Modding The Monoprice MP Mini Printer

July 7, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 66 Comments

Two weeks after my review of the MP Select Mini 3D printer, Monoprice’s own website has said this printer has been out of stock, in stock, and out of stock again several times. This almost unimaginably cheap 3D printer is proving to be exceptionally popular, and is in my opinion, a game-changing machine for the entire world of 3D printing.

With the popularity of this cheap printer that’s more than halfway decent, there are bound to be improvements. Those of us who have any experience with 3D printers aren’t going to be satisfied with a machine with any shortcomings, especially if it means we can print enhancements and mods for our printers.

Below are the best mods currently available for this exceptional printer. Obvious problems with the printer are corrected, and it’s made a little more robust. There are mods to add a glass build plate, and a few people are even messing around with the firmware on this machine. Consider this volume one of the MP Mini hacks; with a cheap printer that’s actually good, there are bound to be more improvements.

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Build A 3D Printer Workhorse, Not An Amazing Disappointment Machine

July 6, 2016 by Moritz Walter 68 Comments

3D printers have become incredibly cheap, you can get a fully workable unit for $200 – even without throwing your money down a crowdfunded abyss. Looking at the folks who still buy kits or even build their own 3D printer from scratch, investing far more than those $200 and so many hours of work into a machine you can buy for cheap, the question “Why the heck would you do that?” may justifiably arise.

The answer is simple: DIY 3D printers done right are rugged workhorses. They work every single time, they never break, and even if: they are an inexhaustible source of spare parts for themselves. They have exactly the quality and functionality you build them to have. No clutter and nothing’s missing. However, the term DIY 3D printer, in its current commonly accepted use, actually means: the first and the last 3D printer someone ever built, which often ends in the amazing disappointment machine.

This post is dedicated to unlocking the full potential in all of these builds, and to turning almost any combination of threaded rods and plywood into a workshop-grade piece of equipment.

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R/C Hot Rod Built Completely From Scratch

July 4, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 14 Comments

[ossum]’s R/C hot rod shows what’s possible when a talented hacker takes full advantage of all the modern resources available to them. The results are stunning.

[ossum] had a stack of Amazon and Shapeways credits lying around after winning a few competitions. He had this dream of building an R/C car for a while, and decided now was the time. After ordering all the needed parts from Amazon, he made an extremely nice model of the car in Fusion 360. The CAD model is a great learning resource. If you want to learn how to use reference photos, parts, and more to build a detailed and useful CAD model we recommend downloading it as a Fusion archive and scrubbing through the timeline to see how he did it.

Some of the parts were sent off for laser cutting. Others were 3D printed. The rest he made himself. Thanks to his model, they all went together well. You can see his R/C rod racing in the video after the break.

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3D Printed Zoetrope Sculpture Squashes 4 Dimensions Into 3

June 29, 2016 by Donald Papp 46 Comments

This fascinating project manages to be both something new and something old done in a new way. Artist [Akinori Goto] has used 3D printing to create a sort of frameless zoetrope. It consists of a short animation of a human figure, but the 3D movements of that figure through time are “smeared” across a circular zone – instead of the movements of the figure being captured as individual figures or frames, they are combined into a single object, in a way squashing 4 dimensions into 3.

“Slices” of that object, when illuminated by a thin shaft of light, reveal the figure’s pose at a particular moment in time. When the object is spun while illuminated in this way, the figure appears to be animated in a manner very similar to a zoetrope.

There are two versions from [Akinori Goto] that we were able to find. The one shown above is a human figure walking, but there is a more recent and more ambitious version showing a dancer in motion, embedded below.

Since a thin ray of light is used to illuminate a single slice of the sculpture at a time, it’s also possible to use multiple points of illumination – or even move them – for different visual effects. Check out the videos below to see these in action.

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One Man’s Journey To Build Portable Concrete 3D Printer Produces Its First Tiny House

June 28, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 71 Comments

[Alex Le Roux] want to 3D print houses. Rather than all the trouble we go through now, the contractor would make a foundation, set-up the 3D printer, feed it concrete, and go to lunch.

It’s by no means the first concrete printer we’ve covered, but the progress he’s made is really interesting. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s claimed to make the first livable structure in the United States. We’re not qualified to verify that statement, maybe a reader can help out, but that’s pretty cool!

The printer is a very scaled gantry system. To avoid having an extremely heavy frame, the eventual design assumes that the concrete will be pumped up to the extruder; for now he is just shoveling it into a funnel as the printer needs it. The extruder appears to be auger based, pushing concrete out of a nozzle. The gantry contains the X and Z. It rides on rails pinned to the ground which function as the Y. This is a good solution that will jive well with most of the skills that construction workers already have.

Having a look inside the controls box we can see that it’s a RAMPS board with the step and direction outputs fed into larger stepper drivers, the laptop is even running pronterface. It seems like he is generating his STLs with Sketch-Up.

[Alex] is working on version three of his printer. He’s also looking for people who would like a small house printed. We assume it’s pretty hard to test the printer after you’ve filled your yard with tiny houses. If you’d like one get in touch with him via the email on his page. His next goal is to print a fully up to code house in Michigan. We’ll certainly be following [Alex]’s tumblr to see what kind of progress he makes next!

Mosaic Palette: Single Extruder Multi-Color And Multi-Material 3D Printing

June 20, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 32 Comments

Lots of solutions have been proposed and enacted for multi-color and multi-material 3D printing, from color mixing in the nozzle to scripts requiring manual filament change. A solution proposed fairly early on was to manually splice the filament together, making a custom spool. The printer would print as normal, but the filament would change color. This worked pretty well, but it was tedious and it wasn’t entirely possible to control where the color change happened on the model.

You’ll find some examples of the more successful manual splicing hacks in the pictures below. Scroll down a bit further to find our interview with Mosaic Manufacturing at Bay Area Maker Faire 2016. They have a new product that automates the filament splicing process with precision as the ultimate goal. It unlocks a single extruder printer to behave like a multi-extruder model without stopping and starting.

Terminus’s Ultrasonic Splicer http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:297380

Malcom’s Handheld Splicer http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16258

RichRap’s Filament Joiner http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:297380

Mosaic pulled off a very difficult combination of two methods mentioned above. Their flagship product is a machine they’ve dubbed, “Palette”. It’s an automatic filament splicer. Up to four different filaments can feed into Palette, and it will splice them at determined intervals. This would be cool by itself, if only to save the tedium of splicing and winding a custom spool by hand.

The real killer app with Palette, however, is the software that runs alongside it. Palette can take the GCODE output of any properly prepared multi material file from any slicer, and then precisely combine and splice the filament. This can feed into any printer without modifying it, aside from sticking an encoder somewhere in the filament path. The results are indistinguishable from a dual, or quad extruder set-up.

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Hackaday Links: June 12, 2016

June 12, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 36 Comments

The Navy is doing some crazy stuff out in China Lake. They were planning to test something out that could potentially make GPS unusable from San Diego to Las Vegas to San Francisco. Those plans were cancelled for ‘internal’ reasons. They will be testing something in Indiana shortly, though. What are they doing? Who knows. That’s what idle speculation in the comments section is for.

3D Hubs, the distributed ‘3D printing service’ thing, now has 30,000 machines distributed around the globe. They also put together the definitive guide to 3D printing recently. For just about everyone reading this, a ‘introduction to 3D printing’ is old news, but this is a very good guide for telling your weird aunt what you’re building in the basement. Forward this one to your family on Facebook.

This one is amazing. Over on Hackaday.io, [Arsenijs] is working on a Raspberry Pi project. It uses a Raspberry Pi, and several accessories and components to make this Raspberry Pi project work. This Raspberry Pi project is already getting far more than the usual number of likes and follows, making this one of the most interesting Raspberry Pi projects in recent memory.

Moog is re-releasing the Minimoog, the original Moog synth from 1970. That’s cool, but what about a DIY Minimoog? That’s what [Scott Rider] is doing with the Crowminius Analog Music Synthesizer on Kickstarter. It’s an analog synth that’s more or less a Minimoog with MIDI, and one of the Kickstarter rewards is a bare PCB.

The future is dancing robots, so here’s a servo-driven Stewart platform that is sure to bring on the robot apocalypse.

What do you do when you need to get your Hackaday fix, but all you have is a laptop from 1995 and a dial-up modem? The Hackaday Retro Edition, of course. That’s a bunch of retro Hackaday posts, posted five at a time, with all the CSS and JavaScript cruft stripped. We’re always interested to see the old machines that are pulling the retro edition down, and [djnikochan] has the latest entry. He found a Thinkpad 380ED from 1997 at the Goodwill store for $15. The RAM was upgraded with a 64MB SIMM, giving this machine a total of 80MB. The Hackaday Retro Edition is viewable with IE 5.5 over a trusty PCMICA WiFi card. Awesome job, and we love to see old iron rendering the retro edition. Send some pics in if you get your old battlestation to load it.