3D printing

I'm meaning to get back into robotics as a hobby, mainly in the hopes I can automate various bits of my life. I figured a 3D printer would be useful to create parts that would be hard to find online, let alone for a low price. While I don't have much to print at the moment, I already tried printing a few pieces of a cable drag chain of my own design. They ended up being unusable because I misjudged the tolerances though. Does anyone else have a 3D printer? What do you use it for?

Utilities' stands and handlers, cases for various small objects such as micro controllers and computers, mechanical objects can be replaced or even created whenever needed. If you got time try browsing some 3D hosting sites and forums such as 3dprintboard, it's quite nice for brainstorming and having conversations with fellow "thickers".[/code][/code]

I got myself Ender 3 Pro some time ago, I used to make replacement parts for kitchen stuff and DIY mounts. I mainly got it to make cases for my projects, but I've been procrastinating on those lately. ATM it's collecting dust and waiting for me to tune it, since I fuarrrked it up a bit while installing CRtouch. It's been very useful when it works so I really should get it back in action. And hey I do need a case for my latest soldering job.

I've printed a bunch more items like cycloidal drives, pistons etc while figuring out the tolerances and limitations of my printer (and slicer). I first used an SD card but I seem to have damaged the pins of the reader somehow as I need to keep it pressed to ensure it can be read. Ended up installing Octoprint and decided to print a camera stand. The first print got ruined because the bottom layer was offset by 3mm along the Y axis for some reason Restarted in safe mode, tried again and I now finally got a print that isn't destined for the scrap bag. The bottom is much too light however, I'll need to figure out how to put some weights in it. Total cost excluding power is ~€0.58, quite a bit cheaper than what you can find elsewhere I imagine.

>>10901 I'd love to get one or rent one to make my own Mauser C96 handgun or spare parts.

I've bought a CR-10s Pro back in 2019 because it was available for an absurdly discounted price (close to 50% or so). Initially I wanted to use it for random decorations and maybe to print a few simple replacement parts, but ultimately I ended up working on a couple of large projects for more than 3 years now, and in effect, learning a lot about designing parts both in commercial and OSS CAD software. Moreover, I've learned how to maintain the printer properly, how to replace most of its parts and even redesign them, since Creality's printers are known for very poor quality and poor wear resistance. I swear, under the right conditions 3D printing is a gateway drug to mechanical engineering.

I've got myself an Ender V3 and I like to use it to make things for home improvement. Someone I know makes model train layouts so I've used FreeCAD to make parts for his setup, like switch boxes and a holder for his remote. This pic is of track supports for an elevated railway. He couldn't find a certain type of curved support he needed to make his curved railway, so I whipped one up and printed a ton of copies. I made the model parametric so that I could change a couple variables to support different radii and length track.

I have a small print farm in my basement, 6 total printers, and I make a lot of minis and environments for table top games, a local games bar, and trading card deck boxes. I started out with an Ender - 3 to learn 3D printing then expanded out. It is a fun hobby but as a word of caution. You will have weird issues with the printer, there will be many failures with prints and hardware, you will loose hours trying to fix the wrong issue, and you will have an amazing time creating anything you ever wanted.

I want to 3D print a split keyboard. Is there any guide on how to do this with options on styles and where to get the chips?

>>11032 >Creality's printers are known for very poor quality and poor wear resistance. For real? I've been using mine for several years, I accidentally kicked it a couple times, the first time I tried using it I almost broke the wires connecting to the extruder, and even made a big carving into the plate by wrongly regulating its height... and it still works perfectly

>>10901 How jump in robotics hobby?

>>11140 Get yourself a an autoleveler for your bed, it will change your life for the better.

>>11140 I fuarrrkin hated my Ender 3. So much time wasted trying to fix some shifting issue, only to FINALLY find some guy who had same issue, and it was the fuarrrking reference Voltage on the motherboard being too low. I have a good job now so I just splurged and got a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon, and it's great. Even ran out of filament a few times and it was able to finish after I replaced it with no issues (the ender SAID it could do this; complete bullshit)

>>10901 >I'm meaning to get back into robotics as a hobby, mainly in the hopes I can automate various bits of my life. Despite spending most of my life fiddling with software, I've never gotten into robotics because I have almost no physical tasks that need automating, and it would take an absurdly advanced robot to automate any of them. >Does anyone else have a 3D printer? What do you use it for? it's sitting in a closet because I could not get it to stop jamming.

>>11725 Horrendous OPSEC, go on Tor or I2P for some good modules

I found I was spending more time tinkering with the printer than actually buiding projects, so it's collecting dust. Was an ender of some sort, I should probably either trash it or upgrade it. >>11748 No opsec needed. It's perfectly legal in many places, and publishing plans and instructions in many more.

>>11725 >OPSEC >for gunsmithing this is an american website >some good modules what's that

>>11845 >neurosuggesting the NSA wouldn't still be interested in you 3D printing guns at home have you not seen all the pushback to ban assault rifles these past few years?

>>11858 They can be interested all they want. Until they take direct action, I'll be gladly open about making things that go bang.

>>11858 assault rifles are already derezzed, you need to register with the atf to get your hands on a fully-automatic rifle, what you're talking about are semi-automatic rifles.

I got a resin printer (elegoo mars) for making some small equipment for a bio lab. Needed something with enough resolution to print things around 0.1mm thick and it does pretty well at that.

Got a Creality K1C yesterday. Currently working on a ergonomic keyboard. A custom variant of a Dactyl Manuform using this online parametric generator: https://ryanis.cool/cosmos/ Aside from keyboards, I also printed a Venus of Willendorf, to represent my love for a chubby gal. I'm going to use it to print some parts for people at work (PLA & ABS), toys for the kids my mother works with, organization for my room and hopefully make bird bath optics glasses in the future. With many trinkets and sculptures in between.

Found this youtube channel of a guy making an "everything machine" using 3d printed parts to make stuff like belt sanders, a lathe, Vertical drill and more. What do you guys think? https://www.youtube.com/@sweetgumnyc7794

>>12302 I saw that. Isn't it focus on jewelry?

>>11456 The only parameterized split keyboard I recommend. >Run lein repl https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard

>>12317 Did you make one? I still havent finished wiring mine. Idk, it just seems too tall for no real reason. And the "squish" movement with your thumb seems way more natural than the "slap", hitting the thumb keys as a traditional spacebar.

>What do you use it for? Cat toys >but don't they chew the plastic! Sometimes, so what? At least it isn't the furniture that's actually harmful.

It frustrated me for the longest time how no slicer seemed to take mechanical precision seriously, especially holes. Many seem to think it's fine to adjust holes directly in CAD software even though that's an insane workflow (and then they share only STLs instead of STEP or some other format...). That said, I recently got back to 3D printing since I want to make my own "helping hands" for soldering. I learned about Orca Slicer which is the first slicer I used that actually respects mechanical dimensions to a reasonable degree. Picrel are two tests I did. The first one is very stiff due to the wall, but the second one rotates fairly smoothly while still being a tight fit. I didn't add any margins and it simply fit, which is great!

People can easily look up information on homemade air-powered ball bearing guns on Youtube. You can also get hold of a certain book written by a British liberty advocate.

My old 3D-printer is crumbling apart, and I'm thinking about buying a Flashforge Adventurer 5X. Is it a good idea?

>>13555 here are some questions i asked myself when buying my first FDM 3D printer seven years ago... (maybe this helps) "do you think you will print anything larger than that print volume you are looking at right now sometime in the future ?" "if i want/need to print larger but i can not (because printer smol), that would make you regret your decision of buying such a small build-plated printer, wouldn't it ?" "do i have enough room to place and operate the machine ?" this flashforge model is fairly small, in terms of build volume, so if thats all you need and you will never go bigger it seems okay, some things that would disturb me aside from the small build volume, the image you attached tells me you can only access the build volume from two directions, then again it seems to have multi color support, this is something purely aesthetic and has little functional value in my opinion, but again its your printer and you buy it because of whatever you want to do with it ;-) for me single filament is all i need. keep in mind you are only using plastic here, even if you use "pro" stuff like PEEK its still inferior to other materials but i guess i am looping back to it all depends on you and your usecase... if you use multi color for whatever you want to do... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ regardless of that... one last thing: since you already have a printer i would like to tell you about the hevort printer, its a sophisticated open source diy model CoreXY you can find it by looking up "hevort" (one word, no "" needed). sure its a project and no out of the box thing, but you will learn a lot building it. since you already have a 3D printer you have everything that you need to build this one. depending on your source of the rest of the material you can also build it on a budget, the knowledge you gain in the process is invaluable. also the machine is on par with the "flagship" models from most industrial manufacturers

>>10901 Man, OrcaSlicer is so garbage. It keeps kkkrashing and it outputs a lot of retarded deformed and self-intersecting geometry, and there is no way to fix it without extensive editing and recompilation. On the bright side...a lot of opportunity to DIY gcode generation, and maybe benchmark.