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9 Articles

Kicking The Tires Before You Buy: 3d Printers

February 22, 2016 by 103 Comments

So you’re looking to buy your first 3D printer, and your index finger is quivering over that 300 US Dollar printer on Amazon.com. Stop! You’re about to have a bad time. 3D printing has come a long way, but most 3D printers are designed through witchcraft, legends, and tall tales rather than any rigorous engineering process. I would say most 3D printer designs are either just plain bad, or designed by a team of Chinese engineers applying all their ingenuity to cost cutting. There are a few that are well designed, and there is a comparatively higher price tag attached.

I’ll start by going through some of the myths and legends that show up in 3D printers. After that I’ll go through some of the common, mostly gimmick, features that typically hinder your printer’s ability, rather than adding any useful function. Next I’ll go onto the things that will actually make your printer better. Finally, I’ll add some special consideration if you’re a beginner buying your first printer.

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Mostly Wood Motorized Camera Slider

December 26, 2015 by 6 Comments

Camera slides can make for interesting dolly shots in your videos, or can spice up an otherwise drab time-lapse sequence. When it came time for one of his own, [Bob] did what any hacker would do and rolled his own motorized camera slide in the wood shop.

We always like to see work based on a hacker’s own prior art, and [Bob] managed to leverage parts and techniques from his impromptu claw machine build for this slider. The rollers in this project use the same 3/4″ angle aluminum and skateboard bearings as the previous build. The bearings roll on a plywood strip capped with the same angle stock for durability and low friction. The stepper motor bracket and pillow blocks are 3D printed, as are the timing pulleys. [Bob] admits that the whole rig is a little noisy and blames it on the rough quality of the pulley prints. He has plans to replace them with commercially available pulleys, which should help; one further suggestion we have is to code a soft-start algorithm into the ATtiny85 to eliminate that jerkiness you see when he demos the slider in the video below.

There are plenty of ways to move a camera along a single axis, and a surprising number of them use parts from the roller sports. We’ve covered quite a few of them before, like this slide that uses skateboard trucks, or this non-motorized rig built from fence posts and inline skate wheels.

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