Plastic Recycling

The lab has (the component parts of) a system for shredding and recycling 3D printing filaments. This is currently being actively worked on, by:

• Yasha (@praxidyke)
• Aria (@ariaaaa)
• Anyone else who wants to help :)

We have:

• A shredder
• A NozTek Pro filament extruder
• A Felfil filament spooler

Each of these needs a bit of work, described below.

Side note: We could probably recycle things into not-filament as well if we wanted to. Bart does this with other plastics, and this site has some ideas.

We have the bits of a shredder donated by Bart, however right now there is no protection against the motor stalling and throwing a breaker. When we got it, the fuses on both the plug and the PSU were bridged. It should probably have:

• A breaker on it, set slightly below ours.
• Alternatively, we could detect stalls and automatically reverse it for a bit, if someone figures out how to do that.
• Maybe some switch to prevent it running without the hopper attached?

We used to have another shredder, but we're not sure where it is.

The extruder we have goes quite fast. Right now it needs:

• An agitator / new hopper on top, to make sure it extrudes evenly. Yasha is working on this.
• Some kind of bracket to hold it at a 45deg angle, since that seems to be how it wants to work.
• Getting it started & threaded through the spooler is kinda a pain, if we can document this / figure out how to make it easier that'd be nice.

The firmware has been mostly rewritten, and the puller and distributor steppers set to 1/32nd microsteps so that they're much smoother. The remaining problems are:

• The arduino on there is partially fried, as is the control board. Aria to order a new one.
• There's some bugs with how the distributor changes direction that need worked out, probably after the arduino is replaced.
• Once we have the extruder sorted out, we probably need to re-PID-tune it.

Resources (mostly for the original):

• Rewritten firmware
• Spooler CAD file
• Manufacturer support site
• Blog posts
  • Config tips
  • Download links for printing accessories: https://felfil.com/felfil-system-5-tips-to-get-the-most-out-of-extrusion/?v=5ea34fa833a1