Wednesday 19 June 2013

Custom Clips



Visit Tagbits to see the full range of tagger products described in this blog.



I've been designing a custom lasertag 'King Of The Hill' system for a customer, and decided to try mounting the PCB with 3D printed clips.
It's a pain to put holes for PCB mounts as extra real estate is required, plus all the associated washers, screws etc.
So I designed a 3D PCB mount, which relies upon friction clips to hold the PCB in place. Here, the green PCB is held in place by the angled clips:

And in the real world:

The PCB is held securely and can be fitted or removed with ease.

Tuesday 11 June 2013

Mendel90 Heated Chamber

I've been very happy with my Mendel90, but attempting to print larger parts in ABS resulted in the inevitable warping of the part as the ABS cools. Nophead has done a load of work on this subject, and my original printer uses a chamber also. So I designed some corner brackets to allow me to make a chamber for the Mendel90 from 6mm MDF. As there are no spare temperature inputs on the Melzi controller, I bought a cheap PID temp. controller off ebay, and wired it into a hot air gun. My '90 is in the garage and needs much more heat than cooling:



Below are the results, keeping the chamber at 45C makes a major difference to the warping. The right hand side shows the same part printed without heating:

This is using ABS juice to glue the parts to the bed. I'm going to try a combination of kapton tape and ABS juice next.