This is very much a work in progress.

The goal of this project is to create a robot which can "print" designs with Perler Beads automatically. The raw material would be multicolored unsorted Perler beads. The robot would accept a bitmap image with some pixel art you'd like to recreate in Perler beads. It would automatically sort the beads and place them on a grid, ready to iron.

So far...

I have a blog post explaining some of my ideas so far:
scanlime.org/2011/02/perler-bead-robot-ideas/

And another post about the color sensor I plan to use:
scanlime.org/2011/02/trying-out-the-avago-adjd-s371-q999-color-sensor/

A video of the vibrating funnel in action:
flickr.com/photos/micahdowty/5407791891/in/set-72157625540465089/

The design comes in several "layers" which stack vertically with standard M4 hardware. First there is a hopper for the raw unsorted beads, then a vibrating funnel which extracts the beads in single-file. Next, a sorter which includes a color sensor, and a servo-driven disc which shuttles the beads back and forth at the right time. This will sit above some kind of X-Y table, which can be rather simple given the low precision requirements.

Currently the first two layers, the hopper and the vibrating funnel, are mostly done. The sorter is more of a sketch than a final design at this point, and it will probably change significantly.

This is another cooling design, inspired by (but not directly based on) thing 5756.

I wanted to use Iwo's design, but I just upgraded to a MakerGear stepper plastruder on my Thing-o-Matic, and there wasn't enough clearance around the extruder nozzle to mount any fan ducts on the top side of the Z-stage. So, this design is a circular cooling nozzle that mounts around the extruder nozzle, just under the Z-stage.

It is fed by two 1/4" PVC hoses, attached to a fan mount that sits on top of the Z-stage, near the rear of the bot. This mount holds a 40mm fan salvaged from an old graphics card.

The overall airflow is very subtle- it's detectable with your hand, but just barely. But it makes a huge difference in print quality for small parts. In the attached image of two single-wall calibration boxes, both boxes were printed consecutively using the same g-code. The only difference is that one box had the cooling fan intake blocked.

This design is in parametric OpenSCAD, so it should be fairly easy to adapt to other nozzle types or fan sizes.

Note: This adds some extra hardware to the underside of your Z-stage. Make sure there will be clearance with anything you have sticking up from your build platform. I had to remove the nozzle wiper from my ABP. (The wiper wasn't working very well with my MakerGear nozzle anyway, so no big loss...)

This is a parametric OpenSCAD script for generating two-dimensional springs. This is the same basic idea that many of the wobble arrestors and snap-in parts use: long, thin plastic segments that are designed to flex a bit. I just generalized the concept a bit.

These springs seem relatively sturdy, and they can be used along the XY plane, or (less ideally) along the Z axis.

You can make the springs stiffer and stronger by making them thicker (taller). Adjust the spring constant by changing the total length of the spring, either by adjusting the radii of the inner/outer circles, or by changing the arc angle of the springs.

Depending on the quality and calibration of your printer, you may or may not be able to make the springs thin enough that they turn into a single plastic filament. When I tried this, the springs were more flexible, but there were more errors in the print due to extruder starting/stopping and due to shrinkage. I made the springs two layers thick, and they print much more reliably now.

This is a really simple design, but I hadn't seen this done before, so I thought I'd upload mine.

It's a small plastic divider insert that you can put into a miniature mint tin in order to turn it into a multi-day pill box. The OpenSCAD model is parametric, but the settings I have by default give you 6 compartments in an "Altoids Smalls" mint tin.

Update 1/22/2011: Added new files, a Version 2 (tighter fitting, notched) insert for Altoids Smalls tins and a new larger 15-compartment insert for full-size Altoids tins.

This is a higher poly count version of thing 1859 by smwombat. I subdivided and smoothed the mesh, and completely flattened the bottom. I'm working on doing a really high-res print of this on my makerbot :)