I use an enclosure for printing, so the light levels aren’t great, I have a strip of LEDs mounted to the top of the enclosure, but whatever is being printed is pretty much in shadow because of the extruder. Now with this part, I can finally see what is being printed!
This is a modified face plate for the Articulated Raspberry Pi Camera Mount that houses a ring of LEDs, I have tested it with a ring of 16 Neopixels, available from Adafruit, and a 12 LED ZIP Circle, available from Pimoroni.
I would personally recommend getting one of the RGBW Neopixel rings, as it means you can get a nice natural white light instead of the slightly more blue light that you get when you run the RGB LEDs at full tilt to get a white colour.
You will also need a microcontroller to control the LEDs, in my case I used an ATtiny85 MCU. Depending on the power supply to your printer you may need a step down voltage regulator, pre built versions of which can be found on eBay or Amazon, or you can have a go at deriving a 5V supply yourself with a linear voltage regulator or go all fancy and build a proper switching voltage regulator like I did, details of which can be found in the ‘Installation’ section.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.