Chunky Media

Number two of my postbag opening series from AliExpress.

First in a series of postbag opening videos from AliExpress. I get a lot of stuff from China and wanted to video the “un-boxing” of the of the postbags and a little intro to some projects I may or may not be working on in the future.

Brilliant original design of an Amazon Echo Dot V2 wall mount by halcyon on Thingiverse. I have had a lot of people ask for this to be printed on 3D Hubs and from their feedback I have updated it with some of my amends.

To support the print bed from the y-axis and the bed frame Prusa 3D printers use bolts, washers and nuts on each corner with a spring for tension. Toolson’s edition of the P3Steel does away with these springs and opts for a novel (genius) solution of using silicone dampeners.

For this printer I will be using the standard and simple setup of an Arduino Mega and a RAMPS 1.4 board. The Arduino Mega is the brains of the printer and will process all the g-code instructions from the .gcode files from either an SD card or over USB and tell the printer how to move, heat up, extrude filament etc by signalling all the motors, heaters and sensors on the printer which are connected via the RAMPS board, which in turn is connected to the Arduino Mega via the GPIO pins.

New 3D printing time lapse test using my P3Steel. Still yet to install Octoprint or a webcam, so have been testing with taking time lapse sequences on my old Canon Powershot A570 and a custom firmware from CHDK. This was for my eldest daughter who is in high school for her Geography class.

Now that all the axis are complete, we can install the endstop/limit switches. These are simply a switch which is triggered mechanically by one of the printers moving parts hitting it, be it the hotend, print bed etc.

Following on from the x-axis build – I skimmed over the last part, just “installing with the z-axis rods and threaded M5 screw”. This post helps to expand on this part, installing the x-axis and carriage onto the printer with the installation of the z-axis smooth 8mm rods and the z-axis screw – which for this build is the standard M5 threaded rod. Read on!

Building one of the more complex parts of the P3Steel which hosts the hotend carriage and connects the x and z travel together. Read on for a detailed breakdown of the x-axis setup and installation.

A remix of a great little Gecko model to be used as a fridge magnet. One of my kids loves putting things on the fridge, and loves my super strong neodymium magnets, and loves 3D printing, so I combined the lot in this remix! She even helped with the measuring of the magnet using my  … Read more