Electroplating 3D Printed Parts for Great Strength

Resin 3D printers have a significant advantage over filament printers in that they are able to print smaller parts with more fine detail. The main downside is that the resin parts aren’t typically as strong or durable as their filament counterparts. For this reason they’re often used more for small models than for working parts, but [Breaking Taps] wanted to try and improve on the strength of these builds buy adding metal to them through electroplating.

Both copper and nickel coatings are used for these test setups, each with different effects to the resin prints. The nickel adds a dramatic amount of stiffness and the copper seems to increase the amount of strain that the resin part can tolerate — although [Breaking Taps] discusses some issues with this result.

While the results of electroplating resin are encouraging, he notes that it is a cumbersome process. It’s a multi-step ordeal to paint the resin with a special paint which helps the metal to adhere, and then electroplate it. It’s also difficult to ensure an even coating of metal on more complex prints than on the simpler samples he uses in this video.

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These Electric Ice Skates Finally Make the Sport Effortless

You probably haven’t noticed this, but athletes tend to be in very good physical condition. That is because most sports require a high level of fitness. You’re going to have a hard time winning a 100-meter dash if you collapse from exhaustion after 20 meters of sprinting. If you’re out of shape like I am, then you’ll probably agree that it isn’t fair that we don’t get to join in the fun. Apparently Simon Sörensen, of the RCLifeOn YouTube channel, felt the same way, which is why he designed these electric ice skates to make the sport effortless.

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3D Printing 90 degree Overhands with Non-Planar Slicing

When slicing a model for 3D printing, the part is divided into a stack of flat, 2D layers. But there’s an alternative in the form of non-planar slicing, where the layers can follow 3D curves. [Rene K. Mueller] took this a step further and successfully used non-planar slicing to print 90° overhangs on a normal Cartesian FDM printer.

Non-planar layers have been around for a while, but were generally limited to creating smooth curves without layer lines. The idea of using the technique for overhangs had been floating around in [Rene]’s head for a while, and he was spurred to action after seeing the rotating tilted nozzle printer featured here on Hackaday. The idea is only to have the outer edge of each layer overhang, by making each layer slope downward toward the overhang. [Rene] programmed a conic slicer algorithm for this purpose, which splits the model into dome-shaped layers, like an onion.

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This RaspberryPi Pico-Based Macro Keyboard Features a 3D-Printed Circuit Board

As makers, we are extremely lucky that today we can have affordable, professional-level PCBs fabricated on demand in small quantities and shipped to our doorsteps in just a week or two. Those are absolutely your best option if you’re working on projects that require custom boards and you want them to come as close as possible to consumer devices. But the week or two it takes to get PCBs fabricated and shipped can be too long for quick projects and you may not want to spend the money anyway. That’s why Redditor Duzitbetter came up with a really clever way to 3D print the circuit board for this Raspberry Pi Pico-based macro keyboard.

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3D Printing : (the famous) Ikea Lack enclosure for Ender 3 Pro

Background
There are a lot of article on the Internet about this topic. How to “turn Ikea Lack tables to 3D printing enclosure?” This is a trending topic. But to be honest, I never find the one that takes your by hand from start to beginning. This is the challenge of this post and I really hope you will like it !

Let’s go !

First, you need a minimum of two Lack tables from your local Ikea store. It works perfectly with three if you want a higher construction. For me two pieces are the ideal size since it will be on my desk. But if you want to have the furniture laying on the ground, three is indeed a better choice.

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Design and Development of a Robotic Hand

Over the few years, there have been great steps in the development of functional prosthetic hands. However, even the most advanced hands lack a combination of high functionality and affordability. A new prosthetic hand has been designed and developed combining high functionality and affordability thanks to rapid prototyping techniques. This video presents the design of a five-fingered prosthetic hand that can be programmed to have multiple grip patterns using force myography (FMG) as a control signal instead of electromyography (EMG) signal. A novel FMG sensor was developed using strain gages and a high resolution ADC to detect mechanical muscle contractions from the residual forearm of amputees.

Akira Kaneda’s Bike – Arduino & 3D printing

– 3D프린터와 아두이노를 이용해서 제작한 아키라 바이크 입니다.
– RC BIKE V1을 기반으로 디자인을 변경한 버전 입니다.

BLE MotorShield http://www.3demp.com/product/productD…
RC BIKE STL & Arduino code http://www.3demp.com/community/boardD…
Controller App : android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/de…
ios : https://apps.apple.com/kr/app/3demp/i…

3D Printed Pi Arcade is an Emulation Horn of Plenty

Let’s be honest, building a home arcade cabinet isn’t exactly the challenge it once was. There’s plenty of kits out there that do all the hard work for you, and they even sell some pretty passable turn-key units at Walmart now. If you want to put a traditional arcade cabinet in your home, it’s not hard to get one.

Which is why this wild build by [Rafael Rubio] is so interesting. The entirely 3D printed enclosure looks like some kind of art piece from the 1970s, and is a perfect example of the kind of unconventional designs made possible by low-cost additive manufacturing. Building something like this out of wood or metal would be nightmare, especially for the novice; but with even a relatively meager desktop 3D printer you’re only a few clicks away from running off your own copy.

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Tiny 3D-Printed DEC VT-102 Hides a Fully-Functional, ESP32-Powered PDP-11 Minicomputer

A tiny screen and a 3D-printed chassis brings some of Digital’s fondest-remembered hardware up to date — and down in scale.

Jeroen “Sprite_tm” Domburg has been working on a build with a difference: It’s an ultra-compact replica of a Digital DEC VT-102 terminal, emulating a PDP-11 running 2.11BSD — all on the top of an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller.

“The thing that attracted me to the PDP11 is that the PDP line in general always has been a family of ‘hackers’ machines,'” Sprite_tm explains. “Its members were cheap enough to allow people to do fun stuff on, and for instance the first computer game, SpaceWar!, was written on a PDP1. It wouldn’t be the last game written on a PDP machine, though: Apart from the aforementioned arcade games, all the way in Russia on a cloned PDP-11, Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov wrote a certain title called ‘Tetris,’ which later was spread all over the world.”

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