Construction of a low-cost filament winder for 3D printers

The increase in demand for both fast and inexpensive prototyping of objects, with a certain degree of resilience and durability, is the main reason why 3D printing has become part of the concept of industry 4.0 and it is omnipresent in research facilities and industries around the world. In this work, we describe step-by-step the construction process of a filament winder that can be adapted for many commercially available bench-size polymer extruders. The electronic circuit used to regulate the winding rate, and therefore the thickness of the filament, is completely based on simple open-code microcontrollers such as Arduino Uno. Finally, it is showed that using this system it is possible to obtain printable ABS filaments with a wide range of thicknesses and a margin of error of around 5%.

Keywords:
3D printer; lab-made filament spooler; acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS)