Drip Governor - A most valuble first hack

[rylangrayston]

Having used the peachy printer alot, I think one of the most valuable hacks That almost everyone will want is some way to automatically speed up and slow down the drip feed in the peachy printer. Id love to include such a feature in every kit

but as of now it looks like it will have to be an add on.



An auto governed dripper would improve 4 situations that really slow down the printing process.


1. If you have a 1000 layer print and 999 of your layers take 1 second to complete

but one of the layers takes 1 minute, then optimal your print could take 1059 seconds, however with out changing your drip speed dynamically during the print

you will have to wait one min in between all the 1 second layers just so you will have time to print the 1 min layer when you get to it. This makes printing without dynamic drip speed take 999 * 60 + 60 = 60000 seconds. This is bad because in this example you wait 16 hours for a print that could have taken 17 minutes with a dynamic drip rate ( of course this is and extreme situation but you get the point


2. Setting the drip speed really slow and just leaving the printer over night can simply result in the drip feed randomly stopping all together.


3 Changing the drip rate by hand works great, until you bump the printer because

its hard to stay focused on such a simple task for hours of time, time which is better spent ells ware


4. The size of a drip gets bigger when dripping very fast compared to very slow

we can account for this by measuring the time between drips but It would be better if we could avoid the slow dripping range entirely.




There are lots and lots of ways you could govern drips but since the printer costs so little iv been trying to find an ultra inexpensive drip governor. Ive been thinking about it for about 9 months now and Im finally starting to like one of my ideas on this topic.. so tonight while waiting for prints to finish i wiped up this little animation:






Important points

- The tapered points glued to ether end of the magnet would have just the right density to float the magnet in salt water


- The entire moving part would be dipped in enamel to prevent corrosion.


- The hope is that you could charge a capacitor and give each coil a pulse causing the printer to drip rapidly or not at all.


- The pules to the coils could be followed by some small holding current



- the wedge shape on the open end is important to help the moving part stick in place

- The flow of the water is typically very very slow not enough to push the moving part around


- If a magnet as apposed to a soft iron core is used its possible to pulse both coils at the same time (one pushing and the other pulling)


- The peachy software and hardware will be developed specifically to make it easy to add such modifications.


- When held vertical the floating magnet would sink indicating that your printer needs more salt.


- it seems quite likely that this could be further modified to be a pump.


I may work on this soon as it would really help the peachy team print faster.


Ill probably just drive mine with an Arduino sending codes over the serial port to open the drip governor

when ever the print is less that 5 drips ahead of the current layer.


Im also very interested in a pump that can do really repeatable pulses of water.


This is a great project for those of you that are dieing to work on the peachy printer before you get it!


Some points of importance in making a great drip detector are

- low cost

- the hole assembly must be air tight from top to bottom as to maximize siphon and stop bumbles from pushing into the bottom resivior

- drips must make clean and reliable contact between microphone input wires.



Well if i do get time to work on this ill be sure to post my results here

hope you will do the same


Rylan Grayston