Handheld Propulsion Is Noisy, Awesome

April 3, 2018 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

Lithium batteries are ubiquitous, cheap, and incredibly powerful. Combine them with some brushless DC motors and you’ve got serious power in a compact package. [Ivan Miranda] decided to use this to his advantage, building the Handheld Self Propelling System #1.

Yes, we’ll come right out and say it – it’s a giant fan, and it blows. Or more accurately, it’s four moderately sized fans in one fetching wrist-mounted package. The one thing that seems completely absent from the video is an answer to the obvious question – why? Other than doing damage to the hearing of anyone nearby in an enclosed space, [Ivan] demonstrates its use with the help of a skateboard in the back end of the video.

It’s built with off-the-shelf RC parts and the body is 3D printed. This is the kind of print you want to get right first time – it takes several days to print and uses a significant amount of filament.

Overall, it’s a terrifying device that promises to do something awesome when finished. [Ivan]’s just finished the thrust test and we can’t wait to see what comes next.

If you’re looking for another way to propel yourself on a skateboard, well – there’s always the more conventional electric path.

https://youtu.be/WmMkUWvBC64

Giant F1 Car Is 3D Printed And Radio Controlled

April 2, 2018 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

The OpenRC F1 car is a radio control car you can 3D print and assemble yourself. You make the parts, glue them together, and then add your RC gear. That’s all well and good, but could it be done… bigger? [3D Printing Nerd] decided to tackle this one at 4x scale.

It goes without saying that this took some work. The model has to be carved up into sections that would actually fit on the printers to hand. This can take some planning to ensure the parts still come out nicely, as they may be printed in different orientations or with different slicer settings than originally intended.

That’s just the start, though. Once they’re printed, the parts need to be accurately aligned and glued together, which is a whole extra set of challenges. Urethane, epoxy and superglue adhesives are all pressed into service here to get the job done.

It’s a multipart build, as it’s a huge undertaking to 3D print anything on this scale. It’s a great example of taking a fun project, and turning up the silly factor to 11. And of course, at the end of the day, you’ve got a gigantic RC car to play with. Perhaps the only bigger RC cars we’ve seen have been… actual cars.

Bringing Fiction To Life With 3D Printing

April 2, 2018 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

I print something nearly every day, and over the last few years, I’ve created hundreds of practical items. Parts to repair my car, specialized tools, scientific instruments, the list goes on and on. It’s very difficult for me to imagine going back to a time where I didn’t have the ability to rapidly create and replicate physical objects at home. I can say with complete honesty that it has been an absolutely life-changing technology for me, personally.

But to everyone else in my life, my friends and family, 3D printers are magical boxes which can produce gadgets, weapons, and characters from their favorite games and movies. Nobody wants to see the parts I made to get my girlfriend’s 1980’s Honda back on the road before she had to go to work in the morning, they want to see the Minecraft block I made for my daughter. I can’t get anyone interested in a device I made to detect the algal density of a sample of water, but they all want me to run off a set of the stones from The Fifth Element for them.

As I recently finished just such a project, a 3D printed limpet mine from Battlefield 1, I thought I would share some thoughts on the best practices for turning fiction into non-fiction.

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3D Printed Tank Tracks

March 31, 2018 by Al Williams 10 Comments

[Ivan] has been keeping his 3D printers busy with parts he’s experimenting with to build a tracked motion setup for a tank-like vehicle. His design uses several interlocking parts, so if you want to duplicate it, we hope your printer calibration is up to snuff. He’s still printing more parts and promises to release the files once the design proves out.

However, you can see he’s off to a good start. Small pieces fit together and accept a piece of filament as a sort of hinge. Some pins keep the filament from working out. Pads fit into the main parts and hold down with zip ties. The whole flexible tread locks into sprockets and a groove on a drive wheel.

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The Essential List Of 3D Printer Accessories

March 28, 2018 by Tom Nardi 108 Comments

You’ve acquired your first 3D printer and are giddy with excitement. But like all new additive manufacturing adventurers, the more you do with your printer the more questions arise. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back.

Getting the most out of your time with a new 3D printer has a lot to do with the tools and accessories on hand and what you do with them. Let’s take a look at a few of the accessories that should accompany every 3D printer, be it in your home, school, or hackerspace. There’s already enough potential aggravation when it comes to 3D printing, the goal here is to ensure you won’t be without a tool or supply when you need it the most.

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Hands On With Filament Splicing Robots

March 24, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

The future of 3D printing, it seems, is in multimaterial filament printers. The Prusa I3 multimaterial upgrade exists, and this weekend at MRRF E3D announced their amazing multihead printer. Multimaterial printing will get you mechanical parts with the properties you want, like wheels with grippy treads and strong hubs. It will give you easily removable support material. The most popular use, though, is bound to be multicolor prints. It’s easier to do, as you’re really only working with either ABS or PLA, and if you’re really clever, you can squeeze everything through a single nozzle.

While there are some very ingenious ways of printing in multiple colors of filament, one technique that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is automated filament splicing. With this, a piece of software analyzes a model, and combines multiple spools of filament into one long strand. A machine that’s getting a lot of attention is the Palette+ from Mosaic Manufacturing. There were a few of these on hand at this weekend’s Midwest RepRap Festival, and here anyone could get a hands-on with this machine without spending $800.

The inside of the Palette+

The splicing mechanism of the Palette+

When it comes to multicolor and multimaterial prints, the first question that comes to mind is the toolchain and the process of turning an STL file into a physical object. The Palette+ uses a piece of software called Chroma that takes STL files as its input. Each color in the object to be printed is actually a separate STL file, combined on Chroma’s build platform. The Charmander print shown above is actually four different prints; the white eyes are one STL, the orange body is a second, the yellow belly is a third, and the red flame on the tail is a fourth STL. In the Chroma app, these STLs are assembled, colors are assigned, and a file generated that’s stored on an SD card and shoved in the Palette robot. The Palette then assembles a custom length of filament with the right colors in the right places. Combine this with some G-code from your favorite slicer, and you have everything you need for multicolor printing with the printer you already own.

The results are fantastic, and the best I’ve ever seen from a multicolor filament-based printer, whether it’s a dual-extrusion head, Prusa’s Multimaterial upgrade, or a bizarre machine with multiple toolheads.

Of course, there are downsides. Because the Palette is designed for single-extruder printers, you’re not going to be able to combine ABS and PLA filament. Combining fancy engineering plastics and colorful PLA is right out. This is a machine that can only use one type of plastic at a time.

That said, we’re getting very, very close to an era of true multicolor printing. Of course, this machine costs as much as a good 3D printer, but if you just want to print some colorful blobs of plastic, I haven’t seen anything better.

3D Printer Halts And Catches Fire — Analysis Finds A Surprising Culprit

March 18, 2018 by Al Williams 144 Comments

Let’s build a robot that gets hot. Really hot — like three times hotter than McDonald’s coffee. Then make it move around. And let’s get the cost in at around $100. Sounds crazy? Not really, since that describes the cheap 3D printers we all have been buying. [John] found out the hard way that you really need to be careful with hot moving parts.

The short story is that [John’s] Anet A8 caught on fire — significantly caught on fire. Common wisdom says that cheap printers often don’t have connectors for the heated bed that can handle the current. There have been several well-publicized cases of those connectors melting, especially on early production models of several printers. However, this printer had an add-on heater with a relay, so that shouldn’t be the problem. Of course, a cheap power supply could do it, too, but the evidence pointed to it being none of those things.

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