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17. Applications and Implications

In this week we needed to answer some questions about our project.

What will it do?

It will recycle plastic and will make PET filament from bottles.

Who has done what beforehand?

There are many machines that turn bottled into filament and I did research to understand how they are made. Here are some of them.

  1. Petamentor2

  2. Recreator3d

  3. Create Your own Free 3D Printing Filament from Plastic Bottles

  4. PET Filament Machine

What I will design?

I decided to make an easy design but most components were designed by myself.

  1. First I will design a gear pair for my stepper motor.

  2. spool for filament

  3. electronics box and the bed,

  4. 4 PCB for my project, because I want to make two controlling boards that will be connected with each other with I2C protocol and for stepper motor driver and power source other board.

What material and components I will use?

Component Quantity Price total Link
FR1 Copper Clad - Single Sided 4x6in 4 6$ online market link
KY-040 Encoder module 1 1.5 $ online market link
LCD I2C Screen 1 6$ online market link
MAX6675 K Module for Thermocouple 1 5$ online market link
Ender hot end 1 14 $ online market link
PLA fimanet 1KG 1 15$ online market link
IRFZ44N MOSFET 1 1$ Local shop
TMC2208 V1.2 driver 1 5$ online market link
2n3904 BJT 1 0.5 $ FabLab
ATTINY1614 2 4 $ Fablab
Acrylic sheet 1 10$ Fablab
Total price 68 $

What process I will use?

I will use.

  1. 3D printing - for gears and spool

  2. Laser cutting - for bed and electronic box

  3. PCB production - for my PCBs

What questions I need to answer?

Because I want to connect my 2 boards with the I2C protocol I need to understand what data they need to transfer to each other and how I need to write the code because I want to program it by myself and don’t use firmware or other open source codes.

I also want to add PID temperature control and need to understand how it works.

Also, I want to create the menu for my device and I need to understand which settings of the machine I need to control with the menu.

How do I need to do thermal insulation for my hot end and its holder to not lose the temperature the holder needs to be heat resistant because the hot end needs to be heat approximately 240-250 °C.

Also, I need to understand the bottle strip width that I want to use for my machine.

How will it be evaluated?

  1. If the hot end and the gears work and I get the filament from the bottle strip.

  2. If I managed to do an I2C connection, send and get the data from the secondary and primary board.

  3. If I make the menu for temperature control. To set the temperature we need and motor will work when the hot end temperature achieves to desired value.

  4. If I add in menu stepper speed control.