A workbench with a 3D printer, a home-made frame of metal tubing and 3D printed brackets and phone holders. 3 iOS devices and 1 Android phone arranged around the printer with a clock and 3 different camera angles around the print bed

Even 3D Printers Are Taking Selfies Now

October 16, 2023 by Michael Shaub 1 Comment

We love watching 3D prints magically grow, through the power of timelapse videos. These are easier to make than ever, due in no small part to a vibrant community that’s continuously refining tools such as Octolapse. Most people are using some camera they can connect to a Raspberry Pi, namely a USB webcam or CSI camera module. A DSLR would arguably take better pictures, but they can be difficult to control, and their high resolution images are tougher for the Pi to encode.

If you’re anything like us, you’ve got a box or drawer full of devices that can take nearly as high-quality images as a DSLR, some cast-off mobile phones. Oh, that pile of “solutions looking for a problem” may have just found one! [Matt@JemRise] sure has, and in the video after the break, you can see how not one but four mobile phones are put to work.

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Neat Soldering Station Design Has Workshop & Portable Versions

October 5, 2023 by Richard Baguley 15 Comments

The warm and rather stinky heart of any hacker’s lair is the soldering station, where the PCB meets the metal (solder). A good soldering station lets you get on with the business of building stuff without worrying about piffling details like temperature and remembering to turn the thing off. The AxxSolder is a neat design from [AxxAxx] that fulfills these criteria, as it includes full PID control of the iron and an auto sleep feature. It will run from any DC power source from 9 to 26 Volts, so you can run it off your bench power supply and have one less thing to plug in. There is even a portable version for those on-the-go hackathons.

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Carbon Fiber With 3D Printing

September 25, 2023 by Al Williams 31 Comments

[Thomas Sanladerer] wanted to make 3D prints using carbon fiber and was surprised that it was fairly inexpensive and worked well, although he mentions that the process is a bit intense. You can learn what he found out in the video below.

He used an advanced PLA that can endure more temperature than normal PLA. That’s important because the process uses heat and the carbon fiber resin will produce heat as it cures. The first step was to print a mold and, other than the material, that was pretty straightforward.

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Powder Your Prints For Baby-Smoothness

September 24, 2023 by Kristina Panos 46 Comments

Layer lines are a dead giveaway to non-normies that a thing was 3D printed. There are things you can do to smooth them — sanding, chemical smoothing, and fillers come to mind. Although this technique technically uses all three, it starts with something very simple.

In the video after the break, [DaveRig] gets right to the point: baby powder and resin mixed together make a fine smoothing agent when cured. Having read about it online, he decided to give it a try.

Starting with a half sphere that had admittedly pretty big layer lines, [DaveRig] mixed up enough resin and baby powder to make the consistency of milk or cream. Then he put five coats on, curing and sanding with 120 in between each one.

Then it’s on to standard post-processing stuff. You know, wipe it down with alcohol, sand it a little more, wet sand, and then it’s on to the airbrush and clear-coat. The end result looks to be as smooth as your average bowling ball, as you can see in the main photo.

What’s your favorite post-processing method? Have you tried annealing them in salt?

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High Temp Resin Means Faster Hot Foil Stamping

September 23, 2023 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

[This Designed That] does a lot of hot foil stamping. That’s the shiny embellishment you’ll see on wedding invitations and your fancier letterheads. They wanted a way to quickly see if the process is right for a given design, and how it might come together if so. Many of the designs involve letter forms, which they have tried milling out of brass in the past, but the process is fiddly and takes a while. Seeking a faster way to test designs, [This Designed That] turned to 3D printing.

They achieved good results with an Elegoo Mars Pro, but the the most important thing here is the resin needs to withstand at least 130 C, which is the max that [This Deigned That] usually runs it at. The answer was in Phrozen TR300 resin, which can handle temps up to 160 C.

In trials, the stamp heat measured roughly 30 C lower on average than the press, so [This Designed That] kept turning up the heat, but it just wasn’t conductive enough. So they started experimenting with ways to increase heat transfer. First they tried molding metal powder, but it didn’t work. After briefly flirting with electroplating them, [This Designed That] finally tried some aluminum tape, wrapped tight and burnished to the design.

Now the hot foil machine stamps perfectly at only 120 C — the lower end of the standard temperature that [This Designed That] typically runs the thing. They are chuffed at the results, and frankly, so are we. Be sure to check out the process video after the break.

Curious about hot foil stamping machines? Check out this retrofit job.

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3D Printing At 100C

September 17, 2023 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Normally, 3D printing with filament takes temperatures of around 200 °C. However, there are some crafting plastics that melt in hot water at 60 °C. You can get spools of similar plastic that prints at very low temperatures, and some 3D printing pens use it. [Lost in Tech] picked up a spool of the stuff meant for medical printing and found that printing with it was a challenge. You can watch a video of the results below.

The first problem is that most printers don’t want to extrude at low temperatures. You can override this or, if you want to print with this plastic — PCL — you can rebuild the printer firmware. He never got bridges to work very well, but some prints came out reasonably well.

Of course, you might wonder why you would care about this kind of plastic. For one thing, it’s apparently safe to work with. If you were printing with students, too, you might be interested in a lower printer temperature. However, it didn’t look like the results were that good. However, it makes you wonder what kinds of filament you could use with a little work that might have some benefit.

The last time we heard about this stuff, someone was printing bones with it. We are always on the lookout for oddball filament to play with.

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3D Printed RC Car Is Geared For Speed

September 13, 2023 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

You can always go out and buy an RC car off the shelf. However, it’s readily achievable to print your own design that has many of the features of off-the-shelf models, as demonstrated by [Jinan].

[Jinan] set about creating a rear-wheel-drive design with a low center of gravity for good handling. Two large 5.2 Ah batteries slung low in the chassis help keep the car planted when cornering. [Jinan] also developed a double-wishbone suspension setup up front to handle bumps with ease.

With his eyes on top speed, [Jinan] needed a drivetrain that could handle sustained high RPM operation without failure. During the development process, [Jinan] spent plenty of time learning about the mathematics behind gear shapes before relying on a built-in CAD generator to do the job for him. Armed with proper gearing, he focused on making sure the driveshafts and other links wouldn’t fail at speed.

[Jinan] doesn’t shy away from diving into the engineering of his design, analyzing failures and improving on his designs along the way. It’s no surprise his design was able to reach 66 km/h (41 MPH) after his rigorous development process. It’s compelling watching, and a great way to learn something.

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