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Rodrigo Shiordia

Showcasing a Self-Built Pellet Extruder


The Design The Printing The Machine in action

The Design

Pellet Extruding

Our pellet extruder was developed in house following several sources online. Particularly, we looked at Bartlett's RC4 video.

The design features a 1" auger in a tube, with a 3d printed tumbler, and a NEMA23 motor with a planetary gearbox. The heat block is made of three 75 watt heat elements, that are controlled using a REX C100 PID controller. We are also using a heated bed using 15m of low temp nichrome coil-wire. The whole thing is held together with an aluminium chasis and attached to a KR30 or KR10 Robot. We are printing ABS and PLA. In the case of PLA, it is printed from reclaimed suppert material and reused plastic, ABS is store-bought,


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The printing


PLA large format prints
We have printed with PLA and ABS, in the case of PLA the prints are not as consistent because we are recycling plastic and that pellet is not consistent.





This is our first furniture piece, which was made of recycled PLA. Even though this was not part of the assignment, we wanted to showcase this in the review time for week 5 because we wanted to share how recycling waste from other printer is a great thing to do in fablabs.

The Machine in Action

The extruder attached to robots
The extruder can be attached to any robotic arm with a min payload of 6kg. We have been working on ways to connect the digital outputs of the robotic arm to the arduino that controls the stepper in order to have more freedom in our prints. Thanks for watching!






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