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3D Printed Parts
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Problems
Something else has come up in this project. 3D printed parts.
There is, already, a 3D printer available here in the lair but it's out of the way & a bit of an annoyance to get it all set up! Also, what would be cooler than turning up with your odd looking laptop and then bring out a, companion, 3D printer
That being said, our favourite Chinese supplier had the answer! The cheapest, and most dubious, 3D printer ever (at around £50 / $60). It has a massive 100mm x 100mm x 100mm (about 4 cubic inch) bed! Enough of a size to print all of the bits that will hold things together & stop the possibility of electrocution in the final build.
So what will be produced for the build? Who knows as the only one that has been designed is for the i2c breakout.
It's a simple box, designed in SketchUp (it's easy & quickish to use) to protect the exposed soldering on the bottom of the breakout
2 other designs are needed. One to allow a breakout for the USB ports that are not in use. The other is for the wired Ethernet. Both will fit onto the back of a PPC640
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| Ethernet Port | USB Port |
The have been designed to be a little over long so they can be cut down to fit better when they are finally installed so they can be fitted more snugly together in their final location.
UPDATE - Feb 23, 2024: It's arrived at the cave! and it looks a lot better built than was expected. The box is quite large considering what's inside as well as the cute print bed in its all 100mm printable area! Now we just have to put it all together, level the bed & then run a test print
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The printer has now been built... It's sooo cute and only 25cm tall so it's very tiny (and portable?) & printing the above part
However, they will take a while as Cura says 2 hours 20 minutes for its 24 layers!
After all of that, the printer has now developed a fault, maybe. It doesn't seem to be pulling in filament. It might just be an "operator error". With that, another one has been ordered and this one will still be put to good use in the project as a "portable 3D printer for the system.
