3d print

100 Articles

3D-Printed Boat Feeds The Fishes

December 16, 2024 by No comments

In most natural environments, fish are able to feed themselves. However, if you wanted to help them out with some extra food, you could always build a 3D-printed boat to do the job for you, as [gokux] did.

The concept is simple enough—it’s a small radio-controlled boat that gets around the water with the aid of two paddle wheels. Driven together, the paddle wheels provide thrust, and driven in opposite directions, they provide steering. A SeeedStudio XIAO ESP32 is the brains of the operation. It listens into commands from the controller and runs the paddle drive motors with the aid of a DRV8833 motor driver module. The custom radio controller is it itself running on another ESP32, and [gokux] built it with a nice industrial style joystick which looks very satisfying to use. The two ESP32s use their onboard wireless hardware to communicate, which keeps things nicely integrated. The boat is able to putter around on the water’s surface, while using a servo-driven to deliver small doses of food when desired.

It’s a neat build, and shows just what you can whip up when you put your 3D printer to good use. If you’d like to build a bigger plastic watercraft, though, you can do that too. Video after the break.

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An homemade automated air freshener dispenser

GPS Enabled Pumpkin Spice Sprayer Knows When It’s PSL Season

November 29, 2024 by 8 Comments

Pumpkin spice, also known as allspice with better marketing, has found its way into a seemingly endless amount of products over the years. It goes beyond the obvious foodstuffs of pies and cakes; because there are plenty of candles, deodorants, and air fresheners ready to add a little more spice to your world. One such autumnal smell enthusiast, YouTube user [J-Knows], sought to automate the delivery mechanism with his 3D printed pumpkin spice aerosol sprayer.

The sprayer device uses an Arduino to rotate a small 3D printed arm that depresses the button on an air freshener cap. This design came as a result of multiple attempts to create a clip that would securely attach to a standard canister. When problems arose with the clip slipping out of place after the motor rotated, a pinch of sticky tack ended up being just the solution. With the proper amount of adhesion, the automated sprayer could now “pollute” any space it is in, as [J-Knows] described.

What took this project to another level is the addition of an Adafruit GPS module. It was coded to respond when it was within one mile of a Starbucks — arguably the organization responsible for the pumpkin spice craze. For some the company’s pumpkin spice latte (PSL) is synonymous with all things fall, and marks the beginning of the season when it is brought back to the coffee menu. Though not being a regular coffee drinker himself, [J-Knows] fully committed to the bit by taking his creation on a test trip to his local Starbucks for a PSL. Judging by the amount of pumpkin spice aerosol solution that ended up on his car dash, he is going to be smelling it into the next year.

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Print Your Own Magnetic Connector

July 27, 2024 by 22 Comments

If you have a late-model laptop, you’ve probably seen how the chargers magnetically snap into place. In theory, this should be easy to recreate for your own purposes. But why reinvent the wheel when [DarthKaker] has already done the work for you — assuming you only need two conductors.

The 3D-printed shells take the usual round magnets. Obviously, the north pole on one part should point to the south pole on the other part. In addition, if polarity matters, you should also have each housing contain one north-facing and one south-facing magnet so that the connectors will only mate one way.

It appears the project uses wires soldered or spot welded to the magnets. Heating magnets sometimes has bad effects, so we might try something different. For example, you could solder the wires to thin washers affixed to the magnets with epoxy, perhaps. Or use the magnets for alignment and make a different arrangement for the contacts, although that would take a different shell design.

We have talked about magnet soldering for connectors before. Don’t forget that you can build magnets into your prints, too.

Electromagnetic Actuator Mimics Muscle

July 26, 2024 by 11 Comments

Most electromagnetic actuators are rotating motors, or some variation on the theme, like servos. However, it’s possible to do linear actuation with electomagnetics, too. [Adrian Perez] demonstrates this with Linette, his design of a linear actuator that he was inspired to build by the structure of our own muscles.

The design uses a coil of copper wire in a 3D-printed plastic housing, surrounded by a claw full of strong magnets. When the coil is activated, the magnets are pulled towards the coil. When the coil is not energized, the magnets fall away. [Adrian] demonstrates the actuator under the control of an Arduino, which switches power to the coil to move it up and down.

He also notes that the design is similar solenoids and voice coil style actuators, though unlike most his uses discrete magnets rather than a single monolithic magnet. It’s possible to get more capacity out of the Linette design through stacking. You can parallelize the actuators to get more pulling force, with neighboring coils sharing the same magnets. Alternatively, you can stack them in series to get longer stroke lengths.

[Adrian] hasn’t put the design to a practical application yet, but we could see multiple uses for robotics or small machines. We’ve seen some other neat DIY magnetic actuators before, too. Video after the break.

A Teeny 3D-Printed Printing Press, Thanks Gutenberg

July 12, 2024 by 18 Comments

The printing press was first invented in 1440 AD by Johannes Gutenberg. It’s not so relevant to our day to day lives today, but it’s a technology that forever changed the path of human history. Now you can whip one up yourself using this teeny design from the [3DPrintingEnthusiast]!

Don’t expect to be making broadsheets with this thing—it’s a strictly table-top sized unit made on a 3D printer. Still, it does the job! The bed, frame, paper holder, and clamps are all 3D-printed. However, you will need some minor additional supplies to complete the carriage and inkballs.

As for your printing plates, you could go out and source some ancient lead type—or you could just 3D print some instead. The latter is probably easier if you’re living in 2024 like yours truly. Who knows, though. 2028 could be a banner year where printing presses roar back to prominence. Try not to think about the global scale disasters that would make that a reality.

In any case, there’s got to be some kind of irony about 3D-printing a printing press on a 3D printer? Perhaps, perhaps not. Debate it below!

3D Printing A Cassette Is Good Retro Fun

April 15, 2024 by 10 Comments

The cassette is one of the coolest music formats ever, in that you could chuck them about with abandon and they’d usually still work. [Chris Borge] recently decided to see if he could recreate these plastic audio packages himself, with great success.

He kicked off his project by printing some examples of an open source cassette model he found online. The model was nicely accurate to the original Compact Cassette design, but wasn’t exactly optimized for 3D printing. It required a great deal of support material and wasn’t easy to customize.

[Chris] ended up splitting the model into multiple components, which could then be assembled with glue later. He then set about customizing the cassette shells with Minecraft artwork. Details of the artwork are baked into the model at varying heights just 1/10th of the total layer height. This makes it easy to designate which sections should be printed with which filament during his multi-colored print. And yet, because the height difference is below a full layer height, the details all end up on the same layer to avoid any ugly gaps between the sections. From there, it’s a simple matter of transferring over the mechanical parts from an existing cassette tape to make the final thing work.

It’s a neat trick, and the final results are impressive. [Chris] was able to create multicolored cassettes that look great. It’s one of the better uses we’ve seen for a multi-colored printer. This would be an epic way to customize a mixtape for a friend!

We’ve seen some great 3D printed cassettes before, too, like these retro reel-to-reel lookalikes.

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The $16 PCB Robot

March 6, 2024 by 20 Comments

It is a fun project to build a simple robot but, often, the hardest part these days is creating the mechanical base. [Concrete Dog] has a new open source design for stoRPer that uses a PC board as the base. The board has a Raspberry Pi Pico and motor drivers. The modular design allows you to add to it easily and use custom wheels. The video below shows some treaded wheels and some mechanum wheels with gears.

There are mounting holes for sensors and also a way to put another deck above to hold other circuits, power, or whatever you like. There’s lots you could do with this as a starting point.

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