3D Printer Tool: Set Your Extruder Steps With Ease

January 27, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 25 Comments

My printer has other issues that i'm still tuning out, but the warping in PLA and excessive surface roughness has all the signs of over extrusion. — My printer has other issues that I’m still tuning out, but the warping in PLA and excessive surface roughness has all the signs of over extrusion.

I have an old Prusa i2 that, like an old car, has been getting some major part replacements lately after many many hours of service. Recently both the extruder and the extruder motor died. The extruder died of brass fill filament sintering to the inside of the nozzle (always flush your extruder of exotic filaments). The motor died at the wires of constant flexing. Regardless, I replaced the motors and found myself with an issue; the new motor and hotend (junk motor from the junk bin, and an E3D v6, which is fantastic) worked way better and was pushing out too much filament.

The hotend, driver gear, extruder mechanics, back pressure, motor, and plastic type all work together to set how much plastic you can push through the nozzle at once. Even the speed at which the plastic is going through the nozzle can change how much friction that plastic experiences. Most of these effects are somewhat negligible. The printer does, however, have a sort of baseline steps per mm of plastic you can set.

The goal is to have a steps per mm that is exactly matched to how much plastic the printer pushes out. If you say 10mm, 10mm of filament should be eaten by the extruder. This setting is the “steps per mm” in the firmware configuration. This number should be close to perfect. Once it is, you can tune it by setting the “extrusion multiplier” setting in most slicers when you switch materials, or have environmental differences to compensate for.

This little guy lets you tune the steps per mm exactly.

The problem comes in measuring the filament that is extruded. Filament comes off a spool and is pulled through an imprecisely held nozzle in an imprecisely made extruder assembly. On top of all that, the filament twists and curves. This makes it difficult to hold against a ruler or caliper and get a trustworthy measurement.

I have come up with a little measuring device you can make with some brass tubing, sandpaper, a saw (or pipe cutter), a pencil torch, solder, and some calipers. To start with, find two pieces of tubing. The first’s ID must fit closely with the filament size you use. The second tube must allow the inside tubing to slide inside of it closely. A close fit is essential.

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Hacking Chipped 3D Printer Filament On The Da Vinci Printer

January 12, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 64 Comments

XYZ Printing has been selling 3D printers for years now with one very special feature not found in more mainstream printers. They’re using a chipped filament cartridge with a small chip inside each of their proprietary filament cartridges, meaning you can only use their filament. It’s the Gillette and ink jet model – sell the printer cheap, and make their money back on filament cartridges.

Last week at CES, XYZ Printing introduced their cheapest printer yet. It’s called the da Vinci Mini, a printer with a 15x15x15 cm build volume that costs only $269. Needless to say, a lot of these will be sold. A lot of people will also be disappointed with chipped filament cartridges in the coming months, so here’s how you defeat the latest version of chipped filament.

A little bit of research showed [WB6CQA] the latest versions of XYZ Printing’s filament uses an NFC chip. Just like the earlier EEPROM version, the latest spools of filament just store a value in memory without any encryption. [WB6CQA] pulled a board from the printer, connected it up to a logic analyzer, and checked out the data sheet for the NFC chip, giving him access to the data on the filament chip.

After running a few prints and comparing the data before and after, [WB6CQA] found a few values that changed. These values could be written back to their previous values, effectively resetting the chip in the filament and allowing third party filament to be used in this printer. It’s a kludge, but it works. More effort will be needed to remove the need to capture data with logic analyzers, but we’re well on our way to chipless filament on da Vinci printers.

Hackaday Links: January 3, 2016

January 3, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 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.

Hackaday Links: October 25, 2015

October 25, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

There are dozens of different 3D printable cases out there for the Raspberry Pi, but the BeagleBone Black, as useful as it is, doesn’t have as many options. The folks at 3D hubs thought they could solve this with a portable electronics lab for the BBB. It opens like a book, fits a half-size breadboard inside, and looks very cool.

The guy who 3D printed his lawnmower has a very, very large 3D printer. He now added a hammock to it, just so he could hang out during the very long prints.

There’s a box somewhere in your attic, basement, or garage filled with IDE cables. Wouldn’t they be useful for projects? Yep, only not all the wires work; some are grounds tied together, some are not wired straight through, and some are missing. [esot.eric] has the definitive guide for 80-wire IDE cables.

Like case mods? Here’s a golden apple, made out of walnut. Yes, there are better woods he could have used. It’s a wooden replica of a Mac 128 with a Mac Mini and LCD stuffed inside. Want a video? Here you go.

If you have a 3D printer, you’re probably familiar with PEEK. It’s the plastic used as a thermal break in non-all-metal hotends. Now it’s a filament. An extraordinarily expensive filament at €900 per kilogram. Printing temperature is 370°C, so you’ll need an all-metal hotend.

It’s the Kickstarter that just keeps going and going and going. That’s not a bad thing, though: there really isn’t much of a market for new Amiga 1200 cases. We’ve featured this project before, but the last time was unsuccessful. Now, with seven days left and just over $14k to go, it might make it this time.

Converting A 3D Printer From 3mm To 1.75mm

October 17, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

A few weeks ago, I published a post discussing the filament diameters common in 3d printing. For no reason whatsoever, consumer 3D printers have settled on two different sizes of filament. Yes, there are differences, but those differences are just a function of engineering tradeoffs and historical choices. [Thomas], YouTube’s 3D printing guru, took this post as a challenge: what does it take to convert a printer to accept different sizes of filament? Not much, actually.

The printer [Thomas] is changing out to accept 1.75mm is the Lulzbot Mini, one of the most popular printers that would ever need this modification. The only required materials is a new hot end suitable for 1.75mm filament, a 4mm drill, and a few wrenches and allen keys. It would be a smart idea to get a hot end that uses the same thermistor as the old one, but that’s not a deal-breaker as the problem can be fixed in the firmware.

Disassembly was easy enough, and after mounting the PTFE tubing, cutting the old wires, soldering in the new hot end, thermistor, and fan, [Thomas] had everything set up and ready to go.

It should be noted that changing a 3mm hot end to 1.75mm doesn’t really do anything. Just about every filament is available in both sizes, although it may not be convenient to buy 3mm filament locally. It would be a good idea to change out the hot end so can standardize your workshop or hackerspace on a single diameter of filament.

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3D Printing Has Evolved Two Filament Standards

September 29, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 56 Comments

We’re far beyond the heyday of the RepRap project, and the Hackaday tip line isn’t seeing multiple Kickstarters for 3D printers every week. In a way, this is a bit of a loss. The rapid evolution of the low-cost 3D printer seen in the first half of this decade will never be matched, and from now on we’ll only see incremental improvements instead of the revolutionary steps taken by the first Prusa, the first Printrbot, and even the Makerbot Replicator.

This doesn’t mean everything is standardized. There’s still enough room for arguing over deltas versus Cartesians, beds moving on the Y axis versus moving along the Z, and a host of other details that make the current crop of printers so diverse. One of these small arguments is especially interesting: the diameter of the filament. Today, you can get any type of plastic you want, in any color, in two sizes: 1.75 and 3mm. If you think about it, it’s bizarre. Why on Earth would filament manufacturers, hot end fabricators, and even printer manufacturers decide to support two different varieties of the same consumable? The answer is a mix of a historical choice, engineering tradeoffs, and an absolutely arbitrary consequence of what 3D printers actually do.

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A Different Kind Of Plastic Shredder For 3D Filament Making

June 14, 2015 by James Hobson 46 Comments

Haven’t you heard? You can make your own 3D filament nowadays from plastic granules (10X cheaper than filament), or even by recycling old plastic! Except if you’re recycling plastic you will have to shred it first…

[David Watkins] came up with a different way of shredding plastic. Typically we’ve seen shrunken versions of giant metal shredders used to dice up plastic into granules that can be melted down and then extruded back into filament. These work with a series of sharp toothed gears that kind of look like a stack of circular saw blades put together inside of a housing.

But that can be rather pricey. [David’s] method is super cheap, and you can do it at home with minimal tools, and maybe $10 or less worth of parts?

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