A8

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How Cheap Can A 3D Printer Get? The Anet A8

December 8, 2017 by 89 Comments

The short answer: something like $200, if your time is worth $0/hour. How is this possible? Cheap kit printers, with laser-cut acrylic frames, but otherwise reasonably solid components. In particular, for this review, an Anet A8. If you’re willing to add a little sweat equity and fix up some of the bugs, an A8 can be turned into a good 3D printer on a shoestring budget.

That said, the A8 is a printer kit, not a printer. You’re going to be responsible for assembly of every last M3 screw, and there are many. Building the thing took me eight or ten hours over three evenings. It’s not rocket surgery, though. There are very accessible videos available online, and a community of people dedicated to turning this box of parts into a great machine. You can do it if you want to.

This article is half how-to guide and half review, and while the fun of a how-to is in the details, the review part is easy enough to sum up: if you want the experience of building a 3D printer, and don’t mind tweaking to get things just right, you should absolutely look into the A8. If you want a backup printer that can print well enough right after assembly, the A8 is a good deal as well; most of the work I’ve put into mine is in chasing perfection. But there are a couple reasons that I’d hesitate to recommend it to a rank beginner, and one of them is fire.

Still, I’ve put 1,615 m (1.0035 miles) of filament through my A8 over 330 hours of run-time spread across the last three months — it’s been actively running for 15% of its lifetime! Some parts have broken, and some have “needed” improving, but basically, it’s been a very functional machine with only three or four hours of unintentional downtime. My expectations going in were naturally fairly low, but the A8 has turned out to be not just a workhorse but also a decent performer, with a little TLC. In short, it’s a hacker’s printer, and I love it.

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Hackaday Links: January 24, 2016

January 24, 2016 by 14 Comments

The RepRap wiki was spammed this week. Everything is fine now, but I feel I should call attention to the fact that the RepRap wiki needs some people to contribute, organize, and maintain everything. The wikis for obscure anime shows are better than the RepRap wiki, so if you’re looking to contribute to an important open source project, there ‘ya go.

The 200cc, 5.5HP, 4-stroke OHV Honda GX200 engine is found in a whole lot of tools, and is a fantastic power plant to build a go-kart around. It also costs about $350. There are clones of this engine available direct from China for about $100. Here’s how you add a turbo to one of these clone engines.

Freescale makes some pretty cool sensors and [Juan Ignacio Cerrudo] figured they needed breakout boards. He has some boards for a low-power three-axis accelerometer, an accelerometer and magnetometer, and a pressure sensor.

The Tektronix TDS744A is an older but still extremely capable 500MHz, 2Gsps, 4-channel scope. You can upgrade it to the 1GHz TDS784A by desoldering a few resistors. Very cool if you’re looking for a cheap-ish 1GHz scope.

[TheBackyardScientist] hung out with some cub scouts a few weekends ago and launched a high altitude balloon over Florida. The payload included a game camera, APRS tracker, GoPro, and a few other bits and bobs. The balloon reached 106,000 feet and landed only a few miles from Cape Canaveral.

Big RC planes – UAVs especially – are a pain to launch. Flying wings above a certain size are just dangerous to launch by hand, and landing gear is heavy and for the most part unnecessary. What’s the next best solution? A trebuchet, of course. It mounts on a car and is able to give a UAV a little bit of altitude and some speed. A pretty good idea that could be easily implemented with some load-bearing PVC pipe.

Everybody likes the Game of Life, so here’s one built with a 6502. It’s built around a Western Design Center 65c816 board we’ve seen before, nine MAX7219 LED controllers mapped to the VIA, and nine 8×8 LED matrix displays. Here’s a video of it in action.

About a month ago, a search of AliExpress turned up Apple’s A8 CPU. I bought one. Here’s what I got. It’s a stupidly small pitch BGA, and I don’t have a datasheet. What am I going to do with it? Make a non-functioning board with a few ports, resistors, no traces, and the A8 chip planted square in the middle.

Hackaday Links: January 3, 2016

January 3, 2016 by 19 Comments

Cx5 is a strange material that’s a favorite of model makers and prop replicators. It’s kind of like a wax, kind of like a clay, and a little bit like a plastic. Now it’s a 3D printer filament. It looks very interesting for sculpted and highly detailed models, something the 3D printing scene hasn’t had yet.

So you want a CNC machine, right? Tormach makes a good one, and here’s what it takes to put a PCNC440 in your garage. This is an incredible amount of work and a great excuse to buy an engine hoist.

[Zemnmez] could find dozens of apps and webpages that would calculate resistor color codes for him automatically. What he couldn’t find is one that would do it in reverse – i.e. type in a resistor value and return the correct color code. He made this.

[aggaz] needed a way to connect multiple MIDI devices to his computer. The MIDI spec provides a neat piece of hardware for just this occasion – the MIDI thru box. The only thing you need to build a single MIDI thru box is an opto-isolator and a buffer. It’s easy enough to build, although the DIN5 jacks used for MIDI devices are pretty expensive nowadays. (FWIW- We get an invalid certificate error when loading this page but you should still be able to load it.)

AliExpress always has some interesting stuff on it, and [Ethan] found something very cool. They’re A8 CPUs found in the latest iPhone. Are they real? Who knows. I bought one, and you’re going to get pictures in another links post in a month or so.

The Game Boy Micro was released by Nintendo in 2005 and quickly became one of the coolest and most desired handheld consoles on the planet. You need only look at the eBay listings for the Micro as evidence of its desirability. [ModPurist] took an old DS Lite and converted it into a Game Boy Micro – same idea, larger package.