Sub $300 CNC, If You Have A 3d Printer

January 25, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 37 Comments

[Allted] has designed a CNC machine that you can print yourself; adding conduit, bearings, and the standard vitamins to bring it to life. The CNC machine uses a mechanical design similar to an etch-a-sketch, though instead of the maze of pulleys and cable it uses four stepper motors to do the X and Y translation. The machine looks to be about as accurate as a Shapeoko, and is able to handle light cutting in aluminum.

The coolest part is the extensibility of the printer. For example, [Allted] needed to print a lot of parts to make orders of the kit. So, he built a 4 headed 3D printer by copying blocks of the design, and tying them all to the same belt. The design also seems to be a little more resistant to dust and debris than some homemade rigs. The CNC won the Boca Bearings design competition. If you’d like to build one yourself, [Allted] has all the instructions with print setting recommendations on his website.

Hacking Chipped 3D Printer Filament On The Da Vinci Printer

January 12, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 64 Comments

XYZ Printing has been selling 3D printers for years now with one very special feature not found in more mainstream printers. They’re using a chipped filament cartridge with a small chip inside each of their proprietary filament cartridges, meaning you can only use their filament. It’s the Gillette and ink jet model – sell the printer cheap, and make their money back on filament cartridges.

Last week at CES, XYZ Printing introduced their cheapest printer yet. It’s called the da Vinci Mini, a printer with a 15x15x15 cm build volume that costs only $269. Needless to say, a lot of these will be sold. A lot of people will also be disappointed with chipped filament cartridges in the coming months, so here’s how you defeat the latest version of chipped filament.

A little bit of research showed [WB6CQA] the latest versions of XYZ Printing’s filament uses an NFC chip. Just like the earlier EEPROM version, the latest spools of filament just store a value in memory without any encryption. [WB6CQA] pulled a board from the printer, connected it up to a logic analyzer, and checked out the data sheet for the NFC chip, giving him access to the data on the filament chip.

After running a few prints and comparing the data before and after, [WB6CQA] found a few values that changed. These values could be written back to their previous values, effectively resetting the chip in the filament and allowing third party filament to be used in this printer. It’s a kludge, but it works. More effort will be needed to remove the need to capture data with logic analyzers, but we’re well on our way to chipless filament on da Vinci printers.

Baby Saved By Doctors Using Google Cardboard After 3D Printer Fails

January 8, 2016 by Dan Maloney 64 Comments

It’s a parent’s worst nightmare. Doctors tell you that your baby is sick and there’s nothing they can do. Luckily though, a combination of hacks led to a happy ending for [Teegan Lexcen] and her family.

When [Cassidy and Chad Lexcen]’s twin daughters were born in August, smaller twin [Teegan] was clearly in trouble. Diagnostics at the Minnesota hospital confirmed that she had been born with only one lung and half a heart. [Teegan]’s parents went home and prepared for the inevitable, but after two months, she was still alive. [Cassidy and Chad] started looking for second opinions, and after a few false starts, [Teegan]’s scans ended up at Miami’s Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, where the cardiac team looked them over. They ordered a 3D print of the scans to help visualize possible surgical fixes, but the 3D printer broke.

Not giving up, they threw [Teegan]’s scans into Sketchfab, slapped an iPhone into a Google Cardboard that one of the docs had been playing with in his office, and were able to see a surgical solution to [Teegan]’s problem. Not only was Cardboard able to make up for the wonky 3D printer, it was able to surpass it – the 3D print would only have been the of the heart, while the VR images showed the heart in the context of the rest of the thoracic cavity.[Dr. Redmond Burke] and his team were able to fix [Teegan]’s heart in early December, and she should be able to go home in a few weeks to join her sister [Riley] and make a complete recovery.

We love the effect that creative use of technology can have on our lives. We’ve already seen a husband using the same Sketchfab tool to find a neurologist that remove his wife’s brain tumor. Now this is a great example of doctors doing what it takes to better leverage the data at their disposal to make important decisions.

The 3D Printers Of CES

January 6, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 65 Comments

CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is in full swing. That means the Hackaday tip line is filled to the brim with uninteresting press releases, and notices that companies from the world over will be at CES.

3D printing has fallen off the radar of people who worship shiny new gadgets of late, and this is simply a function of 3D printing falling into the trough of disillusionment. The hype train of 3D printing is stuck on a siding, people are bored, but this is the time that will shape what 3D printing will become for the next ten years. What fascinating news from the 3D printing industry comes to us from CES?

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32C3: 3D Printing On The Moon

January 3, 2016 by Elliot Williams 36 Comments

How do you resist this talk title? You can’t! [Karsten Becker]’s talk about what kinds of 3D printers you’d use on the moon is a must-see.

[Part-Time Scientists] was a group of 35 people working on a mission to the moon. Then they won the qualifying round in the Google Lunar XPRIZE, got a bunch of money, and partnered with some heavy corporate sponsors, among which is Audi. Now they’ve added eleven full-time employees and updated the name to [PT Scientists]. (They’re taking applications if you’re interested in helping out!)

A really neat part of their planned mission is to land near the Apollo 17 landing site, which will let them check up on the old lunar rover that NASA left up there last time. The science here is that, 45 years on, they hope to learn how all of the various materials that make up the rover have held up over time.

But the main attraction of their mission is experimental 3D printing using in-situ materials. As [Karsten] says, “3D printing is hard…but we want to do it on the moon anyway.”

One idea is to essentially microwave the lunar regolith (and melt it) . This should work because there’s a decent iron component in the regolith, so if they can heat it up it should fuse. The catch with microwaving is directivity — it’s hard to make fine details. On the plus side, it should be easy to make structures similar to paved roads out of melted regolith. Microwave parts are robust and should hold up to launch, and microwaving is relatively energy efficient, so that’s what they’re going to go for.

But there are other alternatives. The European Space Agency is planning to bring some epoxy-like binder along, and glue regolith together in layers like a terrestrial cement printer. The problem is, of course, schlepping all of the binder to the moon in the first place.

And then there are lasers. [Karsten] talked lasers down a little bit, because they’re not very energy efficient and the optics are fidgety — not something you’d like to be supporting remotely from earth.

The final option that [Karsten] mentioned was the possibility of using locally-generated thermite to fuse regolith. This has been tested out on earth, and should work. [Karsten] thought it was an interesting option, but balls of hot thermite are potentially tough on rovers, and the cost of mistakes are so high that they’re going to put that off for a future mission.

In the end, the presentation ran only thirty minutes long, so there’s a great Q&A session after that. Don’t go home once you hear the audience clapping!

The Effects Of Color On Material Properties Of 3D Printed Components

December 28, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

The strength of object printed on filament-based 3D printers varies by the plastic used, the G-code used by the printer, the percent infill, and even the temperature the plastic was extruded at. Everything, it seems, has an effect on the strength of 3D printed parts, but does the color of filament have an effect on the stress and strain a plastic part it can withstand? [Joshua M. Pearce] set out to answer that question in one of his most recent papers.

The methods section of the paper is about what you would expect for someone investigating the strength of parts printed on a RepRap. A Lulzbot TAZ 4 was used, along with natural, white, black, silver, and blue 3mm PLA filament. All parts were printed at 190°C with a 60°C heated bed.

The printed parts demonstrated yet again that a RepRap can produce parts that are at least equal in material strength to those produced by a proprietary 3D printer. But what about a difference in the strength among different colors? While there wasn’t a significant variation in the Young’s modulus of parts printed in different colors, there was a significant variation of the crystallization of differently colored printed parts, with white PLA producing the largest percent crystallinity, followed by blue, grey, black, and finally natural PLA. This crystallinity of a printed part can affect the tensile properties of a printed part, but [Pearce] found the extrusion temperature also has a large effect on the percentage of crystallinity.

Printing Objects Directly From Fallout 4

December 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

Fallout 4 was released about a month ago, and although we don’t have a ‘took an arrow to the knee’ meme like Bethesda’s last game, there are ample opportunities for cosplay and printing out deathclaws and mirelurks on a 3D printer. How do you turn files hidden away in a game’s folders into a real, printed object? It’s actually pretty easy and [Angus] is here to tell you how.

The files for Fallout enemies and items can be readily accessed with the Bethesda Archive Extractor, although this won’t give you files that a 3D printer can understand. You’ll get a .NIF file, and NifSkope can convert the files found in the Fallout archives to an .OBJ file any 3D modeling program can understand. The next step from there is taking the .OBJ file into Meshmixer and fixing everything with Netfabb. After that, it’s off to the printer.

[Angus] printed his model of a Deathclaw in ABS in multiple parts, gluing them together with a little bit of acetone. This didn’t go exactly as planned; there were some contaminants in the ABS that turned into a white film on the black ABS. This was ultimately fixed with XTC-3D, the 3D print coating everyone is experimenting with.

The finished product is a solid yellow but completely smooth 3D model of one of the toughest enemies in Fallout 4. The only thing left to do is paint the model. The best way to proceed at this point is probably doing what model builders have been doing for decades – an airbrush, and hundreds of tiny bottles of paint. [Angus] is opening up his YouTube comments for suggestions, and if you have a better idea he’s looking for some help.
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