Prusa Unveils Their Own Line Of PLA Filament

September 21, 2018 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

There’s little debate that the Original Prusa i3 MK3 by Prusa Research is just about the best desktop 3D printer you can buy, at least in its price bracket. It consistently rates among the highest machines in terms of print quality and consistency, and offers cutting edge features thanks to its open source iterative development. Unless you’re trying to come in under a specific budget, you really can’t go wrong with a Prusa machine.

But while the machine itself can be counted on to deliver consistent results, the same can’t always be said for the filament you feed into it. In a recent blog post, [Josef Prusa] explains that his team was surprised to see just how poor the physical consistency was on even premium brands of 3D printer filament. As a company that prides itself with keeping as much of the 3D printing experience under their control as possible, they felt they had an obligation to do better for their customers. That’s why they’ve started making their own filament which they can hold to the same standards as the rest of their printer.

Their new filament, which is aptly called “Prusament”, is held to higher physical standards of not only diameter but ovality. Many manufacturers simply perform spot checks on the filament’s diameter, but this can miss bulges or changes in its cross-sectional shape. On your average 3D printer this might cause some slightly uneven extrusion and a dip in print quality, but likely not a failure. But the Prusa i3 MK3, specifically with the Multi Material upgrade installed, isn’t most printers. During testing even these slight variations were enough to cause jams.

But you won’t have to take their word for it. Every spool of Prusament will have a QR code that points to a page which tells you the exact production date, length, percent ovality, and standard diameter deviation of that particular roll. An interactive graph will even allow you to find the filament’s diameter for a specific position in the spool, as well as determine how much filament is remaining for a given spool weight. It should be very interesting to see what the community will do with this information, and we predict some very interesting OctoPrint plugins coming down the line.

Prusament is currently only available in PLA, but PETG and ASA variants are coming soon. You can order it now directly from Prusa Research in Prague for $24.99 per kilogram, but it will also be available on Amazon within the month for help keep the shipping costs down.

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Refurbishing An Old P3Steel

October 4, 2017 by Pedro Umbelino 15 Comments

In the aftermath of the London Unconference, after the usual ~~beer drinking~~ networking at the pub, I meet Javier Varela, one of our many readers that were present. It turns out my fellow Iberic friend is involved in some interesting hardware projects, one of them being the OVM20 Lite board. I was looking for an excuse to mess around with my old Prusa and this was the perfect one. The P3Steel 3D printer was just getting dusty on my basement and it printed just fine in the past. Until one day…

Based on Arduino Mega 2560 with the RAMPS 1.4, it was a pretty standard and cheap option to get some years ago (and still is). My additional modifications or upgrades from the standard options was a LCD screen and the DRV8825 stepper drivers.

What happened was that one fine day the prints started to skew. No matter how hard I tried, it skewed. I checked the driver’s potentiometer, I went back to the motor specifications, I swapped drivers around, and I even flashed another firmware. If the print was big enough, it will get messed up. Sometimes even small prints failed. When you are debugging something like this for hours, there comes a point in time that you start to suspect everything. Was it overheating the drivers? If so, why did this never happened before? Maybe the power supply is fluctuating and coming to the end of its life? Some messed up capacitor in the board? Was it RAMPS’ fault or Arduino? A motor starting to fail? A mechanical issue? I had a fine-tuned Marlin firmware that I manually tweaked and slightly changed, which I had no backup off after the flashing. In retrospect, I actually checked for a lot of things that couldn’t really be related to the problem back then but I also learned quite a lot.

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Josef Prusa: Multi Material Extruders For Amazing Color Prints

May 23, 2017 by Mike Szczys 61 Comments

The Prusa i3 Mk 2 is the hotness in consumer-grade, quality 3D printing right now. And things just keep getting more interesting. We caught up with Josef Průša at Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend to see the multi-material extruder in its final form. It’s an upgrade to the Mk 2 which allows a single hot end to print in four different materials, be it different colors or different types of filament.

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Hackaday Links: April 2, 2017

April 2, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

Toorcamp registration is open. It’s June 20-24th on Orcas Island, Washington.

Hey, you. The guy still using Mentor Graphics. Yeah, you. Siemens has acquired Mentor Graphics.

CNC knitting machines are incredibly complicated but exceptionally cool. Until now, most CNC knitting machines are actually conversions of commercial machines. Beginning with [Travis Goodspeed] and [Fabienne Serriere] hack of a knitting machine, [Becky Stern]’s efforts, and the Knitic project, these knitting machines are really just brain transplants of old Brother knitting machines. A few of the folks from the OpenKnit project have been working to change this, and now they’re ready for production. Kniterate is a project on Kickstarter that’s a modern knitting machine, and basically a 2D woolen printer. This is an expensive machine at about $4500, but if you’ve ever seen the inside of one of these knitting machines, you’ll know building one of these things from scratch is challenging.

There was a time when a Macintosh computer could play games. Yes, I know this sounds bizarre, but you could play SimCity 2000, Diablo, and LucasArts adventure games on a machine coming out of Cupertino. [Novaspirit] wanted to relive his childhood, so he set up a Mac OS 7 emulator on a Raspberry Pi. He’s using Minivmac, beginning with an install of OS 7.1, upgrading that to 7.5.3, then upgrading that to 7.5.5. It should be noted the utility of the upgrade to 7.5.5 is questionable — the only real changes from 7.5.3 to 7.5.5 are improved virtual memory support (just change some emulator settings to get around that) and networking support (which is difficult on an emulator). If you’re going to upgrade to 7.5.5, just upgrade to 8.1 instead.

It’s getting warmer in the northern hemisphere, and you know what that means: people building swamp coolers. And you know what that means: people arguing about the thermodynamics of swamp coolers. We love these builds, so if you have a swamp cooler send it on in to the tip line.

The Prusa edition of Slic3r is out. The improvements? It’s not a single core app anymore (!), so slicing is faster. It’s got that neat variable layer slicing. Check out all the features.

It takes at least a week to delete your Facebook account. In the meantime, you can lawyer up and hit the gym. Additionally, we’re not really sure Facebook actually deletes your profile when you disable your account. Robots to the rescue. [anerdev] built a robot to delete all his content from Facebook. It’s a pair of servos with touchpad-sensitive pens. Add an Arduino, and you have a Facebook deleting machine.

Hands On With Variable Layer Height

February 16, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

3D printers are an exercise in compromise. Generally, you don’t want a lot of mass on your tool head, as that can lead to ringing and other mechanical artifacts on your print. However, direct drive extruders are better for many filaments, and the decision on what printer to build ultimately comes down to a choice between speed, build area, and the ability to print in exotic filaments.

Even in slicing a 3D model, a 3D printing enthusiast must balance the quality of a print versus how long the print will take to squirt out of a nozzle. Now, just about any printer can produce fantastic models at a very high layer height, but no one wants to wait several days for the print to finish.

This balance between print time and print quality has, for the last few years, been completely ignored. One of the best solutions to this we’ve seen is variable layer height slicing. Basically, if you’re printing something without much detail, you don’t need small layers in your 3D print. Think of it as printing the neck of a bust at 0.3mm layer height, and the face at 0.1mm.

Yes, there were a few papers from a decade ago laying the conceptual foundations of variable layer height slicing. 3D printers weren’t exactly common back then, though. Recently, Autodesk’s Integrated Additive Manufacturing Team released Varislice for automatic generation of variable layer heights on a 3D printed object. So far, though, there’s no good automated solution for variable layer height slicing, and the tools for manual configuration of variable layer height slicing are terrible.

For the past few months, Prusa Research has been working on their own edition of Slic3r that includes an easy to use interface for variable layer height slicing. This version of Slic3r was just released, and now it’s time for the hands-on. Does variable layer height slicing work?

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Where There’s Smoke, There’s A Knockoff 3D Printer

January 5, 2017 by Lewin Day 46 Comments

These days, it’s possible to buy clones of popular 3D printers from China for satisfyingly low prices. As always, you get what you pay for, and while usable, often they require some modification to reach their full potential. [g3ggo] recently laid down €270 for a clone of the Prusa i3 by Geeetech, knowing it would require some modifications for safety and performance.

First on the bill was a wobbly Z-axis, which was dealt with by printing some new parts designed to fix this issue which have already been developed by the community. Forums are your friend here – often an enterprising user will have already developed fixes for the most common issues, and if they haven’t, you can always step up to be the hero yourself. There was a darker problem lurking inside, though.

[g3ggo] began to wonder why the MOSFETs for the hot end were running so hot. It turned out to be an issue of gate drive – the FETs were only being driven with 5V, which for the given part, wasn’t enough to reach its lowest R_DS(on) and thus was causing the overheating issue. It gets worse, though – the heatsinks on the MOSFETs were bolted on directly without insulation, and sitting fractions of a millimeter above traces on the PCB. Unfortunately, with a small scratch to the soldermask, this caused a short circuit, destroying the hot end and MOSFETs and narrowly avoiding a fire. This is why you never leave 3D printers unattended.

The fix? Replacing the MOSFETs with a part that could deal with a 5V gate drive was the first step, followed by using insulating pads & glue to stop the heatsinks contacting the PCB. Now with the cooler running MOSFETs, there’s less chance of fire, and the mainboard’s cooling fan isn’t even required anymore. Overall, for a small investment in time and parts, [g3ggo] now has a useful 3D printer and learned something along the way. Solid effort!

Hackaday Links: December 4, 2016

December 4, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

The Chaos Communication Congress is growing! Actually, it’s not, but there may be an ‘overflow venue’ for everyone who didn’t get a ticket. There’s a slack up for people who didn’t get a ticket to 33C3 but would still like to rent a venue, set up some tables, stream some videos, and generally have a good time.

Need to test a lot of batteries? Have one of those magnetic parts tray/dish things sitting around? This is freakin’ brilliant. Put your batteries vertically in a metal dish, clip one lead of a meter to the dish and probe each battery with the other lead of your meter.

Pravda reports the USS Zumwalt and HMS Duncan – the most technologically advanced ships in the US and Royal Navies – have turned into, ‘useless tin cans due to China’, with ‘Microchips made in China putting the vessels out of action’. Again, Pravda reports this, so don’t worry. In other news, someone found a few USB drives in a parking lot in Norfolk, Virginia.

Here’s how discourse goes on the Internet. Someone does something. Everyone says it’s stupid. We wait a few days or weeks. Someone posts something on Medium telling everyone it’s actually okay. Public opinion is muddled until the actual issue being discussed is rendered technologically irrelevant. For the newest MacBook Pro, we’re currently at stage 3 and ‘it’s kind of great for hackers’. Now if only we knew how to make USB-C ports work with microcontrollers…

If you have a Prusa i3, here’s a free gift: a Spitfire. The files to print a remote control, 973mm Spitfire Mk XVI are now free for Prusa i3 and i3 Mk 2 owners. Why? Because it’s cool, duh, and [Stephan Dokupil] and [Patrik Svida], the guys behind the Spitfire and other 3D printed RC planes, are also in Czech. Now all we need are Czech roundel stickers.