3D Printing & Electronics
As a hobby I print things using my 3D printer. I have an Anycubic Photon M3 Max, which uses resin as a printing material.
Something I’m especially interested in is building electronics. We’ve arrived at a point where planets are aligning when it comes to manufacturing prototyping.
On one side 3D printing tech has become really affordable, yet high quality (my printer has a 10 micron precision). Printing materials have become affordable as well, hovering around $30 per liter of resin or $30 per kilogram of filament.
On the other side, electronics have also become extremely cheap, open platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi (among others) have democratized and lowered the barrier of entry into custom electronics. The very latest Arduino is really small, really powerful, and really cheap. Check out the RP2040, which is priced at $30 and comes with a dual core CPU, Bluetooth, and Wifi. Arduino is open-source hardware so knock-offs are available for as low as $4 on AliExpress.
Now I’m working on a small electric water pump. Checkout below some photos of what I’ve printed.
I designed this in TinkerCad, then printed two same copies but with different configurations, just to see what comes out best. One was laid out flat, the other one was laid out at a 45 degree angle with support struts (sorry I have no photo of this).
I found the one laid out flat on the printing platform was the best. This is probably because my model has some flat surfaces and those tend to print more straight when laid out flat.
However there were a few issues. A couple holes weren’t wide enough, my hinge broke… so I’m off to iterating on this and trying again!