Development of an integrated system of 3D printer and laser carving

Within this recent years, the maker movement has been developed widely and rapidly in many countries. It encourages individuals to become a maker who is capable of developing a product or design by a low cost process and cheap facilities. Unlike current manufacturers, the makers' products are usually built by a small batch production. It exactly fits the needs and requirements for the age of mass customization. In order to speed up the development of the maker movement, low cost facilities are needed. About the need, makers and engineers have started to develop a set of open sources to freely provide people to build their own machines. 3D printers like Prusa i3 and Rostock are the topical examples. Those cheap machines become makers' major equipment to build their products. Of course, a 3D printer associated with multiple functions definitely can satisfy more makers' building tasks. Based on this fact, this paper is proposed to develop an integrated system which contains both functions of 3D printing and Laser carving in one machine. As we knew, 3D printing is an additive manufacturing technology and Laser carving is a subtractive manufacturing technology. They utilize completely opposite approaches to build their parts, but they are controlled digitally. In the machine, the 3D printing is based on the technology of the Fused Deposition Modeling. It extrudes plastic filament from a nozzle and deposits melted plastic along planned paths layer by layer until a part is completed. For a high quality of printing, the height of the nozzle for printing the first layer is an important control parameter. If the height is too high, it may cause the printed part to fail to stick on the print bed. If the height is too low, it may stop melted plastic out from the nozzle. In order to smooth the printing task, an inductive proximity sensor was installed to develop an auto-bed-leveling system to optimally locate the height of the printer nozzle during a print job. For Laser carving, the auto-bed-leveling system can be used to locate the Laser at optimal height to execute its carving task. This paper presents a designed platform on which an extruder of 3D print head and Laser can be installed without problem. For making auto-bed-leveling work perfectly with Laser carving, an investigation of the Laser carvings at different heights are presented. In addition, a calibration to obtain optimal height is also presented in the paper. This paper presented a detail of developing an integration of 3D printer and Laser carving. It is useful to makers to own a multifunction of machine for their product development.