Design and Development of XYZ Scanner for 3D Printing

3D printing is future of manufacturing technology which creates 3D object using 3D digital model. 3D printed components are very useful in design prototyping as well as manufacturing commercial products. The present article reviews the 3D printing process and our development of a new type of scanner for 3D printing system which achieves faster scanning in a compact space. It consists of serial XY scanning stage on which an extruder is mounted and the platform is mounted on Z-stage. Motion in all three directions is achieved via NEMA17 stepper motors and a standard ARDUINO microcontroller is used for controlling motion and speed of the scanning operation. It is observed that scanning speed of more than 10 mm/s with positioning accuracy of less than 10 microns is easily achieved.