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Why is the belt moving up and down?

This is generally due to 4 things:
- Angular misalignment of the pulleys/idlers
- Parallel misalignment of the pulleys/idlers
- Belt quality, wear and type
- Pulleys/idlers quality and wear

It is also good to know that long belts have the teeth cut at a very small angle which could also increase this phenomena.

#3dprinting #machinedesign #belt #timingbelt #corexy @3dprinting

I wonder if a #SilentSync #belt and #sprocket setup would improve the #print quality of a #3DPrinter. 16mm belts would probably reduce #ghosting / #ringing, but would the offset herringbone tooth pattern reduce some, if not all of the XY wavey artifacts? Maybe the #VoronDesign or #HevORT folks would like to investigate?

https://www.silentsync.com/silentsync-sprockets/yellow-timing-pulley-sprockets

#3DPrinting #3DPrint #kinematics #hardware #belts #TimingBelt #sprockets #Voron

Super Simple Camera Slider With A Neat Twist

When you get into making videos of products or your own cool hacks, at some point you're going to start wondering how those neat panning and rotating shots are achieved. The answer is quite often some kind of mechanical slider which sends the camera along a predefined path. Buying one can be an expensive outlay, so many people opt to build one. [Rahel zahir Ali] was no different, and designed and built a very simple slide, but with a neat twist.

This design uses a geared DC motor, taken from a car windscreen wiper. That's a cost effective way to get your hands on a nice high-torque motor with an integral reduction gearbox. The added twist is that the camera mount is pivoted and slides on a third, central smooth rod. The ends of this guide rod can be offset at either end, allowing the camera to rotate up to thirty degrees as the slide progresses from one end to the other. With a few tweaks, the slider can be vertically mounted, to give those up-and-over shots. Super simple, low tech and not an Arduino in sight.

The CAD modelling was done with Fusion 360, with all the models downloadable with source, in case someone needs to adapt the design further. We were just expecting a pile of STLs, so seeing the full source was a nice surprise, given how many open source projects like this (especially on Thingiverse) do often seem to neglect this.

Electronics consist of a simple DC motor controller (although [Rahel] doesn't mention a specific product, it should not be hard to source) which deals with the speed control, and a DPDT latching rocker switch handles the motor direction. A pair of microswitches are used to stop the motor at the end of its travel. Other than a 3D printer, there is nothing at all special needed to make yourself quite a useful little slider!

We've seen a few slider designs, since this is a common problem for content creators. Here's a more complicated one, and another one.

#digitalcamerashacks #cameraslider #dcmotor #motioncontrol #pan #tilt #timingbelt

Back-to-Back Belts Drive Filament in This Unique Extruder Design

It's hard to say when inspiration will strike, or what form it'll take. But we do know that when you get that itch, it's a good idea to scratch it, because you might just end up with something like this cool new design for a 3D printer extruder as a result.

Clearly, the world is not screaming out for new extruder designs. In fact, the traditional spring-loaded, toothed drive wheel on a stepper really does the job of feeding filament into a printer's hot end just fine, all things considered. But [Jón Schone], aka Proper Printing on YouTube, got the idea for his belt-drive extruder from seeing how filament manufacturers handle their products. His design is a scaled-down version of that, and uses a pair of very small timing belts that run on closely spaced gears. The gears synchronize the movement of the two belts, with the filament riding in the very narrow space between the belts. It's a simple design, with the elasticity of the belt material eliminating the need for spring pre-loading of the drive gears.

Simple in design, but not the easiest execution. The video below tells [Jón]'s tale of printing woe, from a ridiculously viscous SLA resin to build tank damage. The completed extruder was also a bit too big to mount directly on the test printer, so that took some finagling too. But at the end of the day, the idea works, and it looks pretty cool doing it.

As for potential advantages of the new design, we suppose that remains to be seen. It does seem like it would eliminate drive gear eccentricity, which we've seen cause print quality issues before.

[BaldPower] tipped us off to this one. Thanks!

#3dprinterhacks #bowden #extruder #filament #printer #sla #stepper #timingbelt #timinggear