Over the past few months I have made a few improvements to my Rostock Mini 3D printer, which has greatly improved the quality of its prints and ease of use. For example, one of the additions is a Bluetooth interface which doesn’t require any firmware support.
Those of you who’ve read both my Rostock and HAluBot articles, might have noticed that I would have a lot of parts from the Rostock left over after building the HAluBot. In order to put those leftover parts to good use, and because having a 3D printer will be convenient during the design and debugging of my HAluBot, I decided to make a Rostock Mini.
Since the first 3D printer I constructed, a variation on the Rostock, only worked so-so, I decided to tear it down and reuse its components for a new printer. In this first article about my new printer, named HAluBot, I’ll go over and explain my design choices and show some renders of the CAD model I constructed.
In the summer of 2012, I stumbled upon the fantastic delta 3D printer by Johan Rocholl, the Rostock. Until then, 3D printers didn’t really interest me, but the Rostock looked so nice that I couldn’t ignore it. So I decided to build a derivative version myself, and started designing.
For the limit switches on a custom 3D printer I’m designing, I want to try out some contactless sensors. I have chosen to use hall effect sensors, which are sensitive to a magnetic field.There are three different types of these sensors available. First, there’s the omnipolar hall sensor, which turns on when a magnet comes in its vicinity. Next is the unipolar one, which turns on as long as a specific magnetic pole is close enough, which pole depends on the sensor. Finally, there’s the bipolar hall effect sensor, which latches on when one pole comes close and only turns off when it senses the other pole.