ShadowRam Systems

Now that I have the printer somewhat in a reliable printing condition, it’s time to clean it up. It’s a pretty big mess at the moment, with desktop fans cooling the electronics, which is sitting on a piece of wood, and a lot of temporary alligator clips holding some stuff together for testing.

So I did some work on the old electronics box that came with the printer. This is the picture of the old box to remind you,

And this is the Arduino mounted in it, (with its new printed mount) and two computer fans I mounted on the side to replace the large desktop fan in cooling the electronics,

I placed it in the corner and fed the wires back through it. I also went through the task removing some old wire from the cable track, and installing some extra wire. I plan on running a good constant 12VDC up to the print end to run constant fans and some LED lights to light the print-bed as it’s printing. Also to support some extra future sensors/etc.

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So one of the issues I have is that the parts need to be cooled as they are printing, otherwise on short layers the previous layer is still too hot, and the part will start to curl.
I’ve been getting away with aiming a small desktop fan at the printer as it’s printing, but one of the proper ways the 3D Printer prevents this, is to mount a controllable fan to the printer itself.

I designed this in Solidworks, and attempted printing it. To be honest, I thought it was going to be a complete failure, but it turned out way better than expected.

The bonus is, that this part will at least function well enough to print a better copy of itself, which can then help print an even better copy of itself,

This is an old computer memory fan cooler I had lying around and never used. But it has three fans. I’m using the middle one to cool the cold-end of the hot-end.

The other two outside fans are redirected down to the nozzle via some ducts. These 12VDC fans replaced the 5VDC laptop fan I had zip-tied to the side of the hot-end.

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Raspberry Pi Case

$25 Mini-Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

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So I still have about 1/3 of my first roll of PLA Plastic, and I’ve decided to get more plastic and more colours for more printing. $33/roll

I got White, Black and Silver/Grey

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Settlers of Catan Board Game Parts

Card Holders and Multiple Prints at the same time

Brackets to make the Printer more stiff,

New better HotEnd Holder

Fun Stuff

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So I’ve been printing for quite a while now, but I’ve really badly neglected to update this blog. Keeping the blog updated is a much longer task than I had anticipated,

Either way, here is finally a successful print where the quality is good enough to actually use the parts I print. I had a lot of problems getting the parts to stick to the bed, but luckly someone on reddit mentioned I should try some rubbing alcohol on the painters tape, and did it ever stick like crazy.

This part I’m printing out here in the picture is a mount for the Arduino electronics. I later found out that the object was actually mirrored by accident, due to my Y-Axis direction that I assume as ‘positive’ is really negative compared to everyone else’s printer. So I swapped that around and reprinted the part,

Shown here is that it fits the Arduino perfectly,

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