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MegaCoinCell

why stick to CR2032 when you can have a CR200320!!
Powering your Anet A8 3D printer with a coincell

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Inspired to participate in the Hackaday coin cell challenge. We met to brainstorm & barbecue as usual after studying. After a while of researching available coin cells at our favourite online electronics distributor and having a few of the special local brewery's beers it seemed clear that the standard coin cell wouldn't cut it.
We needed something with a lot of power and a little boost converter and capacitor combination would not be enough. So we started to think about building our own coin cell.
Hopefully we'll get to finish our 3D printed parts in time.

We are thinking about powering a pretty simple device, a single resistor. But this resistor will get 0,5L of water to the boiling point, hopefully XD

While deciding the output voltage of our giant coin cell, we decided to power the 3d printer with it. Works perfectly!

Since this would not be a hack without an arduino, we included one for scale (also banana for scale).

printing_on_coin_cell.mp4

first attempt to print on a coin cell. This worked flawlessly

MPEG-4 Video - 42.76 MB - 01/08/2018 at 21:24

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JPEG Image - 1.50 MB - 01/08/2018 at 21:17

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  • 1 × filament (we had translucent white PLA)
  • 1 × can of spray paint silver/chrome
  • 9 × used notebook battery cells

  • Conclusion

    megaCell01/09/2018 at 13:38 0 comments

    Combining 3 cells added up to about 12.5V with no load. The voltage drop was quite significant while preheating the extruder and also at the end of the print it dropped to 9.5 V. After printing it came back to 11.2 V but maybe combining 4 cells in series would have been a better solution with a starting 16 V.

    This is no science, but just some thoughts on what to do next time because the cells were already half dead, scrapped from an old thinkpad T60 or T400 i think. So it is possible that this could work better with shiny new batteries.

  • GIF of the working coin cell printer

    megaCell01/08/2018 at 21:45 0 comments
  • final build

    megaCell01/08/2018 at 21:39 0 comments

    It's 30 minutes until the coin cell challenge ends and we managed to bodge everything together. The cell even got painted an hour ago to look more like a "real" coin cell.

    The afternoon was used to print some internal parts. After that the case was spraypainted with a silver color since the ordered filament didn't arrive on time.

    The pictures show our great work soldering and drilling a hole for the connection to the 3D printer.


    There were a few nice ideas left for a more polished version of this, but it was a lot of fun to build.

  • 3D printed enclosure

    megaCell01/08/2018 at 14:11 0 comments

    At first the goals were set high for our 3D model, but since one month passed faster than we would like to admit, we had to leave some features for version 2; really sticking to the agile programming style: if the updater works, ship it.

    Now the 3d printer is done with our biggest PLA parts, so I uploaded a first picture.

    The next step will be to make a true coin cell out of this. Time is short, but if we are doing our best effort to hack everything together just right to meet the deadline.

View all 4 project logs

  • 1
    Enclosure

    The CAD files can be downloaded from the autodesk fusion360 site and printed. Probably in the next few weeks we'll include battery holders in the bottom part of the build. Current build includes these found on thingyverse (link and mention will be added soon).

  • 2
    Wiring

    The battery's were added 3 parallel packs of 3 in series. Wired together with some scrapped cabling from an old PC power supply.

  • 3
    Warning

    There really is no special secret to this, the entire project was  put together in a really short time frame and just for fun.

    If you really want to build this, I would suggest including at least some circuitry to protect the cells from discharching too much and probably also added to the monitoring part, a charging circuit.

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Discussions

wb8wka wrote 01/18/2018 at 18:14 point

Please mark these in the future as "humor" in the title. 
P.S.
To anyone actually looking a for real larger coin cell,I use the CR2477 in some of my projects.   It's 3Volts and 1000mah.   Love to find a larger one

  Are you sure? yes | no

ActualDragon wrote 01/18/2018 at 22:34 point

I found one here: https://hackaday.io/project/29478 It's really cool, check it out!

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Ted Yapo wrote 01/18/2018 at 22:54 point

coinCell rolling? really? :-)

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megaCell wrote 05/06/2018 at 19:58 point

Please mark these comments in the future as "humor".

;D

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Elliot Williams wrote 01/11/2018 at 09:55 point

I love it! The paint makes the project, IMO.  :)

Next version, use the coin / discharging batteries as a heated bed.  

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megaCell wrote 01/12/2018 at 17:12 point

the batteries got quite hot actually, maybe for the next version ;)

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davedarko wrote 01/11/2018 at 00:28 point

bwahahaha nice :)

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megaCell wrote 05/06/2018 at 19:55 point

thanks!

  Are you sure? yes | no

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