Add Conductive Traces On Vacuum Formed Plastic With 3D Printing

April 22, 2022 by Anne Ogborn 3 Comments

Surface conductors on vacuum formed parts appear in many hacks, from cosplay armor to 3D touch pads and smart objects. But making them has always been painful. Either they had to be hand painted after forming, which looked sloppy and was labor intensive, or they had to be printed with some difficult to use stretchable ink tech. [Freddie Hong] and his group have another solution, using tech most hackers already have – a 3D printer and a vacuum former.

plastic tray with electrodes to sense foil wrapped chocolates — Smart tray created by this method.

They 3D print the traces with conductive PLA filament directly onto a base plastic sheet, and then vacuum form the whole thing. The filament is happy to deform when heated – it’s printer filament.

We like this process. We’ve found conductive filament isn’t reliably resistive across vertical layers, but is reliable in the XY plane. Their method only requires one layer. Also, they suggest 3D printing a layer of non conductive PLA atop most of the conductor, like a PCB solder mask.

Conductive filament has a fair bulk resistance. They suggest electroplating it before applying the top mask layer. They also are exploring 3D printing logos, stripes, and such with colored filament, or even making surface detail like rivets on model parts or adding thickness where the plastic thins during vacuum forming.

Designing the 3D print requires guessing what bit of plastic sheet ends up where in the vacuum formed final part. His group used a commercial program, t-sim, to do the prediction and Grasshopper to import the result into Rhino3D. This seems a lot for a home hacker. Drawing lines on a test sheet and vacuum forming seems simpler.

We’ve looked at vacuum forming before. We did a piece on 3D printing bucks , and covered [Ted Brull]’s Kevo vacuum former back in 2015.

Thanks to [howielowe] for the tip.

Desktop Performance In A Custom Mac Laptop

March 24, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

Most of us either own or have used a laptop at some point. For traveling, as a student, or even for browsing Hackaday on the couch in front of the TV, they are pretty much indispensable. They do tend to have a sharp performance reduction compared to a desktop though thanks to the thermal and battery limitations of a portable form factor. [Scott Yu-Jan] wanted to solve that in his own life by building a custom Mac laptop with none of these downsides.

Noticing that a modern iPad Mini has exactly the same width of his Mac Mini, [Scott] set about combining the two devices into a single unit that he could assemble when traveling. A 3D printed case with a traditional laptop clamshell design takes care of physically combining these two devices, and a USB-C cable between the two takes care of combining them in software thanks to Apple’s Duet program. While this has better performance than a Macbook Pro it might actually have some perks, since Apple continues to refuse to make a laptop with a touchscreen.

There are some downsides, of course. The price is higher than a comparable Macbook Pro for the iPad and Mac together, plus it doesn’t include a keyboard or mouse. It also has no battery, so it needs to be plugged in. In the follow-up video linked below, though, [Scott] notes that for him this still made sense as he uses the Mac and iPad individually already, and only works remotely at places that have power outlets readily available. For the average person, though, we might recommend something different if you really need an esoteric laptop-like machine.

Thanks to [Varun] for originally sending in this tip!

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Upgraded 3D Printed Tank Gets Better Drivetrain And Controls

March 9, 2022 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

When it comes to 3D printed builds, they’re often limited in size due to the small build volume of most printers. However, [Ivan Miranda] has always gone big with his builds, and his latest tank design shows that off in spades.

[Ivan] has been working on printed human-sized tanks for years, and his latest revision aims to solve many of the problems that have hampered its performance in the past. A belt drive is the first major upgrade, aiming to improve the reliability of the drivetrain which has been a pain point in the past. The motor mounts also get built out of aluminium this time to help keep things cooler, as melting was a potential concern previously.

The tank’s controls are also upgraded, this time using a simple pedal system to control the brushless motors for easier driving. There’s even a printed seat for better ergonomics. The result is a giant tank big enough for an adult human, with the bonus that it’s now easy to steer and no longer requires [Ivan] to lie down inside to fit.

[Ivan’s] big printers are key to his success on big builds. One new part for the tank weighs a full 5.8 kg, printed in just 2.5 days! We can’t wait to see what giant thing he builds next. Word is the tank will be getting a turret, too. Video after the break.

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Recycling Soda Bottles Into Filament To Print Smaller Soda Bottles

January 15, 2022 by Lewin Day 32 Comments

Thermoplastics are great, because you can melt them down and reform them into whatever you like. This is ably demonstrated by [The Q] by recycling old soda bottles into usable 3D printer filament.

Cute, huh? Why aren’t Coca-Cola making these? Tiny fake grocery items already proved hugely popular in Australia.

Soda bottles are usually made out of PET plastic, or polyethylene terephthalate, which is one of the most popular thermoplastics in modern society. A soda bottle can be cut into a continuous long, thin strip with the use of a simple hand-operated machine that slices the bottle with a blade. This strip of plastic can then be fed through a heated nozzle in order to produce filament for 3D printing. [The Q] demonstrates both parts of this process, including using a motorized reel to take up filament as the bottle material is fed through the extruder.

The filament is then demonstrated by printing tiny versions of soda bottles. [The Q] fills these with soda and gives them the appropriate lids and labels for completion’s sake. It’s a neat way to demonstrate that the filament actually works for 3D printing. It bears noting that such prints are almost certainly not food safe, but it’s really a proof of concept rather than an attempt to make a usable beverage container.

Like similar builds we’ve seen in the past, the filament is of limited length due to the amount of plastic in a single bottle. We’d like to see a method for feeding multiple bottles worth of plastic into the extruder to make a longer length spool, as joining lengths of filament itself can be fraught with issues. Video after the break.

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Mini Linear Actuators From DVD Drive Parts

December 25, 2021 by Jenny List 11 Comments

For many years now a source for some of the smallest and cheapest home made CNC mechanisms has been the seemingly never-ending supply of surplus CD and DVD-ROM drives. The linear actuator that moves the laser may not be the longest or the strongest, but it’s free, and we’ve seen plenty of little X-Y tables using CD drives. It’s these mechanisms that [Nemo404] has taken a little further, freeing the lead screw and motor from the drive chassis and placing them in a 3D-printed enclosure for a complete linear actuator that can be used in other projects. (Video, embedded below.)

There seems to be no positional feedback, not even the limit switch that would grace a typical CD drive, but aside from that it makes for a compact unit. There are two versions, one for a linear bearing and the other for the brass bushes found in CD drives. It’s unclear how strong the result is, but it appears to be strong enough to demonstrate lifting a small container of screws.

Should you need to make your own actuator then aside from the easy-to-obtain old CD drive the files can be found on Thingiverse. And introduce yourself to the world of CD drives for CNC machines by taking a look at this mill.

Thanks [BaldPower] for the tip!

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A 3D-Printed Block And Tackle For Those Annoying Lifts

August 19, 2021 by Jenny List 11 Comments

Perhaps the humble block and tackle — multiple parallel pulleys to reduce the effort of lifting — is not such a common sight as it once was in this age of hydraulic loaders, but it remains a useful mechanism for whenever there is a lifting task. To that end [semi] has produced a 3D-printed block and tackle system, which as can be seen in the video below the break, makes lifting moderately heavy loads a breeze.

It’s a simple enough mechanism, with the 3D printer supplying pulleys, chocks, and attachment points, and steel bolts holding everything together. It’s demonstrated with a maximum weight of 20 kilograms (44 pounds), and though perhaps some hesitation might be in order before trusting it with 200 Kg of engine, we’re guessing it would be capable of much more that what we’re shown. Should you wish to give it a try, the files can be found on Thingiverse.

The block and tackle should hold a special place in the hearts of engineers everywhere, as the first product manufactured using mass-production techniques. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this early-19th century factory came from the work of Marc Brunel, father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel who we’ve made the subject of a previous Hackaday piece.

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3D Print An Entire PC Case

June 12, 2021 by Jenny List 33 Comments

With laptops having become a commodity item and single-board computers having conquered the lower end for our community, building a PC for yourself is no longer the rite of passage that it once was; except perhaps if you are a gamer. But there is still plenty of fun to be had in selecting and assembling PC hardware, especially if as [makerunit] did, you design and 3D-print your own case.

This is no motherboard in an old pizza box, but instead a highly compact and well-designed receptacle for a reasonable-performance gaming machine with an ITX motherboard. The chassis holding all the parts sits inside a slide-on textured sleeve, and particular attention has been paid to air flow and cooling. The GPU card is a little limited by the size of the case and there’s no room at all for a conventional hard drive, so a PCIe SSD board takes that role.

We’d hazard the opinion that were this case cranked out by the likes of Apple it would be hailed as some kind of design masterpiece, such is its quality. It certainly shows that there’s so much more to building your own PC than the normal rectangular tower case.

Over the decades we’ve brought you so many PC cases, a recent-ish one that’s worth a look is this Lego Minecraft one for an Intel NUC motherboard.

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