Filament for expansion cards

Hi,
I am new to 3D printing and I would like to know which filament you use for expansion cards.

Probably has more to do with what your printer setup can handle than any mechanical properties that the expansion cards need. Unless you are planning to put electronics that run very hot in your custom expansion card, in which case annealed PLA, high temp PLA, or maybe a modified PETG are your best “beginner friendly” filaments I would think. ASA, nylon, PC, apollo-x, and others would also be tougher and resist the abrasion of insert/remove cycles, but are all difficult to print for beginners, depending on what rig you have.

It took me quite awhile to find good settings and good brands of filament to move up from PLA to pure PETG, but now that I have that figured out, I print more PETG than anything else.

I need to keep improving my rig to get to the point where I can do polycarbonate, but that’s a ways down the road still.

Though now I’m imagining a flexible expansion card in TPU. This would be more like a good practical joke than actually practical, but it is an amusing thought nonetheless.

Print wood filled filament and purposely screw up your extruder settings to get rough incomplete extrusion and moire patterns, stain it to look like wood or bamboo even?

“Marble” look filaments for a very unique framework protective case…?

Man now you have my head really spinning.

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@D.H

You appear to be quite knowledgeable in the 3D printing space. After purchasing the DIY framework, and watching Elevated Systems and a few others on YT, it really made me want to get a 3D printer for expansion port prototyping, etc. With that in mind, do you have any “preferred” printer or what others should look for in a 3D printer for this nature? I believe I was looking at the ender-3 Max for an initial printer.

Same here @D.H.
I ordered a printer today for exactly that reason and I am starting with 3D design just now.
A friend recommended the ender 3, so thats what I went with. I will know more in a couple of days, when it arrives

I have a lot of theory, some hands on knowledge, but I’m definitely no Michael (TeachingTech) or Angus (Makers Muse) or Thomas Sanladerer or Stefan (CNC Kitchen) or Jon (Proper Printing) or Joel (3D Printing Nerd).

Here’s the advice I have after having gone through one research / buy cycle and kind of starting my next one…

  1. Go bigger than you think you “need” by at least 50%, more like 100% in each dimension of build volume. There’s a lot more “wasted” space at the edges for a ton of reasons than most beginners appreciate. Big printers can print small objects (albeit slowly), but the reverse is not true.

  2. If I had to do it again, I would NOT pick a bed slinger style printer (I.e. almost all of the open Creality printer besides the CR-30 and Ender 7). Go full cage (six sided cube frame), using CoreXY or maybe Cartesian gantry that moves in x and y, with descending z build plate. Making that frame into an enclosed printer is way way way way way easier to do “right”…

  3. Filament reviews are both complete crap and yet in the aggregate somehow accurate. There are high quality brands and formulations and there are garbage, and the price and 5 star review percentage may not correlate to you and your ability to tune and and and and. Even within the same brand, variation in the mechanical and print qualities from one color to the next is pretty ridiculous. Don’t buy multi packs or more than one roll of any one brand until you are really happy with it.

  4. Octoprint and Klipper. Enough said.

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The rig in it’s current state, so many upgrades partially done, still to do, etc:

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