A Little Rewiring Teaches a Creality Ender 3 New Tricks

The Creality Ender 3 is part of the new wave of budget 3D printers, available for less than $250 from many online retailers. For the money, it’s hard to complain about the machine, and it’s more than suitable for anyone looking to get make their first steps into the world …read more

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Prusa Unveils New Mini 3D Printer, Shakes Up The Competition

For the last couple of years, consumer desktop 3D printer choices in the under $1,000 USD range have fallen into two broad categories: everything bellow $500 USD, and the latest Prusa i3. There are plenty of respectable printers made by companies such as Monoprice and Creality to choose from on …read more

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Bolt-On Stepper Motor Driver For The Raspberry Pi

For his entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Tobius Daichi] is working on adding some motion control capabilities to everyone’s favorite Linux SBC. His 3+Pi board attaches to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header and gives you a convenient way to control four individual stepper motors. Perfect for a 3D printer, …read more

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This Cetus Printer is Rigged for Silent Running

The entry-level 3D-printer market is a rich one, with offerings from many vendors that are surprisingly good. But nothing is perfect, and to hit the $200 price point some compromises are inevitable. That doesn’t mean you have to live with those engineering choices, of course, which makes these cheap printers a great jumping off point for aftermarket mods.

[Linas K] took this route and in the process made his Cetus 3D-printer essentially silent. The first part of the video below reviews the shortcomings of the stock machine and the mechanical changes [Linas] made, including new brackets for the Z-axis slide, …read more

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Hackaday Links: March 25, 2016

File this one under, ‘don’t do this yourself, but we’re glad they filmed it.’ [Denis Koryakin] flew a quadcopter to 10km, or about 33,000 feet. This was just an experiment to see if it was possible. A few items of note from the video: this thing was climbing at 14-15 m/s when it first took off. It was barely climbing at 2 m/s at 10km. Second: it was really, really cold. The ground temperature was -10 C, and temperatures at 8km reached -50 C. Density altitude is on this guy’s side, and I don’t know if this would be possible …read more

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Turning The Beaglebone On A Chip Into A 3D Printer Controller

It’s understood that 3D printers and CNC machines need to control motors, but there are a few other niceties that are always good to have. It would be great if the controller board ran Linux, had support for a nice display, and had some sort of networking. The usual way of going about this is either driving a CNC machine from a desktop, or by adding a Raspberry Pi to a 3D printer.

The best solution to this problem is to just drive everything from a BeagleBone. This will give you Linux, and with a few motor drivers you can …read more

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Improving Cheap Laser Engravers For PCB Fabrication

A few months ago, [Marco] picked up a cheap, cheap, cheap laser engraver from one of the familiar Chinese resellers. It’s a simple affair with aluminum extrusions, a diode laser, and a control board that seems like it was taken from a 3D printer controller designed five years ago. Now, [Marko] is building some upgrades for this engraver and his PCB production skills have gone through the roof.

The laser engraver [Marko] picked up is called the EleksMaker, and lucky for him there are quite a few upgrades available on Thingiverse. He found two 3D printable parts, one that keeps …read more

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