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Electronic Powder Measure - Build in Progress

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The Hen that laid the Golden Legos
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Thought some might be interested in this, it's an electronic powder measure. One pic is the extruder assembly and scale assembly, the other is the control box. As you can see it is run by an Arduino Uno. All the plastic parts are printed. I used standard PLA for the control box and scale, grey since I had it laying around. For the extruder itself I used carbon fiber reinforced PLA both for the structural rigidity it imparted to the extruder motor and hopper stand but also because it is mildly conductive electrically so that will discharge any static electricity that might build up. The most likely spot for that is internal to the extruder tube, there is an extrusion screw inside so it'll be plastic on plastic.....I needed to dissipate static.

I'm still waiting for a couple odd electronic parts to arrive, a couple diodes and capacitors that I didn't have sitting around and had to order. While I'm waiting for the couple missing components to show up I'm also tinkering with the code base for the Arduino. That code is basically an open source project and it came configurable to display in three different languages. Since I don't need German or French I'm slimming down the code base to just English and in homage to the ODT it'll also display the model of the creation, still TBD but I'm leaning towards the "ODT-1000".

The missing components should arrive in the next couple of weeks and my code tweaking should be done by then. I'll post a video of it in action when it's up and running. This is a compilation of parts as there are multiple open source powder measure projects listed ou on Thingiverse. I liked the extruder assembly from one, scale assembly and control box assembly from another. I've pre-wired all the parts I do have already with dupont connectors so when the rest comes in it'll be plug and play. Also makes for a pretty clean looking unit......no loose stuff dangling about on the workbench. The code base is set up to calibrate the unit as it's first step (calibration is mandatory one time, then optional if you want to recalibrate later) so that should help insure accuracy.


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