Please ensure that JavaScript is enabled in your browser to view this page.
It doesn't come close to matching other sources of waste, but discarded plastic is a concern within the 3D printing industry. Even if every print is perfect and gets used, we still end up with waste from supports, scraps at the end of spools, and purging. More realistically, most of us throw away quite a bit of plastic in the form of prototypes and failed prints. Recycled filament is something of a holy grail among 3D printing enthusiasts and you can build a filament extruder machine to make it. If you want to go that route, Michael Klements designed a controller that will help. Extruding Machine
This is a controller that Klements built for his PET Bottle Recycler, which turns old water bottles into usable PET filament. PET by itself isn't an ideal material for 3D printing (which is why most manufacturers add glycol to make PETG), but it will work for prototyping. Like most machines of this type, the PET Bottle Recycler cuts bottles in thin plastic strips and runs them through a hot end with a wide diameter nozzle to form filament. The machine winds that onto a spool that is then ready to go into a 3D printer.
A machine like this one requires a controller to handle the stepper motor that spins the spool and the hot end that melts the plastic. This controller does both and also provides a control interface for the user to enter parameters like hot end temperature and motor speed.
Building this controller for your own machine only requires a handful of components. First up, you need the custom PCB designed by Klements. That hosts the new Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board, a small OLED screen, a rotary control knob, a MOSFET, and a stepper driver. That MOSFET controls the power going to the hot end, modulating it with a PID (proportional-integral-derivative) algorithm. All of those components are through-hole, so assembling the PCB would be easy for anyone with basic soldering skills.
Klements intends for this controller to be used with a Creality Ender 3 hot end, but it should work just as well with other hot ends that use a similar cartridge heater and thermistor for feedback. It is perfect for the PET Bottle Recycler and other machines like it.
Plastic Extrusion Machinery Hackster.io, an Avnet Community © 2023