Parts

True Transparent Parts from a Desktop 3D Printer

December 11, 2018 by 13 Comments

We’re no strangers to seeing translucent 3D printed parts: if you print in a clear filament with thin enough walls you can sorta see through the resulting parts. It’s not perfect, but if you’re trying to make a lamp shade or decorative object, it’s good enough. You certainly couldn’t print anything practical like viewing windows or lenses, leaving “clear” 3D printing as more of a novelty than a practical process.

But after months of refining his process, [Tomer Glick] has finally put together his guide for creating transparent prints on a standard desktop FDM machine. It doesn’t even require any special filament, he says it will work on PLA, ABS, or PETG, though for the purposes of this demonstration he’s using the new Prusament ABS. The process requires some specific print settings and some post processing, but the results he’s achieved are well worth jumping though a few hoops.

According to [Tomer] the secret is in the print settings. Essentially, you want the printer to push the layers together far closer than normal, in combination with using a high hotend temperature and 100% infill. The end result (hopefully) is the plastic being laid down by the printer is completely fused with the preceding one, making a print that is more of a literal solid object than we’re used to seeing with FDM printing. In fact, you could argue these settings generate internal structures that are nearly the polar opposite of what you’d see on a normal print.

The downside with these unusual print settings is that the outside of the print is exceptionally rough and ugly (as you might expect when forcing as much plastic together as possible). To expose the clear internals, you’ll need to knock the outsides down with some fairly intense sanding. [Tomer] says he starts with 600 and works his way up to 4000, and even mentions that when you get up to the real high grits you might as well use a piece of cardboard to sand the print because that’s about how rough the sandpaper would be anyway.

[Tomer] goes on to demonstrate a printed laser lens, and even shows how you can recreate the effect of laser-engraved acrylic by intentionally putting voids inside the print in whatever shape you like. It’s a really awesome effect and honestly something we would never have believed came off a standard desktop 3D printer.

In the past we’ve seen specialized filament deliver some fairly translucent parts, but those results still weren’t as good as what [Tomer] is getting with standard filament. We’re very interested in seeing more of this process, and are excited to see what kind of applications hackers can come up with.

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Laptop Chargers Team Up To Get The Juice Flowing

December 10, 2018 by 32 Comments

There’s perhaps nothing harder to throw away than a good power supply. Whether it’s the classic “wall wart” whose mate has long since been misplaced or a beefy ATX you pulled out of a trashed computer, it always seems like there should be something you could do with these little wonders of modern power conversion. So into the parts bin it goes, where it will stay evermore. But not for the [TheRainHarvester], who figured out that the secret to putting a drawer full of old laptop chargers to use was combing them like hacker Voltron.

Using three old IBM laptop chargers, he’s able to produce up to 48 volts DC at a healthy 4.5 amps. His cobbled together power supply even features an variable output, albeit with some mighty coarse adjustment. As each charger is individually rated for 16V, he can unplug one of the adapters to get 32V.

In the video after the break [TheRainHarvester] walks viewers through the construction of his simple adapter, which could easily be made with salvaged parts. Built on a trace-free piece of fiber board, the adapter consists of the three barrel jacks for the chargers and a trio of beefy Schottky diodes.

The nature of the barrel jacks (which short a pin once the plug is removed) along with the diodes allows [TheRainHarvester] to combine the output of the three adapters in series without running the risk of damaging them if for example one is left plugged into the adapter but not the wall. He’s also looking to add some status LEDs to show which chargers are powered on.

Unfortunately, [TheRainHarvester] realized a bit too late that what he thought was an inert piece of board actually had a ground plane, so he’s going to have to come up with a new way to tie the whole thing together on the next version which he says is coming now that he knows the concept seems workable.

In the meantime, if you’re thinking of hacking something together with the wealth of old laptop chargers we know are kicking around the lab, you might want to take a look at our primer for understanding all those hieroglyphs on the back of the thing.

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A Hacked Solution For Non-Standard Audio Modules

November 19, 2018 by 22 Comments

When life hands you lemons, lemonade ends up being your drink of choice. When life hands you non-standard components, however, you’ve got little choice but to create your own standard to use them. Drinking lemonade in such a situation is left to your discretion.

The little audio record and playback modules [Fran Blanche] scored from eBay for a buck a piece are a good example. These widgets are chip-on-board devices that probably came from some toy manufacturer and can record and playback 20 seconds of audio with just a little external circuitry. [Fran] wants to record different clips on a bunch of these, and pictured using the card-edge connector provided to plug them the recording circuit. But the pad spacing didn’t fit any connector she could find, so she came up with her own. The module and a standard 0.1″ (2.54 mm) pitch header are both glued into a 3D-printed case, and the board is connected to the header by bonding wires. It makes a nice module that’s easily plugged in for recording, and as [Fran] points out, it’s pretty adorable to boot. Check it out in the video below.

Sure, the same thing could have been accomplished with a custom PCB breaking out the module’s pins to a standard card-edge connector. But [Fran] knows a thing or two about ordering PCBs, and our guess is she wanted to get this done with what was on hand rather than wait for weeks. There’s something to be said for semi-instant gratification, after all. And lemonade.

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A 3D Printed Kinematic Camera Mount

November 19, 2018 by 14 Comments

[Enginoor] is on a quest. He wants to get into the world of 3D printing, but isn’t content to run off little toys and trinkets. If he’s going to print something, he wants it to be something practical and ideally be something he couldn’t have made quickly and easily with more traditional methods. Accordingly, he’s come out the gate with a fairly strong showing: a magnetic Maxwell kinematic coupling camera mount.

If you only recognized some of those terms, don’t feel bad. Named for its creator James Clerk Maxwell who came up with the design in 1871, the Maxwell kinematic coupling is self-orienting connection that lends itself to applications that need a positive connection while still being quick and easy to remove. Certainly that sounds like a good way to stick a camera on a tripod to us.

But the Maxwell design, which consists of three groves and matching hemispheres, is only half of the equation. It allows [enginoor] to accurately and repeatably line the camera up, but it doesn’t have any holding power of its own. That’s where the magnets come in. By designing pockets into both parts, he was able to install strong magnets in the mating faces. This gives the mount a satisfying “snap” when attaching that he trusts it enough to hold his Canon EOS 70D and lens.

[enginoor] says he could have made the holes a bit tighter for the magnets (thereby skipping the glue he’s using currently), but otherwise his first 3D printed design was a complete success. He sent this one off to Shapeways to be printed, but in the future he’s considering taking the reins himself if he can keep coming up with ideas worth committing to plastic.

Of course we’ve seen plenty of magnetic camera mounts in the past, but we really like the self-aligning aspect of this design. It definitely seems to fit the criterion for something that would otherwise have been difficult to fabricate if not for 3D printing.

Many Ways to Drive a Small Motor

November 19, 2018 by 17 Comments

Tiny motors used for haptic feedback and vibration come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The most familiar is the “eccentric rotating mass” (ERM) variety which just spins an imbalanced weight on a small motor and comes packaged in two form factors. The classic is the pager “pager motor” which just looks like a tiny, adorable motor and the squat cylindrical “pancake style”. ERMs are simple to use but provide imprecise response when compared to their new-age cousin the “linear resonant actuator”. Unlike the motor in an ERM, LRAs are typically an enclosed mass on a spring placed near a coil which pushes the mass back and forth. The name LRA might not be familiar but Apple’s branded implementation, the Taptic Engine, might be a little more recognisable.

[Precision Microdrives] is a vendor of these sorts of devices who happens to have a pleasantly approachable set of application notes covering any conceivable related topic. A great place to start is this primer on ways to drive motors with constant voltage in a battery powered environment. It starts with the most simple option (a voltage divider, duh) and works through a few other options through using an LDO or controller.

If you’re thinking about adding haptics to a project and are wondering what kind of actuator to use (see: the top of this post) AB-028 is a great resource. It has a thorough discussion on the different options available and considerations for mounting location, PCB attachment, drive modes, and more. Digging around their site yields some other interesting documents too like this one on mounting to fabric and other flexible surfaces. Or this one on choosing PWM frequencies.

3D Print Springs With Hacked GCode

November 14, 2018 by 34 Comments

If you’ve used a desktop 3D printer in the past, you’re almost certainly done battle with “strings”. These are the wispy bits of filament that harden in the air, usually as the printer’s nozzle moves quickly between points in open air. Depending on the severity and the material you’re printing with, these stringy interlopers can range from being an unsightly annoyance to triggering a heartbreaking failed print. But where most see an annoying reality of pushing melted plastic around, [Adam Kumpf] of Makefast Workshop sees inspiration.

Noticing that the nozzle of their printer left strings behind, [Adam] wondered if it would be possible to induce these mid-air printing artifacts on demand. Even better, would it be possible to tame them into producing a useful object? As it turns out it is, and now we’ve got the web-based tool to prove it.

As [Adam] explains, you can’t just load up a 3D model of a spring in your normal slicer and expect your printer to churn out a useful object. The software will, as it’s designed to do, recognize the object can’t be printed without extensive support material. Now you could in theory go ahead and print such a spring, but good luck getting the support material out.

The trick is to throw away the traditional slicer entirely, as the layer-by-layer approach simply won’t work here. By manually creating GCode using carefully tuned parameters, [Adam] found it was possible to get the printer to extrude plastic at the precise rate at which the part cooling fan would instantly solidify it. Then it was just a matter of taking that concept and applying it to a slow spiral motion. The end result are functional, albeit not very strong, helical compression springs.

But you don’t have to take their word for it. This research has lead to the creation of an online tool that allows you to plug in the variables for your desired spring (pitch, radius, revolutions, etc), as well as details about your printer such as nozzle diameter and temperature. The result is a custom GCode that (hopefully) will produce the desired spring when loaded up on your printer. We’d love to hear if any readers manage to replicate the effect on their own printers, but we should mention fiddling with your printer’s GCode directly isn’t without its risks: from skipping steps to stripped filament to head crashes.

The results remind us somewhat of the 3D lattice printer we featured a couple of years back, but even that machine didn’t use standard FDM technology. It will be interesting to see what other applications could be found for this particular technique.

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Mini LEGO Technic Tank Patrols Your Desk Under ESP32 Control

November 1, 2018 by 9 Comments

We probably don’t have to tell the readers of Hackaday that LEGO isn’t just for kids; we’ve seen plenty of projects that live in an enclosure made of the multi-color bricks, and let’s not even get started on the Mindstorms builds we’ve seen over the years. But while LEGO (and especially the Technic product line) is fine for prototyping and putting together quick projects, the stock electronic components aren’t exactly top of the line. Which is why [Jason Kirsons] has been working on bridging the gap between LEGO and “real” parts.

His LEGO Technic tank is a perfect example of this principle. While the tank design itself is standard LEGO fare, he’s gone all in on the electronics. With an Adafruit Feather ESP32, custom motor controller board, and NEMA 8 steppers with 3D printed Technic adapters, this little tank has a lot more going on under the hood than you might expect. While this project is more a proof of concept than anything, the methods [Jason] demonstrates might be something to consider the next time you’re building with Billund’s best.

[Jason] chose the Feather ESP32 because of its small size, but you could get away with a generic board if you’re not trying to compress everything down into such a small footprint. Of course, if you go with another board you won’t be able to use the PCB he’s designed which attaches to the Feather and holds four Pololu DRV8835 motor drivers.

Easily the most broadly applicable element of this project is the work [Jason] has done designing adapter plates that let you use NEMA 8 motors with LEGO Technic parts. He’s put the adapters up on Thingiverse, for anyone looking for a drop-in solution to give their Technic creations a bit more oomph (technical term).

LEGO has a long history with hackers and makers. We’ve covered some absolutely incredible projects built with the famous construction set, and we don’t see any sign of it slowing down in the future.

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