Jesse Arstein

I have two 3D printers, a Monoprice Duplicator i3 and a Prusa MK3S+. I have tinkered with and made many upgrades to both of these machines. These upgrades typically require firmware writing, CAD modeling, thermodynamics, IoT API integration and a lot of time.

A project I would like to highlight is: My first machine was a Duplicator i3 and this machine required the user to manually level their 3D printing bed. This is done to assure that when you lay down plastic layers they stay perpendicular to a surface and is more stable. Manually leveling a bed can be tedious so I opened up the machine and wired in a capacitive sensor to sense the metal bed and give a reading on how close the nozzle is to the 3D printing bed. Once the hardware was in place, I needed to update the firmware to automatically adjust the height of the nozzle during a print. You can get a rough idea of the "levelness" of your bed by probing in a 3x3 matrix across the bed. Once you have that data, you just add some math and you'll be able to make adjustments to the height of your nozzle while you are printing obsoleting the need for a level bed!