3d printing

842 Articles

This Arduino Keeps Its Eyes On You

November 13, 2019 by 5 Comments

[Will] wanted to build some animatronic eyes that didn’t require high-precision 3D printing. He wound up with a forgiving design that uses an Arduino and six servo motors. You can see the video of the eyes moving around in the video below.

The bill of materials is pretty simple and features an Arduino, a driver board, and a joystick. The 3D printing parts are easy to print with no supports, and will work with PLA. Other than opening up holes there wasn’t much post-processing required, though he did sand the actual eyeballs which sounds painful.

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Core XY Explained

November 12, 2019 by 28 Comments

If you are building a CNC machine, a 3D printer, or even a plotter, you have a need for motion in both the X and Y directions. There are many ways to accomplish this, for example, some printers move the tool in the X direction and the bed in the Y direction while others move the entire X carriage in the Y direction and yet more use a delta mechanism. However, one of the oldest means of doing this is the Core XY method. It is interesting because both motors remain stationary and the business end moves entirely on belts or cords. This is similar to the H-Bot technique, but with some differences. [Michael Laws] has a video (see below) that explains how two stationary motors can move a tool anywhere in an XY region.

The idea behind Core XY goes back to at least old drafting tables. You can think of it as an object held by two ends of the same belt. As one end of the belt gets shorter the other end gets longer. The belts are arranged so that motion of one motor causes the tool to move at a 45 degree angle. That means you have to move both motors to go in a straight line.

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Hiring From A Makerspace Pays Off

November 7, 2019 by 12 Comments

A makerspace is a great place to use specialty tools that may be too expensive or large to own by oneself, but there are other perks that come with participation in that particular community. For example, all of the skills you’ve gained by using all that fancy equipment may make you employable in some very niche situations. [lukeiamyourfather] from the Dallas Makerspace recently found himself in just that situation, and was asked to image a two-million-year-old fossil.

The fossil was being placed into a CT machine for imaging, but was too thick to properly view. These things tend to be fragile, so he spent some time laser cutting an acrylic stand in order to image the fossil vertically instead of horizontally. Everything that wasn’t fossil had to be non-conductive for the CT machine, so lots of fishing line and foam was used as well. After the imaging was done, he was also asked to 3D print a model for a display in the museum.

This is all going on at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science if you happen to be in the Dallas area. It’s interesting to see these skills put to use out in the wild as well, especially for something as rare and fragile as studying an old fossil. Also, if you’d like to see if your local makerspace measures up to the Dallas makerspace, we featured a tour of it back in 2014, although they have probably made some updates since then.

Autonomous Air Boat Vs Lake Washington

November 6, 2019 by 9 Comments

Autonomous vehicles make a regular appearance around here, as does [Daniel Riley] aka [rctestflight]. His fascination with building long-endurance autonomous vehicles continues, and this time he built an autonomous air boat.

This craft incorporates a lot of the lessons learnt from his autonomous boat that used a plastic food container. One of the biggest issues was the submerged propellers kept getting tangled in weeds. This led [Daniel] to move his props above water, sacrificing some efficiency for reliability, and turning it into an air boat. The boat itself is catamaran design with separate 3D printed hulls connected by carbon fibre tubes. As with the tupperware boat, autonomous control is done by the open source Ardupilot software.

During testing [Daniel] had another run in with his old arch-nemesis, seaweed. It turns out the sharp vertical bow is a nice edge for weeds to hook on to, create drag, and screw up the craft’s control. [Daniel]’s workaround involved moving the big batteries to the rear, causing the bows lift almost completely out of the water.

With a long endurance in mind right from the start of the project, [Daniel] put it to the test with a 13 km mission on Lake Washington very early one morning. For most of the mission the boat was completely on its own, with [Daniel] stopping at various points along the lake shore to check on its progress. Everything went smoothly until 10 km into the mission when the telemetry showed it slowing down and angling off course, after which is started going in circles. Lucky for Daniel he was offered a kayak by a lakeside resident, and he managed to recover the half sunken vessel. He suspects the cause of the failure was a slowly leaking hull. [Daniel] is already working on the next version, and were looking forward to seeing what he comes up with. Check out the video after the break. Continue reading “Autonomous Air Boat Vs Lake Washington” →

3D Printing Batteries

November 6, 2019 by 7 Comments

We’ve all gotten pretty adept at 3D printing keychains and enclosures. Some people can even 3D print circuit boards to an extent. But the real goal is a Star Trek-style replicator that just pushes out finished products. Printing different components would be a key technology and unless you want to supply external power, one of those components better be a battery or other power source like a solar cell. A recent paper entitled Additive Manufacturing of Batteries explores this technology. The paper is behind a paywall, but you can probably find a copy if you are persistent.

Some of the techniques are pretty exotic. For example, holographic lithography can produce high-performance lithium-ion batteries. However, some of the processes didn’t sound much different than some of the more common printing techniques employed by desktop printers, although with more exotic materials. For example, some batteries can be made with inkjet printing and even fused deposition printing. Continue reading “3D Printing Batteries” →

Rarely Adjusted Slicer Setting Makes A Difference

November 2, 2019 by 11 Comments

When you 3D print something, you probably adjust the layer height based on your desired print quality. Speed is another parameter that many people adjust. But what about extrusion width? The parameter is there, but most people leave it at the defaults. [Stephan] wondered about it, and after running some tests, made a video you can see below trying to determine if it affected strength and print quality.

The tests were pretty straightforward. Some Benchys and other test pieces at each setting were observed and — in some cases — destroyed. He ranged the width from 90% to 250% of a 0.4mm nozzle. Important to note, his results are from a nozzle that has a flat lip around the aperture. If yours doesn’t look like that, you will see different results.

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Josef Prusa Wants You To Change File Formats

November 1, 2019 by 65 Comments

We’ve all been there. You find that cool cat model on Thingiverse — we won’t judge. You download the STL, all ready to watch the magic of having it materialize on your print bed. But the slicer complains it isn’t manifold or watertight or something like that. What a let down. Part of this is due to shortcomings in the STL file format. There’s a newer format available, 3MF, and Josef Prusa and Jakub Kočí would like you to start using it.

STL — short for stereolithography — is a simple format that just holds a bunch of triangles. If you need any information about the part — like colors or materials. Worse still, as in our hypothetical example, there are no definition about how the triangles relate so you can create “bad” STL files. Even properly formed files can be tough to work with. You might scale for inches and the file is set for millimeters, for example.

Turns out 3MF is actually a ZIP archive and it can contain lots of information. The file can contain one or more models, colors, slicing data, copyrights, images, and lots more. The ZIP file is often shorter, too because of the compression. The big deal, though, is that the file format won’t allow nonmanifold models and removes ambiguity so that everything nicely prints. If your slicer stores data into the file — as the Prusa one does — other people using the same software can grab your settings, too.

The format isn’t really that new — it appeared around 2015 — but it hasn’t seen widespread adoption yet. Prusa encourages you to upload models in 3MF even if you also add an STL copy for people who haven’t made the switch yet.

So will you start using 3MF? Or are you already? The file format is open, they say. So if your favorite tool doesn’t like 3MF, you could always add support for it yourself.

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