This guest post was provided by Alex Dragas.
With conventional 3D printers being at times frustrating, limiting and not able to produce satisfactory results, the industry players have come up with ways of improving the output of these printers. With ingenious, innovative and creative gadgets, you can turn your 3D printer into a perfectly functional, economical, accurate and convenient piece of equipment.
So, what gadgets are available and which ones should you own? Here are five of the best gadgets to have if you own a 3D printer.
THE PROTOCYCLER
3D printing is one promising revolutionary technology, which enables one to make literally anything with the press of a button. This technology, however, has its limitations, with the printers restricted to using the manufacturers’ own specific colors and material. Another restraint is the filament. It is costly and uneconomical. What if there existed a gadget that could recycle this filament, just like recycling the ink and toner of regular printers? Well, THE PROTOCYCLER does exactly this.
Regular printer ink, picture taken from moj-toner.com
This gadget allows you to create your filament, in any color you like, at any time from plastic pellets that are available in a variety of materials. It is 90% cheaper than the filaments, and it is fully automatic in functionality. It is extremely fast to create your customized filament. Its mechanism allows you to create ready to use filaments similar to what the manufacturer offers. It has a grinder that recycles all plastic waste from the printouts. Just feed any failed print, prototype or support material into a grinder and get perfectly re-usable filament in any color.
THE PALETTE
The industrial revolution has witnessed the advent of cheap, easily accessible and easy to use 3D printers. These printers, however, have one major limitation; they can only print one color at a time. In comes The Palette. This gadget is a cross-platform compatibility add-on to a normal 3D printer that turns your printer to a multicolored and multipurpose printer. It enables you to print more than one color at a time. It is easy to install and requires no printer modifications.
With this gadget, you can print highly elegant home projects, and even the more complex professional prototypes hassle free. It uses multicolor filaments attached to the already existing extruder in your normal printer, mixes them together and using special software; the user can control and adjust the output color. This gadget was made to redesign 3D printers and make them pro-representative of the ideas one tries to put through.
TIKO
Most 3D printers are heavy, unreliable and overly complicated in structure and assembly. You can spend more time calibrating the printer than actually printing your project. TIKO comes in as a simple solution to these problems by turning your printer into a one-body machine. Since most printers are made with three separate rails, TIKO works to combine all these rails into one chassis creating one solid unit. With this adjustment, problems of misalignment, inaccurate prints, and constant recalibration become a thing of the past.
TIKO also comes with an internal filament tray; a closed built chamber, an auto shut-off mechanism, and large print volume compatibility. For mobility purposes, TIKO also has a cloud-based software and wireless compatibility so you can print from anywhere with internet connectivity. It is also cheap to acquire as it goes for as little as $179.
3D Prostetic arm, picture taken from www.pixabay.com
VOLTERA
With the fast changing technological world, convenience, accuracy, and speed are immensely valuable. Hardware developers have one major problem when designing circuit boards; send a design to a factory, wait for weeks for the finished product only to encounter errors. With no time for fixing these mistakes, VOLTERA; the gadget that helps a hardware designer’s idea come to life faster. Using both conducting and insulating ink, the gadget creates perfectly accurate circuit boards at the click of the button ’print’’. What’s more? You can use any circuit-designing program you are comfortable with, VOLTERA will be able to pick it up and produce the hardware in no time.
3D Printer, picture taken from www.pixabay.com
RETOUCH 3D
Most 3D printed outputs are more often than not, rough-edged scrappy and unfinished. You, therefore, spend hours cleaning up the mess, which can be tedious, time-consuming and you might end up ruining your final product. In comes the Retouch 3D. It the world’s first specialty 3D clean-up tool designed to use heated tips to carefully, accurately and conveniently clean up the edges of your model. With variable heat control and interchangeable heads designed for each suitable 3D printout, the Retouch 3D tidies up your output faster and more accurately. Now you are guaranteed beautiful, well-finished and perfectly crafted products.