3D Printering: Klipper, The Free 3D Printer Upgrade

August 29, 2024 by Al Williams 33 Comments

I have several 3D printers, and I’ve always been satisfied with using either Repetier or Marlin on all of them. There are a few other firmware versions that could run on my hardware, but those two have been all I’ve needed. Sure, it was painful for a while having to juggle features to fit the firmware image onto the smaller microcontroller boards. Now that Marlin supports big 32-bit boards however, that hasn’t been a problem. But recently, I’ve been on a program to switch everything to Klipper.

In this post, I’ll tell you why I did it and give you some data about why you might consider it, too.

The Landscape

Marlin is written in C and burned into a 3D printer’s flash memory. It does a lot. It receives G-code commands, interprets them, and translates them to meaningful actions on the hardware. Modern versions handle automatic transformations to account for lumpy beds, input shaping to reduce shaking, and linear advance to produce better prints.

It might seem simple to control a 3D printer, but there are lots of little details to take into account. For example, if you are moving the head between two XY coordinates and you expect a certain flow rate, then you have to figure out how fast to turn the steppers to get the right amount of plastic out over that time. You also may have to retract before you start a move, make sure temperatures are stable, and transform the actual coordinates based on bed leveling data. There’s a lot going on.

Klipper does the exact same job, but it does it differently. On the 3D printer board is a tiny piece of software that does very little. It’s a bit like a device driver for the printer. All by itself, it does nothing. But it can handle very basic commands that describe how to move the machine.

All the rest of the processing you expect to happen now runs on some Linux computer. That is very often a Raspberry Pi, but it could be a spare laptop, your desktop computer, or anything that will run a reasonable Linux install. Several vendors even sell single-board computers with touchscreens made specifically for running this part of Klipper.

However, even though a screen is nice, you don’t really need it. I’ll talk about that more later.

Continue reading “3D Printering: Klipper, The Free 3D Printer Upgrade” →

Fast 3D Printing With A Polar, Four Quadrant Custom Machine

August 26, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 14 Comments

3D printing is all well and good for making low numbers of units, so long as they’re small enough to print in a reasonable time, but what if you want to go really big? Does a 35-hour print time sound like a fun time? Would it even make it that long? [Nathan] from Nathan Build Robots didn’t fancy the wait, so they embarked on a project to build a huge parallel 3D printer with four independent print heads. Well, kind of. Continue reading “Fast 3D Printing With A Polar, Four Quadrant Custom Machine” →

UC Berkeley Prints Glass Nanoparticles

August 15, 2024 by Al Williams 8 Comments

In a recent video, [Joel] of 3D Printing Nerd interviews a researcher at University of California, Berkeley about their work with glass 3D printing technology. A resin is impregnated with tiny glass nanoparticles and produces green parts. An oven burns away the resin and then another heating step produces the actual silica glass part. You can see a video about the process below.

As you might expect with glass, the temperatures are toasty. The first burn is at 1100 C and the fusing burn is at 1300 C. The nanoparticles are about 40 nanometers across. The resulting parts are tiny with very small feature sizes. The technology to do this has been around for a few years, and the University continues researching this form of computed axial lithograph (CAL) 3D printing. These parts are so small that it uses an adaptation called microCAL that produces much smaller parts at high precision. However, the equipment available today won’t produce very large objects. The video talks about the uses for some of these small glass items.

We wonder how much the firings in the ovens change the tiny tolerances. They obviously work, so either they account for that or it doesn’t shrink much.

If you want your own 3D printed glass, a laser system might be more practical. If you just want transparent plastic, your FDM printer can do that. Really.

Continue reading “UC Berkeley Prints Glass Nanoparticles” →

An L-shaped orange mounting structure with two white reservoirs on top, a set of pumps on the outer bottom edges, and a membrane cell bolted together in the center. The parts are connected by a series of transparent tubes.

Open Source Residential Energy Storage

August 15, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 20 Comments

Battery news typically covers the latest, greatest laboratory or industry breakthroughs to push modern devices further and faster. Could you build your own flow battery stationary storage for home-built solar and wind rigs though?

Based on the concept of appropriate technology, the system from the Flow Battery Research Collective will be easy to construct, easy to maintain, and safe to operate in a residential environment. Current experiments are focusing on Zn/I chemistry, but other aqueous chemistries could be used in the future. Instead of an ion exchange membrane, the battery uses readily attainable photo paper and is already showing similar order of magnitude performance to lab-developed cells.

Any components that aren’t off-the-shelf have been designed in FreeCAD. While they can be 3D printed, the researchers have found traditional milling yields better results which isn’t too surprising when you need something water-tight. More work is needed, but it is promising work toward a practical, DIY-able energy storage solution.

If you’re looking to build your own open source wind turbine or solar cells to charge up a home battery system, then we’ve got you covered. You can also break the chains of the power grid with off-the-shelf parts.

Liquid (Reversibly) Solidifies At Room Temperature, Gets Used For 3D Prints

August 9, 2024 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

Researchers demonstrate sustainable 3D printing by using poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) solutions (PNIPAM), which speedily and reliably turn solid by undergoing a rapid phase change when in a salt solution.

This property has been used to 3D print objects by using a syringe tip as if it were a nozzle in a filament-based printer. As long as the liquid is being printed into contact with a salt solution, the result is a polymer that solidifies upon leaving the syringe.

What’s also interesting is that the process by which the PNIPAM-based solutions solidify is entirely reversible. Researchers demonstrate printing, breaking down, then re-printing, which is an awfully neat trick. Finally, by mixing different additives in with PNIPAM, one can obtain different properties in the final product. For example, researchers demonstrate making conductive prints by adding carbon nanotubes.

While we’ve seen the concept of printing with liquids by extruding them into a gel bath or similar approach, we haven’t seen a process that prides itself on being so reversible before. The research paper with all the details is available here, so check it out for all the details.

Need Many Thin Parts? Try Multi-material Stack Printing

July 27, 2024 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

Admittedly it’s a bit of a niche application, but if you need lots of flat 3D printed objects, one way to go about it is to print them in a stack and separate them somehow. An old(er) solution is to use a non-extruding “ironing” step between each layer, which makes them easier to pull apart. But another trick is to use the fact that PLA and PETG don’t stick well to each other to your advantage. And thus is born multi-material stack printing. (Video, embedded below the break.)

[Jonathan] wants to print out multiples of his fun Multiboard mounting system backplates, and these are the ideal candidate for stack printing: they’re thin, but otherwise take up the entire build plate. As you’d expect, the main trick is to print thin layers of PETG between the PLA plate layers that you do want. He demonstrates that you can then simply pull them apart.

There are some tricks, though. First is to make two pillars in addition to the plates, which apparently convinces the slicer to not flatten all the layers together. (We don’t really understand why, honestly, but we don’t use Bambu slicer for multi-materials.) The other trick that we expect to be more widely applicable, is that [Jonathan] extrudes the PETG interlayers a little thicker than normally. Because the PETG overflows the lower PLA layer, it physically locks on even though it chemically doesn’t. This probably requires some experimentation.

As multi-material printers get cheaper, we’ve seen a lot more innovative uses for them popping up. And we wouldn’t be so stoked about the topic if there weren’t a variety of hacker projects to make it possible. Most recently, the impressive system from [Armored_Turtle] has caught our eye. Who knows what kind of crazy applications we’ll see in the future? Are you doing multi-material yet?

Continue reading “Need Many Thin Parts? Try Multi-material Stack Printing” →

A 3D-printed puzzle for the visually impaired. The pieces have both a texture and a slant.

A Puzzle For The Visually Impaired, Or Blindfolded

July 24, 2024 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

There’s no reason why a visually impaired person can’t enjoy putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It just needs to look a little different. Or, in this case, feel different.

16-year-old [feazellecw] has come up with just the solution — a puzzle with pieces that have both a defining texture and a slant in the z-height to them. While there is no picture on the puzzle face to speak of, instead there is a satisfying end result. You could change it up and add a relief image if you wanted, as long as you still observed the diagonal lines, the z-slant, and the little hole in the bottom that helps differentiate it from the top.

As [feazellecw] says, it’s important to find a box to help keep the pieces together during assembly; a 3D-printed box would be a nice touch. Files for this 15-piece puzzle are available if you’d like to make one for yourself or someone else, but just the idea might inspire you to make your own variant.

Don’t like putting puzzles together? Build a robot to do it for you.