Tag Archives: aka

Have you printed in HDPE?

Posted on by

I just noticed MakerBot discontinued their 5 pound rolls for HDPE.  This page is essentially taken down.  However, when it was last up it contained the following product description:

Update: Discontinued. It’s not fun to print with this stuff.

This is HDPE plastic aka High Density Polyethylene aka Milk Jug plastic. This is a nice, smooth, high quality plastic. It comes as a filament in 5lb coils with a diameter of 3mm.

This plastic is cheaper than ABS, but has a higher shrinkage factor which makes printing large objects more difficult. It does have a much lower coefficient of friction so you can print things that are very smooth.

I’ve never printed with this stuff.  Have you?  A higher shrinkage factor than ABS sounds pretty awful.  Then again, I mostly print fairly small parts, so then again I might not care.  And, for the last listed price of $30 for a 5 pound roll… it’s a dirt cheap printing option.

Soldering?

Posted on by

I have NO idea what I’m doing!

If you’ve got a Batch IX MakerBot all the surface mount boards should have arrived pre-soldered.  This means the first actual material step to building the robot is to solder the opto-endstops.  These are little circuit boards that contain optical switches that will prevent the machine from moving the build platform (and print head?) too far in a particular direction.  You can find the kits for the opto-endstops in the MakerBot store.  According to the page for these kits:

An optical switch usually used to detect when your robot has reached the minimum or maximum position of travel.

An optical endstop AKA opto endstop is a switch made out of light. When something interrupts the light-beam, then it signals the motherboard. Useful for detecting if your robot is attempting to self-destruct. ;)

Also, there are no moving parts to wear out, so they will last pretty much forever.

So, when all is said and done, hopefully I will have taken this:

OptoEndstops Parts

OptoEndstops Parts

To this:

OptoEndstops v2.1

OptoEndstops v2.1