Collaborate Disseminate
3D printers have come a long way over the past several years, but the process of bed leveling remains a pain point. Let’s take a look at the different ways …read more Continue reading 3D Printering: Is Hassle-Free Bed Leveling Finally Here?
If you’ve ever had the good fortune — or, after a shop mishap, the misfortune — to see the insides of a dial indicator, you’ll know the workings of these shop essentials resemble nothing so much as those of a fine Swiss watch. The pinions, gears, and springs within transmit …read more
Continue reading No Assembly Required for this Compliant Mechanism Dial Indicator
How do you know if your 3D printer bed is levelled? Oh, don’t worry – you’ll know. Without a level bed, filament won’t stick properly to the build surface and you’ll run into all sorts of other problems. Knowing how tricky it can be to get the bed just right, …read more
Continue reading Force Sensitive Resistor Takes the Pain Out Of Bed Leveling
Here’s a neat trick for your next 3D-printer build or retrofit: a Z-axis sensor using a DIY strain gauge made from SMD resistors. We’re betting it could have plenty of other applications, too.
Conventional load cells, at least the ones you can pick up cheaply from the usual sources or harvest from old kitchen or bathroom scales, are usually way too big to be used on the extruder of a 3D-printer. [IvDm] wanted to build a touch sensor for his Hybercube printer, so he built his own load cell to do it. It consists of four 1000 ohm SMD resistors …read more
Continue reading Quartet of SMD Resistors Used to Sense Z-Axis Height
Laser engraving and cutting has something in common with focusing the sun’s rays with a magnifying glass: good focus is critical to results. If materials of varying thicknesses are used, focus needs to be re-set every time the material changes, and manual focusing quickly becomes a chore. [Scorch Works] has a clever solution to avoid constant re-focusing that doesn’t involve sensors or motors of any sort. The result is a self-adjusting bed that compensates for material height changes, ensuring that the top surface of the material is always a fixed distance from the laser’s head.
The way [Scorch Works] has …read more
Continue reading Spring-Loaded Bed for K40 Laser Acts As an Auto-Focus
3D Printering: the final frontier. These are the voyages of another 3D printer hack. Its mission: to explore strange new ways of leveling a print bed.
So far, we’ve had servo probes, Allen key probes, Z-sled probes, inductive and capacitive contactless switches, just to name a few. All of them allow a 3D printer to probe its print bed, calculate a correction plane or mesh, and compensate for its own inherent, time variant, inaccuracies.
These sensors are typically mounted somewhere on the print head and introduce their own sensor offset, which has to be precisely calibrated for the whole thing …read more
Continue reading Sonic 3D Printer Auto Bed Leveling Makes Swoosh