Building a 3D Printer

It's the end of Summer I, which means it's time to contemplate on what we've achieved so far. But first, let me take a selfie... Kassem is showing us how to go all the way from a 3D model in SolidWorks to an actual printed item. Dissecting a (probably) dead power supply scavenging for a switch {again, DON'T try this at home}. Girl power :) This week we printed a bunch of new connections, this time a funky yellow color.  The display sits on top of the frame.  The control board is in the left corner on the back .  The whole build so far. We've made a great progress in just 6 weeks, starting from scratch (well, actually, from sawing aluminum channels) and now we are probably just a few days from printing. Yay!

No major breakthroughs this week. We finished putting together all the parts, adjusted connections here and there, and fixed whatever was in the wrong position.  As you can see, things are starting to look a little messy.  This is our X carriage with the print nozzle and the proximity sensor. There also must be a fan to cool down the object that is being printed, but it needs some surgery involving a soldering kit and new wires.  These are three endstops: for X, Z and Y movement. And this is us trying to put together our control board, which consists of an Arduino board, a RAMPS shield and stepper motor drivers.  Next week, hopefully, we will solder all the wires and put together all the electronic components. And maybe even start printing!!!

This week had to do some work in the Machine Shop with Mark Balzarette (again :)). Thanks for not hiding from us in Canada  your patience, Mark! We had to manufacture little brass sleeve thingies to fit between the stepper motors and belt pulleys because the pulleys that we had ordered turned out to be a little too big. Well, thanks to that we learned how to work with a few machine tools and to how to do it safely. Remember, dear reader, never try to learn safety by accident!  Angela did a great job presenting our project in front of our fellow STEM club members.  As you can see in the videos, we're on fire this week! We put together all the moving components, and they are behaving just perfectly. Yay! So much progress in just a month.  The next step is to figure out the electronic components and to start printing !!!

We finally have all the parts to start putting it all together this week. Some of the parts were 3D printed (with the help of Mark Balzarette). All in all we had 39 parts, which is about 35 hours of printing (we call it 'baking the cookies') and about 4 hours of soaking in the special solution (aka 'the soup') to dissolve the support material, which is this copperish brown stuff in the pictures below.  As you can (hopefully) see in the video, it already starts to look like something :)

Our main accomplishment this week is that the frame for our 3D printer is all done. Yay! It's robust and fairly stable, and ready to hold all the other parts together. Work in progress. The thing is, to build a 3D printer you need some parts 3D printed (so that it can then reprint itself and conquer the Earth 😈). So we took a field trip to our school's fancy 3D printers and (profound thanks to Mark!) were able to lay out the first batch of parts, ready to be printed. This will take about 17 hours to print. While we are waiting for our physical parts, let's talk control boards. We originally planned to use an Arduino board, but then... Luis gave us some pie. That is, Raspberry Pi. So, we managed to get it up and running and ready to play with. Can you believe this thingy is a fully functioning Linux based computer with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and just about everything else? Patience is the key.