Credit: Michele Lizzit
Using parts from a flatbed scanner and three old inkjet printers, Michele Lizzit has built a €10 ($11) 3D printer.
New Atlas reveals that 18-year-old Lizzit, a student at Udine’s Liceo Scientifico Copernico, has successfully taken apart the salvaged inkjet printers and scanner and used them to construct a fully functional 3D printer.
This homemade project cost a mere €10 ($11), as all Lizzit had to buy were “a hotend extruder, an ATmega328 processing brain, a motor driver, three driver boards and a high-current transistor.”
The 3D printer is supported by cardboard biscuit boxes, and makes use of a “plastic plate from a scanner” which is topped by Amazon’s cardboard packaging. Rizzit 3D printed the extruder housing, “using a standard desktop machine”, and used an inkjet printer’s paper loading mechanism in place of a hobbed bolt.
He also came up with his own open source system firmware.
The finished product can supposedly “achieve a print resolution of 33 microns on both axes” and future firmware “will allow the system to compensate for filament slipping, auto clean a clogged nozzle and select the correct temperature for a filament on its own.”
Lizzit designed his homemade printer in a bid to prove “that fairly precise prints can be had from a home-build” that “also has the potential to put spent hardware to good use” and can “consume significantly less power than a shop-bought model”.
His 3D printer building instructions are available on his website, in addition to links to firmware downloads, and a list of the parts he used to make his home-built device.