New Project - I'm back! 3D Printed fountain forthcoming!

Hey all,

Its been about three years since I was actively haunting this forum and building my first laminar fountain but I thought I would say hi again and offer my help to anyone who's currently building their own. I see that the forum has unfortunately slowed to a crawl since last I was here so I wanted to liven it back up a bit and start posting again. I have a couple working fountains and would certainly love to answer any questions I can for new comers.

I'm also actively starting my initial designs on a new 3D Printed laminar fountain. My goal is to create a 3D printed fountain that is mostly hardware free minus a few bolts and o-rings to seal the sections. The fountain will be printed in individual sections to allow for easy disassembly and modification. No more having to remove all the straws to change something in the bottom! It should also allow for much easier insertion and support of an internal pipe through which to run fiber-optic cables for light effects. We'll see how it goes but I'm hopeful! The final goal is to end up with three sizes roughly equivalent to 4, 6, and 8" fountains.

Stay tuned but I'm hoping to kick things back in to gear here. Even if I have to talk to myself for a bit =) Hopefully not so say hi below and start posting questions and pics of your own projects!

I'll be posting my progress here but also on my blog I just started at http://scuttlebots.com

Ike,

You're not talking to yourself. I too came back to see what was going on. 3D printing sounds like an interesting approach, I'
m anxious to see what you come up with.

Welcome back!

Its a little slow going with the 3D designs as I'm an EE and not a mechanical guy but so far I've got some cool things started. I'm learning a lot of about best practices for creating the mechanisms to attach each section to each other.

I was trying to decide between a Pentair style fountain with mesh inserts versus one with drinking straws but since printing things is easy I finally realized I should just do both and experiment with them. I'm trying to avoid using full length drinking straws since it makes the fountain unnecessarily tall but the thought of cutting straws down to size again sounds tedious. If I can find a good source for short normal diameter straws online that would be helpful.

Here's a quick preview of the first stage with the water inlet. I have early renditions of the second stage and the mechanical attachments to link the stages together but they aren't rendered yet. I'll probably start a new thread talking about the design once I get a bit further along. I'm hoping to have something good enough to take to the Northern Colorado Maker Faire in October so I'm using that to push me.

That looks good! What about 3D printing the drinking straw unit? Is there a resolution problem printing that thin of walls?

Thinking about it just now from your question, I was avoiding it when considering round holes like straws but they don't have to be round. I can just make them all honeycomb pattern hexagon holes (which is what my pentair design meshes are anyway). That might actually work brilliantly.

I'll give it a shot and see what happens =) Good thinking!

So I wound up stuck in Midway airport for 4+ hours tonight (still stuck on the tarmac actually). The good news is I managed to get a lot more done on my laminar fountain model in OpenSCAD. I'm going to fill the middle stage with hexagon shaped tubes in place of straws but my little windows tablet takes forever to render those so I commented them out for now until I get back to my desktop. Still looks good though I think. I have a few more tweaks in mind to make it easier to print but at least it looks like a full model now!

I only joined the forum last year and was disappointed that I was not involved in the previous busy years, It would be great to see more people involved again. I have been working away on my own jet here in Scotland, for the past 12 months following ideas and advice from this forum, and I am now getting some success, although there were frustrating times when I struggled to get a nice flow.

The 3D printing idea is exciting as it would mean that multiple nozzles with identical characteristics could be made, perhaps for a multiple jet arrangement.

Anyway, here is my jet working, I am now working on adding a cutter and fitting my LED light unit.

.

Very nice looking stream and setup. Your build looks really clean! The grommet around the outlet looks especially nice.

What size outer pipe and pump are you using? That's a pretty good size arch for that size of pipe. I'm impressed. I had to go to 8 inches (200mm) and a 500gph pump for my original fountain to get a stream that stayed perfect from end to end over an arch that size. I'm really curious to hear about your experiences with the lighting. That was the one aspect I never got to do with my fountain (I had the LEDs, circuit, and fiber optic cable but never installed it).

I really want to make the light installation portion easy with my 3D printed design. Getting a pipe from the bottom to line up nicely with the outlet is a bit of challenge when you have limited tools.

During the build I had come to the conclusion that the exit nozzle was the most critical part of the system if you wanted a decent length of arc. I had tried making various by filing washers etc with not much success, I then found someone with a lathe to make the one you see above, for me and instantly the arc was laminar over the whole length.

The main body is 6” diameter and 18” long, the internals are 2” of pond filter foam and full length straws.  The straws are glued together around a central small bore pipe, and yes the pipe didn’t end up quite central so I do have to line up the exit nozzle to the pipe when I fit the top plate.  I ended up gluing the straws as I wanted to remove the mesh holding the straws as I thought it may be part of the cause of my poor quality stream.

I am using a 10,000 lph pump but the flow is currently throttled back a little with a valve, I may be able to get the arc to go a little bit further once I have dealt with various leaks etc.  I bought the large flow pump as when I started I had no idea what I would size I would need, but it turned out to be just what I needed.

For the lighting I followed the circuit design from this post https://laminar.forumotion.com/t283-jetty-s-wifi-web-based-laminar-jet-project  and I have also got a 15mm Perspex rod to use as a light guide rather than fibres, I will report back once I have tested.

Cheers
Paul

So just a quick update to keep things alive. I ran in to some printer issues which led to me completely replacing the hot end and effector arms which has been using up my weekends of late.

I should have the final piece I need in by this weekend so hopefully I can have it up and running and then start printing next weekend. *Fingers Crossed*

How did the printed nozzle work?

Very well actually. I have a nice little 2-3 foot arch going that is pretty smooth using just the 3D printed parts, bolts, and a small piece of foam for a filter. Here are a few of my observations so far:

1) Printing the outlet hole works fairly well but is not as good as working with a milled metal disc. No matter what I do there is always a slight irregularity where the printed ring edge joins together that slightly disrupts flow. Its 100% working and more than serviceable though. I would only switch back to milled metal when I start trying to push flow rate and arch distance.
2) You need a foam filter between the inlet section and the "straws" section. I tried several iterations without and never got a good stream. I added the foam in and instantly saw massive improvement. The fun thing about a 3D printer is I could print a circular cutting guide to get a perfectly round circle of foam and could print a filter holder to secure it in place within the chamber. For the foam I used the water soaking foam pad they wrapped around the bottom of a flower bouquet I bought my wife. Its works really well and got me points with the wife at the same time. Double score!
3) Don't over tighten plastic! I cracked a nozzle and found out some of my leaks were from tightening the sections to much. Sometimes less is more!

In my rare free time I've been slowly developing a web interface for the RGB LED and Pump speed controller using a Beaglebone Black. I've been traveling for work every week lately which has limited my time but it slowly gets closer. I'm writing the code in python and using Flask for the web interface. (Teaching myself HTML and Python through this, primarily I've been a C++/C# programmer).

I've been slacking in posting pictures and need to get on that over Christmas. I'll try to get some of the fountain running. More to come but most likely not until closer to the end of the month or early next year.