If you thought CADing designs for 3D printing was hard enough, wait until you hear about this .stl trick. [Angus] of Maker’s Muse recently demoed a method for creating hidden geometries in .stl files that are only revealed during the slicing process before a 3D print. (Video, embedded below.) The process involves creating geometries with […]
[Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi] submits this interesting printer he built for his daughter to use. He admits that the project started simply out of curiosity about the strange deltesian movement. In this configuration, the X and Z-axis are a delta mechanism while the Y-axis is a regular Cartesian bed on rails. There’s not a load of […]
[Design Prototype Test] got a box in the mail. Inside? An E3D “tool changer and motion system.” Superficially, it looks like a 3D printer, but it is touted as a machine that can mount several different kinds of tools, including a 3D print head. In the video below, you can see the assembly of the […]
A single board computer on a desk is fine for quick demos but for taking it into the wild (or even the rest of the house) you’re going to want a little more safety from debris, ESD, and drops. As SBCs get more useful this becomes an increasingly relevant problem to solve, plus a slick […]
Doesn’t the Z-axis on 3D-printers seem a little – underused? I mean, all it does is creep up a fraction of a millimeter as the printer works through each slice. It would be nice if it could work with the other two axes and actually do something interesting. Which is exactly what’s happening in the […]
There are many ways to keep an eye on your 3D printer as it churns out the layers of your print. Most of us take a peek every now and then to ensure we’re not making plastic vermicelli, and some of us will go further with a Raspberry Pi camera or similar. [Uri Shaked] has […]
One lesson we can learn from the Vietnam War documentary Apocalypse Now is that only crazy people like terrible smells just for fun. Surely Lt. Col. Kilgore would appreciate the smell of 3D printers as well, but for those among us who are a little less insane, we might want a way to eliminate the […]
3D printing is all well and good, but it can get expensive having to purchase roll after roll of filament. Various projects exist that attempt to take unwanted 3D prints and turn them back into filament to be used again. However, [Sam Smith] took a different path. The Trash Printer is a 3D print head […]
The average FDM 3D printer is not so different from your garden variety laser cutter. They’re often both Cartesian-coordinate based machines, but with different numbers of axes and mounting different tools. As [Gosse Adema] shows, turning a 3D printer into a laser cutter can actually be a remarkably easy job. The build starts with an […]
It is an unfortunate fact that 3D printers spend most of their time sitting idle, waiting for a human to remove finished prints or waiting for the next print to start. Hackers see such inefficiency as an open invitation to devise a better way, and we’ve seen several innovative ideas come across these pages. Some […]