bowden

5 Articles

3-DOF Robot Arm Wrist Without The Motor Weight

November 3, 2022 by 15 Comments

A major challenge of robotic arms is the weight of the actuators, especially closer to the end of the arm. The long lever arm means more torque is required from the other actuators, and everything flexes a bit more. To get around this, [RoTechnic] moved the wrist stepper motors off the arms entirely.

He built a push-pull mechanism that uses braided fishing line to transfer motion to the robot arm’s wrist using Bowden tubes. The motors are mounted on the arm’s base, with a drum and two lengths of fishing line on the shafts. The lines pass through an adjustable tensioner before entering the Bowden tubes. This drum mechanism is also present on each of the three rotating axes of the wrist.

[RoTechnic] used an Arduino-powered RAMPS board as a controller, which is programmed to accept over the serial interface. He created a simple GUI and scripting interface in Jupyter Labs to generate and send command, which seems like an excellent solution for testing.

We can see this mechanism being a useful for a variety of motion applications, and definitely something to add to the idea toolbox. It is somewhat similar to some other cable-operated joints we’ve seen in humanoid robots and other 3D printed arms.

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Belt-drive 3D-printer extruder

Back-to-Back Belts Drive Filament In This Unique Extruder Design

December 23, 2021 by 18 Comments

It’s hard to say when inspiration will strike, or what form it’ll take. But we do know that when you get that itch, it’s a good idea to scratch it, because you might just end up with something like this cool new design for a 3D printer extruder as a result.

Clearly, the world is not screaming out for new extruder designs. In fact, the traditional spring-loaded, toothed drive wheel on a stepper really does the job of feeding filament into a printer’s hot end just fine, all things considered. But [Jón Schone], aka Proper Printing on YouTube, got the idea for his belt-drive extruder from seeing how filament manufacturers handle their products. His design is a scaled-down version of that, and uses a pair of very small timing belts that run on closely spaced gears. The gears synchronize the movement of the two belts, with the filament riding in the very narrow space between the belts. It’s a simple design, with the elasticity of the belt material eliminating the need for spring pre-loading of the drive gears.

Simple in design, but not the easiest execution. The video below tells [Jón]’s tale of printing woe, from using a viscous specialty SLA resin that was really intended for a temperature-controlled printer, to build tank damage. The completed extruder was also a bit too big to mount directly on the test printer, so that took some finagling too. But at the end of the day, the idea works, and it looks pretty cool doing it.

As for potential advantages of the new design, we suppose that remains to be seen. It does seem like it would eliminate drive gear eccentricity, which we’ve seen cause print quality issues before.

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A Better Bowden Drive For Floppy Filaments

May 16, 2019 by 7 Comments

You might not think to use the word “rigid” to describe most 3D-printer filaments, but most plastic filaments are actually pretty stiff over a short length, stiff enough to be pushed into an extruder. Try the same thing with a softer plastic like TPE, though, and you might find yourself looking at this modified Bowden drive for elastomeric filaments.

The idea behind the Bowden drive favored by some 3D-printer designers is simple: clamp the filament between a motor-driven wheel and an idler to push it up a pipe into the hot end of the extruder. But with TPE and similar elastomeric filaments, [Tech2C] found that the Bowden drive on his Hypercube printer was causing jams and under-extrusion artifacts in finished prints. A careful analysis of the stock drive showed a few weaknesses, such as how much of the filament is not supported on the output side of the wheel. [Tech2C] reworked the drive to close that gap and also to move the output tube opening closer to the drive. The stock drive wheel was also replaced with a smaller diameter wheel with more aggressive knurling. Bolted to the stepper, the new drive gave remarkably improved results – a TPE vase was almost flawless with the new drive, while the old drive had blobs and artifacts galore. And a retraction test print showed no stringing at all with PLA, meaning the new drive isn’t just good for the soft stuff.

All in all, a great upgrade for this versatile and hackable little printer. We’ve seen the Hypercube before, of course – this bed height probe using SMD resistors as strain gauges connects to the other end of the Bowden drive.

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Learning Software In A Soft Exosuit

April 16, 2018 by 2 Comments

Wearables and robots don’t often intersect, because most robots rely on rigid bodies and programming while we don’t. Exoskeletons are an instance where robots interact with our bodies, and a soft exosuit is even closer to our physiology. Machine learning is closer to our minds than a simple state machine. The combination of machine learning software and a soft exosuit is a match made in heaven for the Harvard Biodesign Lab and Agile Robotics Lab.

Machine learning studies a walker’s steady gait for twenty periods while vitals are monitored to assess how much energy is being expended. After watching, the taught machine assists instead of assessing. This type of personalization has been done in the past, but the addition of machine learning shows that the necessary customization can be programmed into each machine without a team of humans.

Exoskeletons are no stranger to these pages, our 2017 Hackaday Prize gave $1000 to an open-source set of robotic legs and reported on an exoskeleton to keep seniors safe.

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Experiments With A Bowden Extruder Filament Force Sensor

February 9, 2016 by 20 Comments

We were excited to learn that someone had started working with force sensors on filament extruders, especially after we posted about a recent development in filament thickness sensors.

[airtripper] primarily uses a Bowden extruder, and wanted to be a little more scientific in his 3D printing efforts. So he purchased a force sensor off eBay and modified his extruder design to fit it. Once installed he could see exactly how different temperatures, retraction rates, speed, etc. resulted in different forces on the extruder. He used this information to tune his printer just a bit better.

More interesting, [airtripper] used his new sensor to validate the powers of various extruder gears. These are the gears that actually transfer the driving force of the stepper to the filament itself. He tested some of the common drive gears, and proved that the Mk8 gear slipped the least and provided the most constant force. We love to see this kind of science in the 3D printing community — let’s see if someone can replicate his findings.