We’re partial to a 3D printer around here. The Maker Lab at Pi Towers has a nice collection of various types and sizes to serve the unique needs of our engineers, so we’re pretty good at figuring them out across a range of brands. When we saw Form 4, the newest 3D printer from Formlabs, we figured it would be especially easy to get our heads around, seeing as it’s built on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

Printing for professionals

While some printer brands focus on building machines to support the quick and easy home printing jobs lots of makers need, Formlabs has always been more focused on industrial customers — they were the first company to build a 3D printer capable of achieving professional part quality at an affordable price. Turning to our Compute Module 4 to base their newest machine around was a no-brainer as they looked to increase the speed, quality, and success rate of printing for their flagship line, providing a reliable, high-power solution capable of meeting the needs of businesses.

Formlabs was founded in 2011 and, these days, we see their printers used in all sorts of industries, including engineering, manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, and medical. All Formlabs printers across the range have various apps running in the background to move motors, regulate temperatures, log critical events, and so on. The new Form 4 would also need to run two high-resolution displays and a camera simultaneously, so more CPU, RAM, and graphics capabilities were required. Enter Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

Story time

Formlabs was initially most familiar with Raspberry Pi’s popularity with makers and hobbyists, and investigated whether the devices were also suitable for industrial applications, checking that they met needs regarding security, supply, ease of use, and, of course, price. The Compute Module line satisfied all their requirements.

Our Product Information Portal provides business customers and professional users with access to white papers, guides, compliance reports, and other information to help keep product development moving along at pace. Formlabs harnessed all of the above and managed to hit its time-to-market target. We do love a good success story.

There’s a much longer story behind Formlabs’ new Compute Module 4-based machine if you’d like to read it. You’ll find all sorts of juicy detail about the design, development, and journey to market, so if you’re into your printers or are curious about how Raspberry Pi supported this industrial use case, give our recent case study a read.

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Roboreactor is a web-based platform enabling engineers to build robotic and automation systems based on Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA Jetson, or other SBCs from a web browser including parts selection, code generation through visual programming, and generating URDF models from Onshape software. You can also create your robot with LLM if you wish. The first step is to create a project with your robot specifications and download and install the Genflow Mini image to your Raspberry Pi or NVIDIA Jetson SBC. Alternatively, you can install Gemini Mini middleware with a script on other SBCs, but we’re told the process takes up to 10 hours… At this point, you should be able to access data from sensors and other peripherals connected to your board, and you can also start working on the Python code using visual programming through the Roboreactor node generator without having to write code or understand low-level algorithms. Another [...]

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Designed by Boltz R&D, the SmartPrintCoreH7x 3D printer mainboard is an open-source mainboard built around an STM32H7 microcontroller and designed to work with 3D printers from Creality, Anet, and Voron. It supports up to 6 stepper drivers (5 standard drivers plus 1 dedicated driver) and can be expanded further using the “SmartPrintCore Extravaganza” module for additional stepper drivers. Key features of this motherboard include a jumper-less setup, automatic power source switching, and support for both 12V and 24V power supplies. It uses high-efficiency TI buck converters to provide power for multiple fan and servo ports, and there is a dedicated power supply for peripherals, SBCs, and Wi-Fi modules. The board is equipped with a variety of connectors, including Molex, Ultra-Fit, Mini-Lock, and JST-GH for power, motors, and peripherals. SmartPrintCoreH7x specifications: MCU – STMicro STM32H723 Arm Cortex-M7 32-bit core @ 550 MHz with 1MB Flash, 564 KB RAM, FPU, DSP, Ethernet, USB [...]

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The OpenFlexture Microscope is a DIY, open-source, 3D-printed microscope built around the Raspberry Pi 4, a Raspberry Pi Camera Module v2, and a choice of optics or various qualities up to lab-grade optics. It can be motorized using low-cost geared stepper motors and can achieve a resolution of up to around 100 nanometers I found out about the OpenFlexture Microscope in one of the sessions at the upcoming FOSDEM 2025 event whose description partially reads: The OpenFlexure Microscope is an open-source laboratory-grade digital robotic microscope. As a robotic microscope, it is able to automatically scan microscope slides creating, enormous multi-gigapixel digital representations of samples. The microscope is already undergoing evaluation for malaria and cancer diagnosis in Tanzania, Rwanda, and the Philippines. As an open project, our key goal is to support local manufacturing of microscopes in low-resource settings. [..] high-quality consistent documentation has enabled thousands of microscopes to be built [...]

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Seeed Studio has recently started selling the SO-ARM100 AI Robotic Arm kit, a low-cost AI arm designed for real-world robotics applications. This open-source hardware device features a 6-degree-of-freedom design with high-torque STS3215 bus servos, a 12-bit magnetic encoder for precise angle sensing, and UART for communication. The arm comes with motors, driver boards, power adapters, and other 3D-printed parts like arm segments, base, grippers, and motor mounts. Designed to work with the NVIDIA Jetson edge platform, it is ideal for grasping and placing. All these features make this device suitable for education, research, and AI-driven robotics projects. SO-ARM100 AI robotic arm kit specifications Degrees of Freedom (DOF) – 6 Motor control Total servo – 12x STS3215 bus servos Servo torque Arm kit Standard – 19.5 kg.cm @ 7.4V Arm kit pro – 30 kg.cm @ 12V (Pro) Angle Sensor – 12-bit magnetic encoder USB – USB-C for programming and testing [...]

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PCBWay has a special treat for Christmas 2024 with the Big Sales event for up to 50% on PCB manufacturing and assembly services. But that’s not all, as the PCB manufacturer also offers free coupons, free PCB prototypes for Christmas, and a game to win free modules. Let’s have a closer look at each offer and conditions. Nine coupons are offered including several valid for all services, and two specific to the company’s CNC and 3D printing services: $5 discount for $30 or more orders $10 discount for $59 or more orders $15 discount for $109 or more orders $30 discount for $279 or more orders $50 discount for $699 or more orders $100 discount for $1299 or more orders $200 discount for $2999 or more orders CNC and 3D printing coupons: $5 discount for $29+ orders, and $20 off for $199+ orders You’ll be asked to log in to [...]

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