3d printer

559 Articles

Toorcamp: Type A Machines

August 16, 2012 by 6 Comments

Type A Machines designs and builds 3D printers in San Francisco. [Miloh], one of the founders, brought two of their flagship Series 1 printers to Toorcamp. He printed out a variety of models including water tight cups and quadcopter arms.

The RepRap Arduino MEGA Pololu Shield (RAMPS) is used to drive the stepper motors for each axis, as well as the extruder. This is attached to an Arduino MEGA running the Marlin RepRap firmware. Type A Machines ships the printer with Polylactic Acid (PLA) filament, which is biodegradable.

On software side, you start with a 3D model in STL format. This can be exported from 3D software such as Google SketchUp or Autodesk 123D. You then need a slicer to generate G-code and machine control software to command the printer. [Miloh] used Slic3r and Repetier for his workflow, but he also pointed out a good summary of 3D printer workflows.

The Series 1 was launched at the Bay Area Maker Faire this past May. It has a print volume of 1200 mL, which is the largest print volume of any desktop printer around. The Series 1 brings another option into the low-cost 3D printer market.

Visualizing Heat With Schlieren Photography

July 26, 2012 by 12 Comments

[Kevin] wanted to check out the air patterns present when his 3D printer is in action. This is useful research; slight differences in temperature can affect the quality of his prints. Instead of something like a thermometer, [Kevin] decided to use Schlieren photography to visualize the air around his 3D printer.

If you’ve ever seen very old-school pictures of supersonic research, you’ve seen Schlieren photography. It’s a way of visualizing the density of transparent objects using only mirrors, lenses, and a point light source. The resulting pictures are usually black and white, although some amazing color pictures exist of bullets traveling through the air next to soap bubbles and candles.

The process of creating a Schlieren photograph is actually pretty easy. [Kevin] pointed a light at a used a 4-inch parabolic mirror placed behind his printer. A knife edge is placed at exactly twice the focal length of the mirror, and after putting a camera behind this knife edge, differences in the density of the air are visible.

From [Kevin]’s video of his Schlieren setup (available after the break), you can see the air is extremely turbulent around his print. That might have been obvious given the presence of a cooling fan, but it’s still very, very cool to look at.

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Drag And Drop Images For 3D Printing

July 19, 2012 by 31 Comments

This piece of software called OmNomNom works with OpenSCAD to turn 2D images into 3D models. It’s literally a drag-and-drop process that renders almost instantly.

Here the example is a QR code, which is perfect for the software since it’s a well-defined black and white outline in the source image. But the video after the break shows several other examples that don’t rely on this simplicity. For instance, the Superman logo, which uses four different colors, is converted quite easily. There’s also a depth map of [Beethoven’s] bust that is converted into a 3D object. The same technique can be used to create terrain from topographic source images.

Once the file has been converted to a model it can still be tweaked like normal. This allows you to customize size and depth to suit your needs. This is where OpenSCD comes into play, but if you don’t use that program you can still export an STL file directly from OmNomNom for use on your 3D printer.

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Printing A Boat Made Out Of Milk Jugs

July 14, 2012 by 27 Comments

Today, groups from all over the Pacific Northwest will take up their oars and head over to Green Lake for the 42nd annual Seafair Milk Carton derby. The team who builds the fastest boat made out of milk cartons wins the regatta (and $10,000). This year, we’d put our money on the 3D printer group from the University of Washington; they printed a boat large enough to carry a person using crushed melted milk jugs.

After building a huge extruder to feed shredded HDPE plastic through a nozzle, the team repurposed an old plasma cutter to serve as an 8-foot-long 3D printer. There were a number of problems the team ran into – getting layers to fuse together, finding a suitable printing surface, and perfecting the art of squeezing melted milk jugs through a heated metal tube – but the final result is impressive, to say the least.

As far as how lake-worthy the UW team’s boat is, we have no idea. The milk jug regatta will be held later today, and if you have an update of how the team fared, send us a tip.

3D Printing With A Delta Robot That Seems To Simplify The Concept

July 13, 2012 by 61 Comments

This 3d printing delta robot really seems to solve a lot of the hurdles faced by previous offerings. With other delta printers we’ve looked at the motor control of the three arms is usually a it complicated. On this build the motors can just be seen in this image at each corner under the build platform. Each motor has a belt that loops from the bottom to the top for the machine, driving an arm along two precision rods.

It’s also interesting to note that the printer head doesn’t have a motor mounted on it for feeding the filament. Instead, the motor is mounted remotely. You can see it above the soda can in this image. It feeds the filament through a hollow tube spanning the gap between the extruder and the motor. This acts as a Bowden cable. With less mass to move this may make it easier to control the location of the print head.

After the break you can catch a clip of the team showing off the speed and dexterity of the delta bot, followed by a printing demo.

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RA 3D Printer Controller Board Does Everything, Has Disco Lights

July 10, 2012 by 15 Comments

3D printers are getting far, far more complicated than a 4-axis, plastic-squirting CNC machine. These days, you really haven’t earned your geek cred unless you’ve hacked an LCD and SD card interface into your 3D printer, or at least experimented with multiple extruders. There’s a problem with the controller boards everyone is using, though: most boards simply don’t have enough output pins, greatly reducing the number of cool things a 3D printer can do.

Enter RA. It’s a new 3D printer controller board with IO for any imaginable setup. Going down the feature list of RA, we’re wondering why we haven’t seen some of these features before. A 24-pin ATX power header is soldered directly to the board, giving RA users a stupidly easy way to power their printer. Of course there are outputs for LEDs, camera triggers (printer time-lapse movies are really cool), light rings, buzzers, an LCD/rotary encoder/SD card control panel, and support for two heated beds for gigantic printers. If printing in one color isn’t good enough for you, RA has support for three extruders

Compared to other 3D printer boards such as RAMPS or the Sanguinololu, the number of outputs on this board is simply amazing. If you’re planning to build a huge, feature-laden 3D printer, you probably couldn’t do much better than what RA is offering.

3D DLP Printer Builds An Orange TARDIS

July 5, 2012 by 16 Comments

This micro-sized TARDIS is the latest print from [Ron Light]’s Sedgwick 3D DLP printer. Yes, it’s orange, but the print quality for such a small object is pretty astounding.

The Sedgwick 3D printer is currently available as a kit on Kickstarter. For five hundred bones, the Sedgwick provides all the parts – minus a DLP projector and resin – to make your own miniature Type 40 with a broken chameleon circuit. There’s a lot more this printer can do, from miniature cathedrals to hollow geodesic spheres.

This is the latest in what will be a long line of DLP projector / resin 3D printers, and the most affordable one to date. The last one we saw was an awesome $2400 machine that included a projector and resin. At $500 for a projector-less kit, the Sedgwick still handily beats even the cheapest option we’ve seen so far.

[Ron Light] is from Kansas City, and our boss man [Caleb] ran into him at the KC Maker Faire a few weeks ago. You can check out that little interview and a few videos of the Sedgwick doing its thing after the break.

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