eggplant
L3 | NAR 93664, TRA 17791
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2011
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I've wanted to build a filament winder for years now but always considered it to be too daunting a project, given that building one includes mechanical, electrical, and software work, not to mention lots of messy composites. Examples of homebrew winders are few and far between with no real community compared to 3D printers so it is harder to stand on the shoulders of giants. If you dig for a little while though, you can find plenty of examples, from videos of industrial winders in action, research papers, to discussion about the X-Winder, the main hobby-grade winder available. I started doing research in earnest when I came across this excellent thread where @Scrapmaster87 did a great job documenting his filament winder build. From there I was committed and started to CAD:
I ended up with a largely X-Winder inspired 3-axis machine that's designed to be easily upgradable to 4 axes. It should handle up to 5" mandrels and though I've built mine with 4' travel, should be able to handle more length. It is built entirely out of off-the-shelf hardware and 3D printed parts, so it is quick to iterate on and should be straightforward for others to replicate. If you want to follow along with the CAD, you can do so here. I still need to finish the design of the resin bath, but most of it is there.
I'm using NEMA-23 steppers for the carriage and mandrel and a NEMA-14 for the delivery head. All driven by TMC2209 drivers. The machine is currently running off of a standard BigTreeTech Octopus board using Marlin.
I'm also working on software for generating toolpaths, plotting them for evaluation/debugging, and running the machine. Definitely a work in progress, but it can generate gcode for helical and hoop winds and stream them to the machine. The plotting functionality has been super useful for debugging so far:
I plan to make the plotter show tow at the real width, draw overlaps in an intuitive way, animate the output, and potentially wrap it onto a 3D cylinder. Already very helpful though. There isn't much documentation yet, but the software is located here.
Initial results in the next post!
I ended up with a largely X-Winder inspired 3-axis machine that's designed to be easily upgradable to 4 axes. It should handle up to 5" mandrels and though I've built mine with 4' travel, should be able to handle more length. It is built entirely out of off-the-shelf hardware and 3D printed parts, so it is quick to iterate on and should be straightforward for others to replicate. If you want to follow along with the CAD, you can do so here. I still need to finish the design of the resin bath, but most of it is there.
I'm using NEMA-23 steppers for the carriage and mandrel and a NEMA-14 for the delivery head. All driven by TMC2209 drivers. The machine is currently running off of a standard BigTreeTech Octopus board using Marlin.
I'm also working on software for generating toolpaths, plotting them for evaluation/debugging, and running the machine. Definitely a work in progress, but it can generate gcode for helical and hoop winds and stream them to the machine. The plotting functionality has been super useful for debugging so far:
I plan to make the plotter show tow at the real width, draw overlaps in an intuitive way, animate the output, and potentially wrap it onto a 3D cylinder. Already very helpful though. There isn't much documentation yet, but the software is located here.
Initial results in the next post!
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