After we developed our first design, we really didn’t feel comfortable with the amount of filament it used. It didn’t make sense to create more waste for a project that’s supposed to be decreasing it. We came together and agreed to some goals: that the final product should use the minimal amount of new material and that as many of the components as possible should be easily returned to their original function after use.

It was a major shift going from developing a stand alone product to a modification for a 3d filament printer. We had to throw out the entire physical platform we built and figure out how to use G-code for our guidance. But now the only new physical object that needs to be produced is a mount to hold the soldering iron and the camera. We designed that to be small, minimizing material to only a few grams. The mounting will depend on the type of camera, soldering iron, and printer used so it will be relativity unique to each set up, but it should be easy to modify our model for your specific set-up. At least we know everyone building this already has a home 3d printer.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Our team had a lot of discussions on where to mount the camera. A fixed position would be easier, but we felt that it would be too complex to understand the absolute value of the camera, soldering iron, and solder blob at all times. This could generate a lot of calibration for the end user. Instead, if we mounted the camera with the soldering iron, then we could just use a relative measure to tell it to move a small amount in any direction.

In the future we may want to have two cameras, one above and one below the piece being desoldered. That way they could identify the solder from two different connections of the same component, heating those right after each other. We also thought about shining a strong light through the board so the camera could see the components on the other side. We paused both of these ideas for now, but wanted to remember them for possible future design.

We also wanted to decrease the effort to set this up. Originally we thought the soldering iron would temporarily take the place of the filament extruder. Instead, if we put the mount next to the extruder, we could leave it on all the time. We would only put the soldering iron in the mount when we needed it, but the mount would live on the printer even when it’s just printing.

In this layout, you can see the soldering iron (orange handle) on the right. It’s held in a purple support which is mounted to the long blue backplate. At the far left is a pink mounting for the camera (which will look down through the hole). The two holes in the blue plate are aligned to exactly fit the screws currently connecting the extruder to the printer. Having a thin back plate with the camera and soldering iron mount to the left and right of the filament head means that we should be able to install this once and go back to 3d printing without uninstalling it (we’d just need to take the soldering iron out). The entire set-up is one piece and should be very easy to print without much filament or any supports.

Getting slightly sidetracked from the goal of this project, we started to wonder about what applications there could be for a device that both had an active filament head and soldering iron. There could be some interesting artwork that involved 3d printing something while at the same time having a heating element mark and deform it. A more practical matter could be installing heat-set inserts. Since the 3d printer knows exactly where the print is, it could precisely line up the soldering iron above it and heat the metal insert, possibly while the 3d print is still warm. Making it easier to add in precise, threaded inserts to our models could open up some fun possibilities.