3d printing

864 Articles

Building A High-Capacity Linear Servo Actuator

February 17, 2022 by 19 Comments

Linear actuators are useful things, moving things in straight lines rather than annoying circles like so many motors. [Retsetman] recently built a linear servo actuator of his own design with accurate positional control.

The design relies on a carriage that moves along a threaded rod, perhaps the most rudimentary design of linear actuator. A large brushed DC motor is used to turn the threaded rod through a 3D-printed 9:1 herringbone geartrain, shifting the actuator back and forth. End stop switches are used to disengage the motor to avoid damage to the mechanism. Feedback is via a ten-turn potentiometer driven off the output geartrain to match the range of the actuator to the rotational range of the pot.

The final build has a stroke of approximately 100 mm, and can lift and hold a 15 kg weight with ease. In a pull test, the actuator failed at a load just shy of 100 kg. If you’re looking for something smaller, though, you can try building a linear actuator out of old DVD drive parts instead. Video after the break.

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Printing Magnets

February 14, 2022 by 29 Comments

A research center in Spain has been working on ways to solve recent supply chain issues. One of these issues is a shortage of materials to make magnets. Their answer? Recycle ferrite residue by treating it and mixing it with ABS for 3D printing.

The mixing of ferrite with a polymer isn’t the key though, instead the trick is in the processing. The team collected strontium ferrite waste and ground it to a powder. Heating to the point of calcination (about 1000C) creates a superior material with a 350% increase in coercitivity and a 25% increase in remanence over the original waste material.

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3D Printing Tiny Metal Parts

February 14, 2022 by 7 Comments

It may sound like a pop band, but μ-WAAM is actually a 3D printing technique for making small metal parts from the NOVA University Lisbon. Of course, WAAM stands for wire arc additive manufacturing, a well-known technique for 3D printing in metal. The difference? The new technique uses 250 μm wire stock instead of the 1mm or thicker wires used in conventional WAAM.

The thinner feed wire allows μ-WAAM to create fine details like thin walls that would be difficult to replicate with traditional methods. Typically, for fine structures, printers use fused metal powder. This is good for fine details, but typically slower and has higher waste than wire-based systems.

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3D Printing Rainbows

February 13, 2022 by 18 Comments

[The Action Lab] had a very serious technical problem. His daughter wanted to 3D print sparkly unicorns. But how do you make a 3D print sparkly? Turns out, he had used a diffraction grating before to make rainbow-enhanced chocolate.

The method turns out to be surprisingly simple. Using a diffraction grating as a print bed, puts the pattern on the bottom of the 3D print and — thanks to how a diffraction grating works — the 3D print now works like a grating, too.

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Homemade Probe For 3D Printer: $3

February 11, 2022 by 38 Comments

You have a few choices if you want to use a probe to level your 3D printer bed. Rarely, you’ll see optical or capacitive probes. More commonly, though, your probe will sense a metal print or uses a physical probe to touch the print bed. [Design Prototype Test] has long used a BLTouch which uses the latter method. However, putting it in a heated build chamber prevented it from working so he set out to make his own simple design using an Allen key.

We’ve seen Allen key sensors before, but usually, they use a microswitch. We’ve also seen microswitches used to directly probe the bed. But, in this case, a 3D printed fan shroud uses an optical sensor to note when the Allen key hits the bed.

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CadQuery Comes Of Age

February 4, 2022 by 66 Comments

Now, we know what some of you are going to say — “Oh man, not another programmatic CAD tool, what’s wrong with OpenSCAD?” — and you may be right, but maybe hold on a bit and take a look at this one, because we think that it’s now pretty awesome! OpenSCAD is great, we use it all the time round these parts, but it is a bit, you know, weird in places. Then along comes CadQuery, and blows it out of the water ease-of-use and functionality wise. Now, we’ve seen a few mentions of CadQuery over the years, and finally it’s become a full-blown toolset in its own right, complete with a graphical frontend/editor, CQ-editor. No odd dependencies on FreeCAD to be seen! That said, installing FreeCAD is not a bad thing either.

The goal is to have the CadQuery script that produces this object be as close as possible to the English phrase a human would use.

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Conveyor Belt Printer Mod Is Nearly All Printed

February 3, 2022 by 19 Comments

[Call Me Swal] wanted to experiment with large 3D prints. So he took a Hornet 3D printer and  designed a lot of 3D parts to convert it into an “infinite” conveyor belt printer. It looks like — as you can see in the video below — that all the parts are 3D printed but you will still need to buy material for the actual belt.

Of course, you may not have a Hornet, but the idea would be applicable to just about any similar printer. You’d have to, of course, adapt or redesign the parts.

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