Upcycling E-Waste Disc Drives to Build a 3D Printer

Electronic waste is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century and only getting worse as we increase our consumption of “disposable” electronics. When those devices inevitably fail or slide into obsolescence within a couple of years, they become garbage — often with so little value that it simply isn’t worthwhile to recycle their components or materials on an industrial scale. But makers don’t need to operate on an industrial scale, which is why students Sergio López Vioque and Raúl Fernández were able to upcycle some old disc (and disk) drives to build a 3D printer.

Even just a decade ago, 3D printers felt very futuristic to most of us. But as far as machines go, they’re actually quite simple from a mechanical standpoint — your grandfather’s old WWII-era knee mill was far more complex. A typical 3D printer only needs four motors: one for each axis, plus one for the extruder. Some 3D printers double-up the Z axis motors to keep the gantry level, and end up with five motors in total. Others, have more unusual arrangements.

Those are almost always stepper motors, which are easy to control with rotational precision. Stepper motor prices are now very low, but Vioque and Fernández chose to salvage theirs instead of buying new units. They got them from a pair CD/DVD disc drives, plus one floppy disk drive. They also managed to get a 12V power supply out of the deal. On top of that, they were able to use some of the frame components and rails from the drives to construct the printer’s motion system.

But not all of the printer’s parts could be sourced from e-waste. Vioque and Fernández still had to purchase an Arduino Mega 2560 board, a RAMPS 1.4 controller, a hot end, an extruder, and one stepper motor. The stepper motors from the drives don’t have a lot of power and can’t carry much weight, so they chose a Bowden extruder to reduce the mass on the carriage.

All-in, Vioque and Fernández report that the project had a cost of about €120 (around $126 USD). The print quality isn’t bad, but the printer does have very limited travel and therefore a small build volume. It is possible to purchase a brand-new printer with superior capability for less money, but this project helped eliminate some of the e-waste from the world, rather than add to it.