Living in a student house has its pros and cons. Most of us who have lived in one shall concur with the statement that it is an absolute nightmare when you have to wash the dishes without a dishwasher. This is where a Swedish student, Filip Sjöö, comes in who made use of some old engineering principles along with 3D printing technology to come up with an automatic dishwasher.
Filip is 22 years old and made use of his CAD skills and his technical expertise in Solidworks 3D and some knowledge on 3D printing of plastics to come up with a cogged device that uses flowing water from the tap to power itself. The rotating motion of a water wheel is converted into a linear motion while one end of the gadget has a scrubbing brush affixed that wipes the dishes clean on a pre-set speed.
The project can be used as great example for how to make use of conventional principles of engineering along with modern technology to tackle your everyday problems. Sjöö said, “I got my 3D-printer for Christmas. It’s a Prusa i3, and it’s probably the best Christmas gift ever.”
There were some other original ideas as well, like internal water turbine, however, they just were not meant to be and after a number of tries, he was able to create a final design. He also designed a custom thread that was used for fitting the tap. He explains, “The maximum angle you can print without supports is approximately 45 degrees. Because of this, I had to make a custom design. I was not sure that I would succeed in printing functional threads, as the pitch was only 1 mm, but surprisingly it worked very well after some failures.”
Filip had to live with some failed parts while getting the brush move to the defined position with a speed of 1 stroke per second. We must say that this is a job wonderfully done!
