Parametric Design Process Produces Unique Speakers

February 17, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 28 Comments

When building one-off projects, it’s common to draw up a plan on a sheet of paper or in CAD, or even wing it and hope for the best outcome without any formal plans. Each of these design philosophies has its ups and downs but both tend to be rigid, offering little flexibility as the project progresses. To solve this, designers often turn to parametric design where changes to any part of the design are automatically reflected throughout the rest, offering far greater flexibility while still maintaining an overall plan. [Cal Bryant] used this parametric method to devise a new set of speakers for an office, with excellent results.

The bulk of the speakers were designed with OpenSCAD, with the parametric design allowing for easy adjustments to accommodate different drivers and enclosure volumes. A number of the panels of the speakers are curved as well, which is more difficult with traditional speaker materials like MDF but much easier with this 3D printed design. There were a few hiccups along the way though; while the plastic used here is much denser than MDF, the amount of infill needed to be experimented with to achieve a good finish. The parametric design paid off here as well as the original didn’t fit exactly within the print bed, so without having to split up the print the speakers’ shape was slightly tweaked instead. In the end he has a finished set of speakers that look and sound like a high-end product.

There are a few other perks to a parametric design like this as well. [Cal] can take his design for smaller desk-based speakers and tweak a few dimensions and get a model designed to stand up on the floor instead. It’s a design process that adds a lot of options and although it takes a bit more up-front effort it can be worth it while prototyping or even for producing different products quickly. If you want to make something much larger than the print bed and slightly changing the design won’t cut it, [Cal] recently showed us how to easily print huge objects like arcade cabinets with fairly standard sized 3D printers.

Tiny RC Four-Wheeler Gets Chassis Upgrade For More Traction

February 2, 2025 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

[Azpaca] purchased a fun little toy car from Tamiya, only… there was a problem. The little off-roader wasn’t up to scratch—despite its four-wheel-drive, it couldn’t get over rough ground to save its life. Thus, it was time to 3D-print a better chassis that could actually get through it!

The problem was quite obvious. With no suspension and a rigid chassis, the vehicle would tend to end up with one or more wheels on the air on rough surfaces. To rectify this, [Azpaca] created a twisting chassis which would allow the wheels to better remain in contact with the ground. The design is relatively straightforward, and reuses much of the original drivetrain, including the simple brushed motor. However, with a pivot right behind the front wheels, it has much more traction on rocks and gravel, and can traverse these terrains much more easily.

Tamiya’s motorized toys aren’t particularly well known in the West, but it’s neat to see the community that exists around modifying them around the world. Design files are available for the curious. If you’re not down with mods, perhaps you’d prefer to print your own cars from scratch. Video after the break.

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Could Non-Planar Infill Improve The Strength Of Your 3D Prints?

February 1, 2025 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

When you’re spitting out G-Code for a 3D print, you can pick all kinds of infill settings. You can choose the pattern, and the percentage… but the vast majority of slicers all have one thing in common. They all print layer by layer, infill and all. What if there was another way?

There’s been a lot of chatter in the 3D printing world about the potential of non-planar prints. Following this theme, [TenTech] has developed a system for non-planar infill. This is where the infill design is modulated with sinusoidal waves in the Z axis, such that it forms a somewhat continuous bond between what would otherwise be totally seperate layers of the print. This is intended to create a part that is stronger in the Z direction—historically a weakness of layer-by-layer FDM parts.

Files are on Github for the curious, and currently, it only works with Prusaslicer. Ultimately, it’s interesting work, and we can’t wait to see where it goes next. What we really need is a comprehensive and scientific test regime on the tensile strength of parts printed using this technique. We’ve featured some other neat work in this space before, too. Video after the break.

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Time Vs Money, 3D Printer Style

February 1, 2025 by Elliot Williams 28 Comments

A few months ago, Hackaday’s own Al Williams convinced me to buy a couple of untested, returned-to-manufacturer 3D printers. Or rather, he convinced me to buy one, and the incredible success of the first printer spurred me on to the second. TL;DR: Lightning didn’t strike twice, but I’d still rate it as worth my time. This probably isn’t a good choice for your first printer, but if you’ve done the regular maintenance on your first printer already, I’d recommend it for your second or twelfth.

As background, Al has been volunteering with local schools to teach a 3D printing summer class, and this means outfitting them with a 3DP lab on the dirt cheap. His secret is to buy last year’s model which has all of the features he needs – most importantly for the kids, automatic bed height probing – but to buy it from the scratch-and-dent shelf at Creality. Why? Because they are mid-grade printers, relatively new, but on deep discount.

How deep? I found an essentially endless supply of printers that retail for $300 on discount for $90 each. The catch? It might work, it might not. I bought my son one, because I thought that it would at least make a good project for us to work on together. Those plans were spoiled – it worked absolutely flawlessly from the moment we bolted it together, and he runs 24-hour jobs on the thing without fear. From the look of the build plate, it had been used exactly once and returned for whatever reason. Maybe the owner just didn’t want a 3D printer?

The siren song of straightforward success was too much for me to resist, and I picked another up to replace my aging A8 which was basically a kit for a 3D printer, and not a particularly good one at that, but could be made to work. My scratch-and-dent Creality came with a defective bed-touch sensor, which manifest itself as a random absolute refusal to print.

I took it apart, but the flaw is in the design of the V1 touch sensors – the solenoid requires more current to push down than the 3DP motherboard can reliably deliver. It works 100% of the time on my bench power supply, but in situ it fails about 30% of the time, even after hitting it with graphite and making sure everything is mechanically sound. Creality knows this and offers a free trade-in, just not for me. The new version of the Creality probe costs $50 new, but you can get cheap knock-off BL Touch models for $14. Guess what I did?

And guess what bit me? The cheapo touch probe descends a bit slower than the Creality version should, and the firmware is coded to time-out in an extra-short timeframe. Thankfully, Creality’s modifications to Marlin are all open source, and I managed to tweak and flash a new firmware that made it work 100% of the time, but this was at a cost of probably eight hours of bug-hunting, part-ordering, and firmware-compiling. That said, I got some nice extra features along the way, which is the advantage of a printer running open-source firmware.

So my $300 printer cost me $105, plus eight hours of labor. I only charge one coffee per hour for fun hardware debugging tasks, but you may have a different valuation. Taken together with my son’s printer, we have $600 worth of printer for under $200 plus labor, though, which starts to sound a little better.

Is gambling on an untested return 3D printer worth it? For us, I would say it was, and I’d do it again in a few years. For now, though, we’ve got three printers running and that’s all we need. Have you gone down this perilous path?

Small Print Bed? No Problem!

January 24, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

One of the major limitations of 3D printers is the size of the printable area. The robotic arm holding the printer head can only print where it can reach, after all. Some methods of reducing this constraint have been tried before, largely focusing on either larger printers or printer heads that are mobile in some way. Another approach to increasing the size of prints beyond the confined space typical of most consumer-grade 3D printers is to create some sort of joinery into the prints themselves so that larger things can be created. [Cal Bryant] is developing this jigsaw-based method which has allowed him to produce some truly massive prints.

Rather than making the joints by hand, [Cal]’s software will cut up a model into a certain number of parts when given the volume constraints of a specific 3D printer so it can not only easily print the parts, but also automatically add the jigsaw-like dovetail joints to each of the sections of the print. There were a few things that needed prototyping to get exactly right like the tolerance between each of the “teeth” of the joint, which [Cal] settled on 0.2 mm which allows for a strong glued joint, and there are were some software artifacts to take care of as well like overhanging sections of teeth around the edges of prints. But with those edge cases taken care of he has some working automation software that can print arbitrarily large objects.

[Cal] has used this to build a few speaker enclosures, replacing older MDF designs with 3D printed ones. He’s also built a full-size arcade cabinet which he points out was an excellent way to use up leftover filament. Another clever way we’ve seen of producing prints larger than the 3D printer is to remove the print bed entirely. This robotic 3D printer can move itself to a location and then print directly on its environment.

Camera Slider Uses Repositionable Rail To Do Rotational Moves

December 23, 2024 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

You can buy motorized camera sliders off-the-shelf, but they’re pretty costly. Alternatively, you can make one yourself, and it’s not even that hard if you’re kitted out with a 3D printer. [Creative 3D Printing] did just that with a nifty design that adds rotation into the mix. Check it out in the video below.

Why should a camera get all the fun? Try your phone.

The basic slider is built out of 3D-printed components and some good old aluminum extrusion. A small 12-volt motor trucks the camera cart back and forth using a leadscrew. It’s torquey enough and slow enough that there isn’t much need for more advanced control—the motor just does the job. There’s also a limit switch set up to trigger a neat auto-reverse function.

The neat part, though, is the rotational mechanism. A smooth steel rod is attached to the slider’s housing, which can be set up in a straight line or aligned diagonally if desired. In the latter case, it rotates the mounting on the camera cart via a crank, panning the camera as it moves along the slider’s trajectory.

It’s a mechanically sophisticated design and quite unlike most of the camera sliders we feature around these parts.

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Old 3D Printer Parts Repurposed Into DIY Camera Slider

December 22, 2024 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

What do you do with an old 3D printer? They’re full of interesting components, after all, from switches and motors to lovely smooth rails. [Mukesh Sankhla] had a great idea—why not repurpose the components into a motorized camera slider?

The heart of the slider is the 4020 V-slot aluminum profile. It’s upon this that the camera carriage rides, running on rubber rollers to keep things smooth. A stepper motor and belt are then used to move the slider at a constant speed up or down the rail while the camera gets the necessary shot. The build relies almost entirely on salvaged components, save for an ESP32, OLED screen, and a few buttons to act as the control interface. There are also the TMC2208 stepper motor drivers, of course, but they came from the salvaged Ender 3 unit as well.

This is a classic project. Many old 3D printers have pretty much the perfect set of parts to build a camera slider, making this build a no-brainer. Indeed, others have tread the same path. There are plenty of other potential uses around the lab or for soldering.

Meanwhile, the proof is in the pudding. Scope the slider’s performance in the video below.

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