Home » 3D Printing

3D Printing

Learn about 3D printing technology and how to make DYOR robot with a 3D printer.

3D printing is an additive manufacturing process, which means that create things by adding material. This is precisely the opposite process of traditional manufacturing processes such as CNC (Numerical control). With 3D printing, you can create complex structures, which in most of the cases are nearly impossible with CNC with just one single part, however 3D printers are also affected by many factors that will determine the probability of succeeding, and therefore we must take them into account.

The working principle is quite simple, a filament, generally a plastic filament, is extruded through a hot-end. This is an important part of the 3D printing process, since it must be hot enough to melt the plastic into a liquid state that solidifies just after being extruded at ambient temperature. Layer by layer, we can deposit plastic to create a part.

The hot-end can be accurately positioned with the help of stepper motors using a Cartesian structure, with accuracies below the millimetre. As a consequence, we need to slice a 3D digital object into layers separated into a given height and determine the X and Y position for the hot-end for each slice. Obviously, it is not necessary to fill the whole part to print with material, because only the hull is of interest. However, is is usually required to create internal structures that allow to fill the part with a given density which saves a lot of time and material and at the same time provide the required rigidity. This is usually known as fill pattern.

Here we show some entries related with 3D printing: