Custom 3D Printer

Inspriration (Voron V0)

My Printer

The area where I see the largest improvement relative to other printers in the same class is the X axis. Compared to a standard solution of 15mm extrusion I opted to use two 6x4mm carbon fiber tubes designed for drone arms, the tubes are stacked in the direction where the most amount of stiffness is needed while reducing Z height and cost while still making it easier to manufacture than one larger tube. The reduced weight reduces the amount of mass needed to accelerate when moving the Y axis therefor making the whole printer able to handle harder accelerations in the Y axis.

The X carriage is the part that I had the most difficulty with, I had three big constraints that increased this difficulty and caused a few redesigns and reprints of the part. The most important restraint was weight, the weight of the hot end contributed to both the X and Y axis making any gram that i could save in this location super valuable for increasing the acceleration. The other two constraints were not as strict however as a design challenge I wanted to pursue them, the first was to make the carraige as small as possible as it would reduce the frame size needed, the other was that I forced myself to use as many common bolts across the whole project to reduce the overall number of unique parts and therefor cost.

In order to reduce cost this printer is designed to use a mainboard from the most popular consumer 3D printer (Ender 3) which allows me to purchase the board for a much lower price compared to other main boards. All the motors are nema 17, 0.4N-m stepper motors that I had from an my first ever printer (Anet A8). The system runs on 24v and draws about 7.5A peak with everything running.

Originally I had planned to power this printer using Klipper however due to college and uncertainty around the wifi and issues with my raspberry pi I opted to just run plain Marlin 2.0 which lacks some of the features I was planning on but made my physical design much more important due to the lack of accelerometer based input shaping which can reduce artifacts of resonance due to high accelerations.