I am teaching students (university) to use modeling and 3D printing. It is not that hard to build a new one. For electrical engineer student, you may cooperate with mechanical engineer student.

It would be much easier for beginner to play one diy 3d printer and then move on to modify the 3d printer. You can get one below 200 dollar in ebay:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313.TR12.TRC2.A0.H0.X3d+printer.TRS0&_nkw=3d+printer&_sacat=0

Get the basic mechanical, electrical and computer control behind it.

The desktop version for basic polymer, like PLA, ABS, is not that hard, but it would be challenge if you add the bluetooth, wifi and machine learning technology into it.

For electrical engineer, it would be practical and useful if you start to use eagle or altium design a new board, which could support the new sensors mentioned above. Here is a good link for you :

https://reprap.org/wiki/RAMPS_1.4

The arduino code is open source and the cura also supports the open source. You could learn a lot from that.

Good luck.

It depends on several factors...

What material do you want to print with?

What do you want the resolution to be?

How fast do you want the printing process to be?

You need to answer these questions first. We can identify the challenges based on this

Dear Maohua,

Thank you for your kind information.

As a electrical student I am interested to improve the features of existing 3D printer with additional features like sensing unit of extruder, wifi enabled printing and monitoring printing status. Other than this, do we have any specific feature can implement in terms of control system. @ Maohua Lin

Dear madam,

As a electrical engineer on which factors i can concentrate to add the new features to existing 3d printer other than mechanical aspects.

1. Improve control in multi material dispensing systems.

2. Sensing of thermal characteristics to reduce distortion due to warpage.

3. Cloud enabled and controlled 3d printing/ printer sharing

4. Improved sensors to prevent printing in air/levelling of platform

Being an electrical you can work and improve the controls over different factors that are still a hot research topic like real time temperature control of melt pool (in case of metal sintering), this would help in controlling the porosity and residual stresses that generates during printing. This would also help in increasing the overall speed of the printing which is still very slow as compared to traditional manufacturing processes.

Sudhakar Babu

For the control system, you may also look into the machine learning technique added to current system. I am also interested on this topic.

The main challenge in making a 3D Printer are

1) Should optimize temperatures on bed and nozzle with respect to material to be used using PID temperature controller.

2) Supply voltage fluctuations should be corrected.

3) Motor accuracy and positioning with respect to moviment of nozzle, auto leveling of beam should be more accurate in all coordinates.X,Y and Z.

4) High temperature with standing cables/wires can be suggested for the assembly of 3D Printing.