MakerBot’s R&D all-stars have been printing up a PLA storm on our MakerBot Replicators and getting impressive results! Last night we did an overnight time-lapse of this skull and it turned out beautifully!

Success!

Thingiverse user arkatipe recently posted their designs for a “device to repair plastic hangers.”  The device itself is little more than a hollow plastic cylinder.  However, the way arkatipe used this simple PLA cylinder is particularly interesting.

This is intentionally a little bit smaller than the hanger diameter. I’d recommend that you clean it up, drop it in a cup of water, then stick it in the microwave for a minute or so. After it’s softened up, press it on the hanger and hold it in shape until it hardens.

PLA softens at a much lower temperature than ABS and tends to hold the heat a little longer, staying malleable.  Having a little plastic part that can be printed very close to what you need, softened, molded, and then left to cool and harden could be incredibly useful.  It really opens up a world of possibilities.  If there were a particular shape that one could foresee being very useful, you could print up several of them and keep them on hand.  When you’re read to use them, moisten, nuke, mold, harden.

Thanks arkatipe!

Device to repair a plastic hanger by arkatipe

Because hangers cost $1.00, and the plastic to fix them is less than $0.01. Design is intended for PLA. Additionally, this can be used to justify the expense of your 3D printer to your significant other, provided you have several hundred broken hangers.

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A pick-and-place machine is a robot that picks up very small surface mount electronics and places them in the appropriate location and orientation.  Having such a device allows a user to quickly create electronics using smaller and cheaper surface mount electronics parts.  A DIY pick-and-place machine is a pretty big deal because commercial machines are incredibly expensive – in the tens of thousands of dollars for even a used machine.  Here’s a short video of their prototype pick-and-place machine going through some calibration steps.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Keep up the awesome work guys!

1. Which is really funny given that we’re less than three years old!

DualStrusion is highly experimental right now, and we’re all learning about it — engineers, developers, and tech support agents included.  While it’s a very exciting process, don’t expect DualStrusion to work right out of the box without some serious troubleshooting: that’s the cost of being on the cutting edge.

In light of that, we’ve just created a new support forum for DualStrusion experimenters to share their learning and experiences.  And so, I give to you: the DualStrusion experimenters support forum.

Thing-o-Matic Alternate Front Panel by dougkeenan

Sometimes a simple hack is all it takes.  Just look at dougkeenan’s “Thing-o-Matic Alternate Front Panel.”

Why would you want a front panel that has a little divot in the left side?  Well, if you’re rocking a MakerBot Automated Build Platform, you already the know the answer.  The MakerBot ABP has gears that advance the conveyor belt so that it can keep printing part after part.  However, those gears on the side rob the operator of a few precious millimeters of build space in the X direction.¹  My making a little cut out, dougkeenan has effectively increased the build area for his Thing-O-Matic.  One of the cool things is that you could even just cut this little piece out of your front panel and gain the extra build area too!

Thing-o-Matic alternate front panel by dougkeenan

panel outline is slightly trapezoidal, with a notch for the ABP gears

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1. Left and right.

Those of you who got a chance to stop by Maker Faire this weekend (or read our earlier blog post) are probably wondering when you too can experiment with dual extrusion heads. The answer is: now! We’ve integrated tools into ReplicatorG that simplify the process of creating a two-material print. They’re not in the released version of ReplicatorG yet, but they are available in a git branch for experimenters who want to get a jump start on the future. And who doesn’t want to get a jump start on the future? Details for the bold below!

First of all, you’ll need to check out the “dualstrusion” branch of ReplicatorG. As always, all the code is available from our github repository. If you’re new to running ReplicatorG from source, take a look at the build instructions. Once you’ve cloned the repository and successfully run ReplicatorG, you’ll just need to check out the experimental branch and rebuild:

> git checkout dualstrusion

> ant run

Once you’re up and running with the experimental code, read Ben Rockhold’s guide to designing for dualstrusion, which will explain how to design and print objects for dual extrusion.

Additionally, if you’re using multiple toolheads and having trouble with communications, you’ll want to try building the latest firmware from source, as the current version in git implements a protocol change that greatly improves operation for multiple toolheads.

A special thank you goes out to Ben Rockhold, Noah Levy, and Will Langford, who made all this awesomeness happen.

Good luck, and as always drop me a line or a comment and let me know how it goes!

Gnome and Gnome

There is no doubt Tony Buser has definitely done more for the 3D printing community than anyone else when it comes to advancing gnome duplication and teleportation technology.  However, I’m convinced that his SpinScan open source software and hadware has a larger potential besides assisting in the controversial practice of gnome cloning. ¹  Tony hasn’t finalized the materials list, but the final project would probably involve a decent web camera with good low light performance² , a cheap laser³ , a stepper driver, a stepper motor, an arduino, a few bearings, threaded rod, and some nuts and bolts.  The whole lot would set you back around $200 and significantly less if you can scavenge a few parts.

So, if you could scan and print anything, what would it be?⁴

Spinscan by tbuser

Gnome Scan #3 by tbuser

This one came out pretty well and is the most complete 360 degree gnome scan yet. It was also the first scan using my new printed turntable and spinscan software from thingiverse.com/thing:9972 Spinscan isn't calculating the Z axis correctly, so if you download the point cloud you'll see it was stretched. I had to shrink the Z axis in blender. Other then that and 2 steps in meshlab, it required no cleanup or merging of multiple point clouds, spinscan got a complete scan of all sides in one go.

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1. I mean, the anti-gnome-stem-cell lobby is just insane!
2. Perhaps around $100
3. He got a $4 laser from eBay
4. But, perhaps a better question is…  what are you waiting for?!

Northrop Grumman RQ-4 UAV Drone - (the coolest drone photo I could find!)

Using a 3D printing technique for nylon laser sintering engineers at the University of Southampton designed, printed, and flew a printed unmanned aerial vehicle¹²

No fasteners were used and all equipment was attached using ‘snap fit’ techniques so that the entire aircraft can be put together without tools in minutes.  The electric-powered aircraft, with a 2-metres wingspan, has a top speed of nearly 100 miles per hour, but when in cruise mode is almost silent.

With no need for special tools, tooling skills, equipment and no extra expense or time “penalty” for complex structures, they were able to produce wing structures that would have been extremely expensive and difficult to manufacture in any other way.  This is a truly amazing demonstration of the versatility of 3D printing and snap-fit designs.

Via Slashdot

1. Think drone airplane.
2. Photo courtesy of gordontour

As you know, I loved the original tiny toy dump truck.  Madscifi showed us the progression of each of the versions leading up to the one that had a movable bed and rolling wheels.  We’ve seen some pretty cool print-at-once things on Thingiverse, but madscifi’s work seems to be opening up a new area with an awesome cam shaft.

His Thingiverse post also provides a lot of detail about how he used manual support to accomplish this print.  The process amounts to introducing pauses into the GCode, putting clay on the platform at the exact proper level, and then resuming the print.

Tiny Toy Dump Truck with Cam Action Bed by madscifi

This is a variation of the Tiny Toy Dump Truck that does require support in order to print. The use of support allows cylindrical wheels, a bed axle sleeve that is no longer sliced, and the addition of a cam and rod that lifts the bed once per rotation of the back axle. It can be printed as a single piece on a standard Reprap/Makerbot by manually introducing support material during the print. See youtube.com/watch?v=47iEXR6xXnE for a video of a working copy that was printed on a standard Reprap.

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Prusa Mendel Cupcake production files by kliment

A “printing plate,” sometimes referred to as a “production plate,” is the practice of organizing the pieces of a multi-part print so that several parts will fit onto a build area.  They help streamline printing and production by reducing the number of separate printing tasks.  Organizing your multi-part print onto plates is a relatively easy design trick for improving your speed of production.  Here are a few tips in case you’re doing this:

• Draw a square or rectangle the shape of your build platform into the design.  Try to organize your parts onto that square¹ and delete the square when done. ²
• Start by placing the largest piece onto a square, then adding the largest piece you can manage to the plate.  Add as many little pieces as you can around the larger parts.
• If you are printing slot-together parts, you can safely mirror or flip the pieces.  Once printed, they’ll be functionally identical whether they were printed face-up or face-down.
• Packing parts together can actually reduce warping and curling.  You may find that the extra parts will either provide apron-like mechanical advantages by holding down corners or thermal walls.
• If certain parts need to be printed multiple times, put them with other parts that need to be printed multiple times.  In the case of Dino-Girl’s spidersaur, it has two different kinds of legs – four identical long legs and four identical shorter legs.  It also had a body panel and a fang part that needed to be printed twice each.  I created one plate with a long leg, a short leg, and the body panel and another plate with a long leg, short leg, and the fang part.  If you print each of those plates twice, you end up with four long legs, four short legs, two body panels, and two fang parts.
• Ask for help!  I had a lot of trouble organizing the last five parts onto the fifth printing plate.  I enlisted the help of two other Thingiverse citizens, Syvwlch and Renosis, in organizing this plate.  They each solved it in a nearly identical fashion in far less time than I had spent trying to figure it out.
• Use a stepper extruder.  If you’re packing parts in closely together, you’re going to want the kind of fine-grain control a MK6 stepper extruder can provide.

What other tips do you have for creating printing plates?

1. Or rectangle
2. Ed of Softsolder.com suggests using a matrix of small cubes.