Projects / Laboratory and scientific instruments
Measurement bench for a syringe extruder on a 3D-printer base: load cell with ADS1232, force graph, CSV logging and OpenCV line-width measurement.
The task was to turn gel extrusion on an existing 3D-printer platform into a measurable laboratory process. The system had to record force on the syringe plunger, show a force graph, save data and help compare mechanical load with the geometry of the extruded trace.
A laboratory bench was prepared for studying extrusion of gels and viscous materials. It measures feed force through a load cell, sends data to a PC, plots the graph, writes CSV files and separately measures the width of the extruded line from a camera image.
Video
A short recording of the device or test bench in operation.
Engineering context
Extrusion depends on material viscosity, nozzle, speed, syringe, bubbles, drying and feed mechanics.
Without force measurement only the final trace is visible, while the process dynamics remain unclear.
The force channel shows load on the plunger, and the optical channel shows the result on the surface.
The laboratory needed numerical data that could be compared between experiments.
Gel properties can change under external heating, including viscosity changes.
Work done
Mechanical part of the syringe extruder.
Adaptation of the extruder node to an existing 3D printer.
Load-cell measurement electronics.
ADS1232 bridge-signal digitizing.
Microcontroller firmware for PC data transfer.
ADS1232 Viewer software with graph, tare, filtering and CSV export.
Gel Thickness Monitor software on OpenCV for line-width measurement.
Details
The load cell measures force on the syringe plunger. The PC application converts readings to practical units, shows the graph and allows the experiment to be saved as CSV.
A separate application analyzes the camera image: it selects a region of interest, applies thresholding, finds the contour and estimates line width in millimeters after calibration.
The researcher receives not only a material sample, but process data: how force increased, where peaks appeared, how smooth the feed was and what line width was obtained for the selected mode.
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