Rolive

Which do you prefer? I have the option to do both but milling seems to take awfully long and produces a lot of noise and glass fiber dust. It has the benefit of not needing etch resist which is also messy.

Chemical etching with iron chloride is also quite messy. First applying etch resist, removing part of it, etching etc. It is much simpler though and you don't need a CNC machine for this.

I made an enclosure for build-in induction cooking hobs. The build-in models are usually much cheaper and have better features than the free-standing ones. The corner blocks and ventilation grills are 3D printed and the side panels are 6mm thick aluminium composite plates. The plates are glued to the corner blocks using epoxy.

The price of the ACP plates and glue combined is still far cheaper than the difference between build-in and free-standing induction hobs and it's quite a simple model.

Here is the model and design file.

https://www.printables.com/model/1769315-induction-hob-enclosure

Normally you'd post a FixMyPrint issue where the OP asks for a solution. Here instead I post an issue and the cause/solution immediately as well, hoping that it helps others.

This issue looks this way in a CoreXY printer, on a Cartesian printer you probably have only one axis looking weird.

The top part of the image has two printed objects in it, they're corner blocks for an enclosure I'm making. The right one has a bend in it. The toolhead would consistently move 1mm to the right or left at the exact same location. Normally a layer shift occurs due to warping or loose belts or hitting the infill somehow.

The left block is what it's supposed to look like.

Upon closer inspection of my belts it appears that one of them was stretched a small amount. These are cheap generic belts from Aliexpress that did last quite a while but were probably not the highest quality. At some point the filling material breaks and the belt stretches by a small amount. When that part of the belt goes over the stepper motor you get a layer shift.

Now I got Gates belts and hope that they last longer.

This is an article from 10 years ago but so far I have not seen any 3D printers actually use this.

Currently I'm designing a new toolhead for my 3D printer and I want to make the footprint as small as possible to maximize the usable print area. I'm redesigning an Ender 5 so that the bed of an Ender5Plus fits into the frame of the Ender5 and that most of the area is accessible by the nozzle. The toolhead is one obstacle.

My current toolhead has two 5015 blower fans, one on each side, and they add a significant amount of bulk to the toolhead. The fan ducts are also quite bulky.

Have any of you tried a small aquarium pump with a length of Bowden tubing and perhaps a blunt syringe tip at the end? This way you can precisely direct airflow to the plastic flow and not cool the nozzle down too much, which is unavoidable with blower fans.

I'm thinking towards those cheap 5v USB aquarium fans that you can buy for a few euros from China.

I'm designing a new toolhead for my heavily modified Ender 5. At the moment it uses a MicroSwiss all metal hotend with dual blower fans, a tiny 404010 fan on the heatbreak (barely enough) and on top of it an Orbiter 1.5 extruder.

It has been working quite well but I want to get something with higher flow capabilities to push print speeds. Perhaps even dual Orbiter extruders and two hotends.

After I'm done modifying the Ender5 it will have a 314x314 bed which should allow for dual hotends without losing too much space.

Ideally I end up with a new toolhead so that the old one may be kept as backup.

I have been eyeing the Orbiter V2 with the Phaetus Rapido UHF but I'm open to suggestions. What have you been using and do you have any advice? There are a ton of options.

I want to start a DWC hydroponics system on my balcony but have concerns about the safety of the plant containers.

The first idea was to use plastic sauce buckets from the local snackbar. They're a waste product and you can easily get a large stack of 10L buckets for free just by asking. They're initially food safe material and all you have to do is wash out the sauce residue.

The problem is though that this food safety won't last long in sunlight. The plastic will inevitably break down and release contaminants into the plant water and therefore will also end up in whatever vegetables that are growing in it.

I have considered getting other materials, such as glass vases or perhaps stoneware. Both are heavy and anything large enough is also quite expensive. Weight is a consideration as well on a balcony.

Another option would be to cover the plastic buckets with some plate material with a few holes in it for the plants.

Am I overthinking this? I'm trying to avoid plastic whenever possible but with the right precautions it shouldn't be that bad.

I want to grow my own supply.

Is this feasible at all?

My idea is to have a battery of 112 Li Ion cells in series, ending up with a nominal voltage of about 414V. This is apparently how car batteries are configured as well and it's the easiest for an EGS002 inverter.

Charging however is quite difficult as stepping up to those voltages is not trivial.

The idea is to have a charge pump circuit on every single cell. 2 mosfets for charging, a capacitor, 2 mosfets for discharging. The capacitor would charge from a 4.2V supply and discharge into the battery.

The mosfets on the battery side can be controlled with optocouplers. The gate voltage is provided by cells further up in the chain so the gate always has at least 12V on it.

Is this a bad idea? Things that come to mind are the mosfet losses. Essentially the on resistance counts 4 times per cell but usually the rDS on is in the 20 mOhm range, so 80 mOhm per cell.

Balancing is much easier this way.

Perhaps a compromise that charges several cells in series and watches the balancing could work too if efficiency is the biggest reason against this.

I'm aware of the safety considerations.

This is a customized version of the Ender 5 Mercury One.1 mod. I had two 10mm rods lying around that would fit the X axis and wanted to use the MGN12 rail for a custom CNC project instead. Please check the Printables link for more information as well as a FreeCAD file.

https://www.printables.com/model/1399143-ender-5-mercury-one1-x-10mm-rod-mod

I also think that having the hotend centered between two rails may allow for a larger reachable print area at some point. Later I want to remake the way the heated bed is mounted so that a larger bed can be used while still having the same Ender 5 footprint.

I don't think this should still be called an Ender 5 and this point. Perhaps a Frankender will do.

Right now all it has is a plotter adding but I'm also making a mount for a mill and lasercutter. It's meant mostly for making circuit boards but should be able to handle other projects as well.

It's designed in FreeCAD and some parts were sourced from discarded laboratory devices from my job as well as a broken 3D printer.

Here's a link to the FreeCAD in its current form. I'm not happy about Google but this is to be shared for free so it's okay.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TaGmB2l-2IpyjhtpyuxbR6gJtIwyiHvx/view?usp=drivesdk

Right now it's a bit messy but I intend to post it to printables.com later when it's fully done.

The video is sped up 8x. I think it can handle this speed realtime as well.

3D printer toolheads often have large blower fans with big fan ducts ending in small holes and I wonder how necessary that is.

These large part cooling setups are most of the size of the toolhead and significantly reduce print area. Blower fans also do not produce much pressure so those fan ducts greatly reduce their effectiveness.

Does it make sense to, instead of using a blower fan, use a small compressor like for an aquarium and have the airflow delivered Bowden style to a small nozzle? The airflow would be substantially higher than from a fan. Noise isn't really an issue for a tiny compressor.

Has anyone tried this? I might eventually but don't have the time to set it up now.

This is a WIP and at this point don't know if it's going to be successful or not. I'm currently building it. The idea is to use the Mercury One build but modify it so that it uses 10mm rods on the X axis instead of an aluminium extrusion with an MGN12 rail. I have a set of these rods on hand and want to use the MGN12 rail on a DIY CNC instead. These rods seem good enough for a 3D printer and I don't want to waste them.

I have decided to modify the Mercury One so that it has a different X assembly and a completely custom toolhead that houses the stock Ender5 hotend or a MicroSwiss hotend coupled with an Orbiter 1.5 extruder. Later I'll make a different toolhead for a better hotend but for now the MicroSwiss is good enough.

The red parts are original MercuryOne parts, the green ones are the ones I designed. I haven't bothered with rounding or chamfering yet. I have also imported some things from GrabCAD such as the BLtouch, hotend and fans.

This is quite the Frankenstein creation and I wonder, what am I supposed to call it? It barely resembles an Ender5 at this point, only the frame does.

I feel a bit bad for still using Gdrive but here's the FreeCAD file. I only put things in Gdrive that I want to share publicly so idc if they spy on me. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WFskq_OpdML4qeyOsKfkcaarW1QUJOB5/view?usp=sharing