Development

Table of Contents

Note: Currrently, Alex is the only developer of the project, so this was written entirely by them, from their perspective.

The Story

Back in January of 2023, I (Alex) finally finished my VORON Legacy by the VORON Design team. No words could describe how awesome it felt to finally fulfill a dream I had so many years ago. I mean really, I had built a massive 3D printer from scratch! I immediately began hunting for my next challenge.

A few months prior, I had seen the Positron project by KRALYN Design.

This design stuck out to for two reasons:

  1. It fit inside a filament box, which was just the coolest thing ever
  2. More importantly, it was filled with innovation, done entirely by one university student.

The second point was particularly meaningful to me though, since printers like the VORON Legacy I had just built were designed by entire teams of people. It made the task of designing a printer actually seem approachable.

Costing upwards of 700+ USD and requiring custom CNC machined parts though, the project was unfortunately inaccessible to me. I decided to design my own instead; how hard could it really be?

Since my motivation to design a printer stemmed from accessibility issues, the that’s what I decided to design Neutrino around. I sent out surveys to get an idea of issues that other people were facing. It didn’t get enough responses for me to draw useful conclusions though. Instead, I decided to tackle almost every common issue I could think of with DIY 3D printers:

  • Cost
    Most DIY 3D printer designs are just way too expensive in general. Sometimes they’ll be labelled as “$200” and then have another $100 in shipping costs.
  • Custom parts
    CNC machined parts or otherwise custom components are hard to obtain for many, so the design should omit them.
  • Complex build
    I don’t think someone should require an engineering degree to be able to put a good 3D printer together.
  • Plastic waste
    3D printers use a lot of plastic, plastic which rarely gets recycled. I wanted to design my printer to be able to print with recycled plastic from water bottles. Much like the Recreator 3D

I also wanted an answer to some “why not?” questions I’ve always had such as:

  • What happens if you buy the absolute cheapest parts?
    3D printing communities tend to recommend certain sellers and manufacturers and to avoid the cheap parts like the plague, but I was always curious as to how bad it could really be. After all, they’re still in business, right? (Spoiler alert: everything is pretty much the same)
  • What happens if you 3D print everything?
    Almost every DIY 3D printer uses metal for the structural pieces, which makes up a large portion of the cost. I always wondered what would happen if you 3D printed them instead, even when much of the community recommended against it.

For the first few weeks, ideas to solve these problems lingered in my head, but nothing really came to fruition. During one particular dinner though, the vision for Neutrino came to me and I immediately sprinted upstairs. I spent the next 5 hours coming up with a flowchart:

(You can download a high res version here, complete with every detail)

Once I had this laid out, I began to actually work on what would become Neutrino.

Getting started & Finding a workflow

Before I finished Neutrino, I never really designed anything more complicated than a weekend project; the design would span a couple weeks at most. As a result, I wasn’t quite sure where to start with actually approaching the problem. I went through countless different software and methods to document ideas, learning a lot along the way.

Before then, I’d mostly just imagine the idea, make extremely rudimentary sketches, and then get to designing; that’s pretty much how I started with this project. During this process, I swapped between a ton of different software, mainly for sketches.

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Initially, I started with sketches made using Excalidraw (Fig 1). For more technical drawings, I used Krita instead (Fig 2). I then figured that images and shapes would be easier to work with, instead of hand drawing every part (Fig 3). Later on though, I figured that it would be easier to just work out the dimensions in CAD software, so I used sketches to just represent concepts instead (Fig 4).

For text-based notes and general planning though, I used Obsidian the entire time. I had learned about it through a friend a few months prior, and was already pretty familiar with it. It was useful for organizing my stuff into tasks

When it came to the software I’d actually use for designing, my choices were pretty straightforward. I had designed PCBs, made functional 3D printed parts, and programmed plenty of projects before. This was a matter of just combining them all.
In conclusion:

The development itself

Being a portable printer, there were many design considerations I had to aim at. Each had their own specific problems to deal with. For ease of reading, I’ve blocked this section out into each respective component

Gantry Kinematics

Coming soon!

Extrusion setup

Coming soon!

Z-axis

Coming soon!

Frame & Base

Coming soon!

Electronics & Firmware

Coming soon!

PET Recycling unit

Coming soon!

Final takeaways, next steps

Coming soon!