Ben Heck Creates Portable, Autonomous 3D Printer, Makes DIY Community Jealous - irvinhaster

3D printers are beautiful incredible things, right? Serial modder Ben Heck thinks so too, especially considering how so some of the parts for his varied projects were made on one. For his latest project, Ben not only made a 3D printer, but a little, more portable rather 3D printer. Meet the Briefcase Pressman.

The briefcase Printer task is actually based along a 3D printer Ben created in a previous evidenc (named the Birdstruder), but with extra features. Ace of the main aims of the Printer Briefcase was to pass more portable, which means making it slimmer–something the bulk of 3D printers are not. He also made the printer mod autonomous, meaning if you were caught without a computer, you could print from a Blackguard file stored along an SD card.

The new printer is just 5 inches thick, and tail fit in the command processing overhead time baggage compartment happening an airplane. To black and white, cardinal panels drop belt down on either side of the main printing machine body, allowing the physical object to glide through equally information technology's existence written. The most of import part of devising the briefcase pressman was wiring up the Y baby buggy extruder (this heats up plastic and pushes it through with a nozzle) and the Y passenger car itself, which runs along the running while an object is written.

At that place is likewise a itsy-bitsy controller, which uses readily available code to tell the pressman what to coif, though Ben admits it is much easier to control it from your PC. You can use software like Pronterface for this.

Although it looks a little tricky to order unitedly, the project is really impressive. That said, if you're novel to wiring things up and coding you may want to give this one a miss and perhaps wait for a more streamlined 3D printer to keep sale. If you are looking a challenge, though, head over to Element14 to watch Ben put up information technology together, and provide a some pointers.

[Element14]