Printing Point-to-point Circuits On A 3D Printer

May 4, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

[CarryTheWhat] put up an Instructable on his endeavours in printing circuit boards for solder free electronics. He managed to print a flashlight where the only non-printed parts are a pair of batteries and a couple of LEDs.

The circuit is a weird mix of point to point and Manhattan style circuit construction; after modeling a printed plastic plate, [CarryTheWhat] added a few custom component holders to hold LEDs, batteries, and other tiny electronic bits.

To deliver power to each electronic bit, the components are tied off on blue pegs. These pegs are attached to each other by conductive thread much like wirewrap circuit construction.

Right now, the circuits are extremely simple, but they really remind us of a few vintage ham radio rigs. While this method is most likely too complex to print 3D printer electronics (a much desired and elusive goal), it’s very possible to replicate some of the simpler projects we see on Hackaday.

[CarryTheWhat] put the models and files up on GitHub if you’d like to try out a build of your own.

Automated Bed Leveling With Our 3D Printer

April 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

Anyone with a RepRap or other 3D printer knows how much of a pain leveling the bed is. To get a good quality print, the bed – the surface the printer prints on – must be exactingly level, and may the engineering gods help you if your surface has the slightest bump in it. [Atntias] is developing a solution to this problem: an auto leveling platform that shouldn’t require any parts at all if you already have a metal bed.

The idea is incredibly simple: Just ground your metal bed, and apply a small voltage to the tip of your hot end. [Atntias]’ code (available on GitHub) probes the surface of the bed and shoots out a 3D mesh of your current bed profile. This can be used as a GCode offset, so the bottom of your print is always directly on the top of the bed.

Although the utility of leveling a bed down to the micron level is of questionable utility for 3D printers, it’s vitally important if you want to mill a PCB on your printer. [Atntias] says his idea is currently being implemented into the Marlin firmware, so it looks like another firmware update is in our future.

Thanks go to [technodream] for sending this one in. Check out the video after the break to see the bed leveling process in action.

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Print In Chocolate, Sugar, And Clay With A Universal Paste Extruder

April 10, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

With a glut of Easter candy acquired over the last week, you might be thinking what to do with mountains of chocolate and other sugary delights. How about sending them through a 3D printer with [RichRap]’s universal paste extruder?

[RichRap]’s extruder uses a common 10cc syringes slowly squeezed by an off-the-shelf stepper motor. Chocolate wasn’t the only goal for this build; [RichRap] also tested out cake icing, corn chip dough, muffin and sponge cake batter with his new toy. The most interesting paste in our humble opinion is porcelain ceramic clay. [RichRap] was able to make some very nice 3D printed greenware, but we’ll withhold our judgement until the ceramic parts are fired later this week.

After the break you can check out the introduction video for the Universal Paste Extruder, as well as a quick glimpse of [RichRap]’s very cool porcelain clay prints. We’re very interested in the ceramics printed with this extruder, if only for printing reprap parts that will be exposed to plastic-melting temperatures. Of course, all the files to build your own paste extruder are up on Thingiverse.

Tip ‘o the hat to [Josef Prusa] for sending this one in.

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3D Printer With Insane Accuracy Uses A DLP Projector

April 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 107 Comments

After years of work, [Junior Veloso] is finally getting his 3D printer project out to the public. Unlike the Makerbots and repraps we usually see, [Junior]’s printer uses light-curing resin and a DLP projector to build objects with incredibly fine detail.

One highlight of [Junior]’s project is the development of low-cost resins. Normally, light curing resins are extremely expensive, but [Junior] is actively trying to get the price of resin down to $150 USD per kilogram. A quick back-of-the-wolfram calculation tells us you should be able to print about 7-800 cubic centimeters with a kilogram of resin. It’s much more expensive than plastic filament used in other 3D printers, but that’s the price you pay for quality.

There’s a very popular Indiegogo campaign that is trying to raise money to mass produce the resin and some components of this kit. We’re not impressed with the rewards for this campaign – $59 for a .PDF description of the printer without any dimensions, $159 for a BOM, dimensions and the formula to make your own resin, and $400 for the closed-source software [Junior] devleoped – but hopefully this Indiegogo gets cheap resin out onto the market. There’s a short FAQ about this printer, so we’ll leave our readers to tactfully discuss the merits of this printer in the comments below.

You can check out the process of printing a remarkably detailed alien skull in the video after the break.

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Becoming Intelligent Designers And Saving The RepRap

March 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 148 Comments

While Hack a Day’s modus operandi is serving up hacks from around the Internet, sometimes we feel the need to exercise a bit of editorial freedom. A thousand words is a bit awkward for the front page, so feel free to skip the break and head straight to the full text of this article.

It’s no secret myself and my fellow writers for Hack a Day are impressed with the concept of a personal 3D printer. We’ve seen many, many, builds over the years where a 3D printer is a vital tool or the build itself.

Personally, I love the idea of having a 3D printer. I’ve built a Prusa Mendel over the past few months – Sanguinololu electronics, [Josef Prusa]’s PCB heated bed, and a very nice Budaschnozzle 1.0 from the awesome people at LulzBot. I’ve even made some really cool bits of plastic with it, including the GEB cube from the inside cover of Gödel, Escher, Bach (a very tricky object to realize in a physical form, but not a bad attempt for the third thing I’ve ever printed, including calibration cubes). Right now I’m working on the wheel design for a rocker-bogie suspension system I hope to finish by early August when the next Mars rover lands. My Prusa is a wonderful tool; it’s not a garage filled with a mill, lathe, and woodworking tools, but it’s a start. I think of it as the Shopsmith of the 21st century.

Lately I’ve become more aware of the problems the RepRap and 3D printer community will have to deal with in the very near future, and the possible solution that led me to write this little rant.

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Building A Magnetic Rotary Encoder

March 8, 2012 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[Long Haired Hacker] has undertaken a high-resolution 3D printer build. He got his hands on some motors to drive the build platform but it doesn’t have a built-in encoder. He knows that optical encoder wheels can have problems due to dirt and grim as well as ambient light so he set out to find a better way of providing feedback to the controller. He ended up building his own magnetic rotary encoder which is shown above.

At the heart of the system is an AS5043 magnetic rotary sensor. The chip, which runs from $6.50-$11, can detect and report the rotation of a magnetic field with great precision. The rotation data can be read out in degrees using SPI, but it sounds like there’s also grey code output on a few pins if that suits your needs a bit better. The magnet which the chip measures is mounted in a sleeve milled to seat inside of a bearing ring.

The 3D printing method [Long Haired Hacker] has chosen uses a projector and light-cured resin to achieve the kind of results seen in this other hi-res printer.

Hackaday Links March 8th, 2012

March 8, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 9 Comments

Solder Your Pin headers Straight

If you’re worried about how to solder your pin headers straight, why not try this simple trick and put them into a breadboard before soldering?

Etiquette for Open Source Projects

If you use or develop open source projects, it’s worth checking out [Phillip Torrone]’s Unspoken rules of Open Source article. You may not HAVE to do all the things he says, but it’s certainly a good starting point for being ethical with your hacks.

The [GoAmateur] Camera Mount

If you can’t afford a professional camera mount for your bike, why not make one yourself? As pointed out in the article, normal cameras aren’t really made for this, so do so at your own risk. If this isn’t shoddy enough for you, why not make a mount for your 4 year old dumb-phone (Env2) out of a block of wood?

A 3D Printer BOM

If you’re wondering how much a 3D printer will cost you, or where to source the parts, this Bill of Materials for a Prusa Mendel should help. We would assume this project will be updated as everything is built, so be sure to check back!

MakerBot Assembly Time-Lapse

Along the same lines, if you’re wondering about getting into 3D printing, this time-lapse of the Thing-O-Matic being assembled may give you some insight into what’s involved in getting one functional!