3D Printing

With all the grand home automation ideas I had as I got into making my own controllers, sensors, and whatnot, I needed something to put them in or to mount them to something. Plastic project boxes are great, but I found that they were too big, too small, or just not the right thing I was looking for. Several of the YouTube channels and Facebook groups I was following for the electronics related projects had custom 3-D printed enclosures.

This sparked my interest in getting a 3-D printer, but my initial thought was, “man that would be expensive.” As it turns out, they’ve gotten really inexpensive (relatively speaking). Through online research, I decided to go with a Creality product.

Creality makes several different models, and I had settled on the Ender 3. At the time, it was about $250 and the size of things it could print was more than enough for my needs. Just as I was about order it, I found the Ender 5 with a larger build plate (the economist in me tells me more is better, right), but the additional features and improvements are what convinced to go that route. It was about $350, and I think the advantages of the 5 over the 3 justified the extra cost.

I ordered it from Amazon, got it shipped in a couple of days, and it took about and hour and a half to assemble… decent directions but I kept going back and forth between the printed instructions, online assembly videos, and actual assembly. I could probably do it in half that time now. Got it all together, plugged it in, and… nothing! Went back to the instructions and saw where the power supply had a switch for European or US power. Of course it was on the EU setting. Flipped it to US and hit the power switch… success!

I leveled the bed per online instructions, loaded the filament, and printed a couple of the test items that were on the microSD card that came with the printer. Next I was out to find more useful things to print. Fortunately the 3-D print community posts a lot of free designs they’ve made on Thingiverse. I printed a few of different boxes for some controllers but found that most didn’t work for my model/manufacturer of controllers.

I googled around and found a few free online tools where I could make my own basic boxes, but these were pretty rudimentary. I needed better.

I came across Fusion 360 from Autodesk. They offered their product for FREE! to hobbyists like myself for no commercial purposes. Freaking Awesome! (If you get into Fusion 360 and use the free license, please follow the rules… they don’t have to offer it for free to hobbyist and folks like me using it for personal non-commercial purposes).

The learning curve was pretty high at first since I had zero experience, but through perseverance, a lot of cussing, and online videos, I’ve got fairly good at meeting my needs. What took an hour a year ago I can now do in ~15 minutes.

One of the biggest challenges was similar to what I experienced with Thingiverse. I’d get the dimensions close much of the time, but not quite perfect. It helped to go from a ruler to a digital caliper, but over time I’ve learned the tolerances of my printer and can now (usually) compensate for the tolerances in my designs.

I’ve also made some upgrades to the printer. Pretty basic stuff you can learn more about through YouTube searches so I won’t bore you with those details. However I will note that I’ve also added OctoPrint (free software) that runs on a Raspberry Pi connected to the printer. This lets me monitor and control the printer over WiFi. I can also add a camera to the Pi if I ever get around to it. Beats running back and forth to and from the room where the printer is set up.

I’ve tried to leave out a lot of detail of the trials and frustrations I’ve had to keep this post fairly short. Let’s just say I’ve bought 2, 1kg spoils of filament over the past year and just weighed the failed prints (bad designs and printer errors) It came in at about 1.5kg, so that’s 75% waste. Well, not waste really. I learned a lot. That amounts to about $30 total. What I’ve learned in the process is much more valuable.

All in all, I’d say this is one of the best, most fun investments I’ve ever made.