3D Printing at Home

Starting Summer 2020, the printer of choice for this course is the Creality Ender 3 which can be found here.

The Ultimaker 3D Printer Slicing Software Cura 3D will be used for the printers in our lab and those in the Innovation Colab through the 3D Printer OS System here.  Learn how to use this operation system here.

There are vast online resources that will help you through the ‘build, calibrate, design, and implement’ process that will make your 3D printer a critical part of your required design and prototyping training.  We recommend that you visit the links below before embarking on your 3D printer journey or deciding on a CAD program or slicer software to use.

  1. Complete Beginner’s Guide
  2. First 7 Projects
    1. Interested in 24 Upgrades?
    2. Ender 3 Vent Ring
    3. Extruder Motor Knob
    4. Fan Cover
    5. Spring Tensioner
    6. Cable Clips
    7. Filament Guide
  3. Print Quality Troubleshooting
  4. Slicer Calibration
  5. CAD: Using Onshape Playlist
  6. Slicer: Using Cura
    1. Beginner
    2. 5 Most Important Slicer Settings
  7. Free STL files
    1. Thingiverse
    2. GrabCad
  8. Advanced
    1. Flashing Bootloader and Updating Firmware

Electronics at Home

Many of the projects on this website use single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi and the Jetson Nano. If you would like to get started with either of these powerful devices, the links below should help guide you through the setup processes

  1. Booting Raspberry Pi / Jetson Nano

See the tutorials below for guides on circuits and circuit manufacturing techniques.

  1. Outsourcing Custom PCB Board

ESP32 is a series of low-cost, low-power System-on-Chip (SoC) microcontrollers developed by Espressif Systems. It has a feature-rich MCU with integrated WiFi & Bluetooth capabilities for a wide range of applications. It also has a couple of on-board buttons and LEDs which are explained below:

  1. Micro-USB jack:  The micro USB jack is used to connect the ESP32 to our computer through a USB cable.  It is used to program the ESP module as well as can be used for serial debugging as it supports serial communication.
  2. EN Button: The EN button is the reset button of the ESP module. Pressing this button will reset the code running on the ESP module.
  3. Boot Button: This button is used to upload the Program from Arduino to the ESP module. It has to be pressed after clicking on the upload icon on the Arduino IDE. When the Boot button is pressed along with the EN button, ESP enters into firmware uploading mode. Do not play with this mode unless you know what you are doing.
  4. Red LED: The Red LED on the board is used to indicate the power supply. It glows red when the board is powered.
  5. Blue LED: The Blue LED on the board is connected to the GPIO pin. It can be turned on or off through programming. In some Chinese cloned boards like mine, this led might also be in red colour.
  6. I/O pins: This is where major development has taken place. Unlike ESP8266, on ESP32 we can access all the I/O pin of the module through the break-out pins. These pins are capable of Digital Read/Write, Analog Read/Write, PWM, IIC, SPI, DAC and much more. We will get more into that later. But if you are interested you can learn through the pin description at ESP32 Datasheet.
  7. ESP-WROOM-32: This is the heart of the ESP32 module. It is a 32-bit microprocessor developed by Espressif systems. If you are more of a technical person you can read through the ESP-WROOM-32 Datasheet.

[Source: Circuit Digest, Aswinth Raj, 2018]

Click on the video below to get started with ESP32:

Specifications and Datasheet:

The esp32 DevKit v1 comes with a serial-to-USB chip on board that allows programming and opening the UART of the ESP32 module. In order to start working with the controller, it is important to know its specifications.

Below are links to the specifications of some popular ESP32 boards –

  1. Espressif Systems (ESP32 Series)
  2. ESP32 Development Board – DEVKIT v1
  3. Heltec ESP32 OLED WiFi Kit
Basic Tutorials:

ESP32-CAM Wi-Fi Setup – Bo Anderson

-Paavana

AI, ML, and ROS at Home