Conductive Filament Printing

A brand new functional design making use of highly conductive material just entered the market. Here is a review of the new “Flashlight LetterKit” from Functionalize, made with F-Electric FE-PLA-0750 filament. This material pushes the limits of current conductive materials for FFF-printers with its low resistivity of 0.75 ohm/cm. We are demonstrating an example on how to use this filament by printing a LED flash light.

Print time: 37 Minutes

Material Usage: 3.45g

Recommended ZEUS settings:

Layer Height: 200 microns,

Temperature: 197 Celsius (PLA), 220 Celsius (Conductive PLA)

Print Speed: 30mm/sec

Three step instruction how to build the LED flashlight

To print this gadget, please find the Flashlight LetterKit including STL files for download here. The filament works perfectly with the ZEUS.

Step 1: Printing

The Flashlight LetterKit comes in different case colors and a black conductive filament. First, the base layer need to be printed. Once the base layer reaches a height of approximately 1.2 mm, please change PLA filament to the conductive filament (see below). You can easily use the pause function on the ZEUS printer to quickly change the filaments. Please don't forget to increase the temperature from your standard PLA 197 Celsius to 220 Celsius.

Below you see the finished print of the Flashlight LetterKit. Please take the turntable out of the ZEUS. We recommend using a box cutter knife to carefully remove the printout from the turntable.

Step 2: Assembly

The Flashlight LetterKit comes with a battery and a LED light. You will find detailed assembly instructions in the Flashlight LetterKit documentation. See below our assembly.

Outlook: This conductive filament can also be used to print circuit boards. Below is an example of a 3D printed Arduino Microcontroller Board.