and electronic parts included. Subjectively, [Angus] found the sound quality to be impressive, with plenty of full bass and clearly defined highs. Overall, it’s a positive review in the areas of comfort and sound quality.

Detractors will note that the kit of parts costs over $100 USD alone, and that after hours of work and printing, the user is left with a set of headphones made out of obviously 3D-printed parts. It seems destined to be a product aimed at the 3D printing fanbase. If you want a set of headphones you can customise endlessly in form and color, these are ideal. If you prefer the fit and finish of a consumer-grade product, they may not be for you.

It’s a good look at a design sure to appeal to a wide set of makers out there. We’ve seen 3D printing put to good use in this realm before, too. Video after the break.

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Columbia Decides 3D Printed Food Tastes Like Chicken

September 26, 2021 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Researchers at Columbia have used multi-wavelength lasers to cook 3D-printed chicken. Apparently, it tastes like chicken. We were not overly surprised that 3D printed chicken protein cooked up to taste like chicken, but, then again, you have to do the science.

While additive manufacturing is the latest buzzword for all kinds of manufacturing, there’s also been a variety of attempts to 3D print food. We’ve seen pizza printers and fake steak printers, too. It makes sense that you don’t want to print raw food — the finished product needs to be cooked. You can see several videos about the process, below.

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3D Printed Sensor Detects Glyphosate

September 22, 2021 by Al Williams 14 Comments

Typically, detecting glyphosate — a herbicide — in a beverage requires a sophisticated test setup. But Washington State University has a 3D printed sensor that uses nanotubes to simplify the detection of the toxin.

The idea is very similar to inexpensive blood glucose monitors. The test will eventually find use for human samples, but the initial testing was for detecting contamination in orange juice.

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Up Close And Personal With An Unusual 3D Printer Kit

September 21, 2021 by Tom Nardi 28 Comments

While there are still plenty of folks out there tinkering with custom 3D printers, it’s safe to say that most people these days are using a commercially-available machine. The prices are just so low now, even on the resin printers, that unless you have some application that requires exacting specifications, it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to fiddle around with a homebrew machine.

As it so happens, [Nicolas Tranchant] actually does have such an application. He needs ultra-high resolution 3D prints for his jewelry company, but even expensive printers designed for doing dental work weren’t giving him the results he was looking for. Rather than spend five-figures on a machine that may or may not get the job done, he decided to check out what was available in kit form. That’s when he found the work of [Frédéric Lautré].

He purchased the unique “Top-Down” SLA kit from him back in 2017, and now after four years of working with the machine, [Nicolas] decided he would share his experiences with the rest of the class. The basic idea with this printer is that the light source is above the resin vat, rather than below. So instead of the print bed being pulled farther away from the resin on each new layer, it actually sinks deeper into it.

Compared to the “Bottom-Up” style of resin printers that are more common for hobbyists, this approach does away with the need for a non-stick layer of film at the bottom of the tank. Printing is therefore made faster and more reliable, as the part doesn’t need to be peeled off the film for each new layer.

[Nicolas] goes into quite a bit of detail about building and using the $700 USD kit, including the occasional modifications he made. It sounds like the kit later went through a few revisions, but the core concepts are largely the same. It’s worth noting that the kit did not come with the actual projector though, so in his case the total cost was closer to $1,400. We were also surprised to see that [Frédéric] apparently developed the software for this printer himself, so the tips on how to wrangle its unfamiliar interface for slicing and support generation may be particularly helpful.

Unfortunately, it sounds like [Frédéric] has dropped off the radar. The website for the kit is gone, and [Nicolas] has been unable to get in touch with him. Which is a shame, as this looks to be a fascinating project. Perhaps the Hackaday community can help track down this mysterious SLA maestro?

Silky Smooth Resin Printer Timelapses Thanks To Machine Vision

September 18, 2021 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

The fascination of watching a 3D printer go through its paces does tend to wear off after you spent a few hours doing it, in which case those cool time-lapse videos come in handy. Trouble is they tend to look choppy and unpleasant unless the exposures are synchronized to the motion of the gantry. That’s easy enough to do on FDM printers, but resin printers are another thing altogether.

Or are they? [Alex] found a way to make gorgeous time-lapse videos of resin printers that have to be seen to be believed. The advantage of his method is that it’ll work with any camera and requires no hardware other than a little LED throwie attached to the build platform of the printer. The LED acts as a fiducial that OpenCV can easily find in each frame, one that indicates the Z-axis position of the stage when the photo was taken. A Python program then sorts the frames, so it looks like the resin print is being pulled out of the vat in one smooth pull.

To smooth things out further, [Alex] also used frame interpolation to fill in the gaps where the build platform appears to jump between frames using real-time intermediate flow estimation, or RIFE. The details of that technique alone were worth the price of admission, and the results are spectacular. Alex kindly provides his code if you want to give this a whack; it’s almost worth buying a resin printer just to try.

Is there a resin printer in your future? If so, you might want to look over [Donald Papp]’s guide to the pros and cons of SLA compared to FDM printers.

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