Electrically Conductive Black

I am part of a community called Makers Making Change. We volunteer our time to make adaptive technology devices. I used this filament to print a palm ball stylus (a ball you can hold to operate touch screens). The original design called for a wire in the ball that runs down to the tip that contacts the screen. I thought about using conductive filament and found the Protopasta stuff. The palm stylus worked perfectly and looks great. The clients said the units worked perfectly. I have gone through two spools already with issue. Good stuff!

Four because it costs $100 a kilo but comes on the cheapest imaginable corrugated cardboard spool that keeps getting stuck in the AMS. I've printed dozens of spools with cardboard spools without a problem, will certainly make me think twice about buying from protoplasta again. That said, the filament itself is fine, prints well with stock settings, wasn't brittle and produced good prints. Using just using needle probes in a VOM, resistance was in the low kohm range over about 6". Probably low enough for shielding and strictly speaking, too low for anti-static. while you probably can't use it to carry useful power,, contact with it would cause an annoyingly hard to track down short. Treat it as a conductor and you'll be fine. Update: as I'm writing this and having to clear at least 4 jams so far, it may be more an issue with bad winding than just the spool, in any case, annoying for such an expensive product.

Worked just like pla+: tough, not stringy, with a matte finish. Much easier to work with than other "conductive pla" brands. Good value for the money, print quality is rarely an issue with the prusa mk4s. This holds true with this filament. It was a little sticky to the pei bed, but nothing a plastic scraper couldn't remove after it cooled down.

I bought this filament through a different site, but I can’t leave a review there, so I’ll leave one here. I’m very new to printing, with only a month under my belt, but I have considerable electrical engineering experience. If you’re going to use this stuff, keep in mind that it is NOT going to act like wire; it is more like a printed carbon resistor. As such, a thin/long line of it will exhibit considerable resistance, while thicker/shorter lines will decrease resistance. I printed one of my normal filament sample swatches, at 210C, and as you can see from the photo, I got about 535 ohms from end-to-end. PCB traces this ain’t! It may be useful for printing contacts for button pads, though, so I’m going to give it a shot. Now here’s the warning: after printing with this filament, I got my first nozzle clog ever while running cleaning filament through. This may be a total coincidence, but it took a good cleaning with a needle to free it up. Even after that, it took a LOT of cleaning filament before it ran clear - close to 3 feet. I haven’t done another print yet, so I don’t know if I got it all, but be warned, this stuff is like toner in your nozzle. (Because it basically is.) All in all: it’s fun to experiment with, still not sure about its overall usefulness or whether it’s worth it.

This does exactly what I wanted. I can use it as low-temp solder and apply it directly to metal wires to make low resistance joints. This plastic seems somewhat less hard than normal PLA, I have not found brittleness to be a problem. The resistance is hard to measure and seems to vary depending on the voltage potential across the plastic. Measuring the resistance of my first circuit (w/o voltage connected obviously) disappointed me with a really big number; however, when I turned on the power and the LEDs winked on I was not disappointed at all! Filament runs at PLA temperatures and smells mildly of PLA-Waffles. ABS temperatures do not appear to burn the filament. The MSDS for this product (posted on Proto-pasta's website) notes that the conductive polymer could potentially be bad for people HOWEVER it is completely encapsulated in plastic and should remain inaccessible to biology. Combine that with the fact that PLA can biodegrade; store this stuff carefully, keep it dry, discard scraps. This is new technology. So far I have enjoyed using this filament with my new MYNT 3D pen. I have had a prusa mendel for about 2 years but haven't actually run this through the printer yet. The cardboard spool is cool. I didn't expect to like that but it's lightweight and you can easily punch a hole to hook the filament for storage (that way you don't have to cut off a foot of filament like when the end doesn't line up with the pre-cut hole on a plastic spool).

I had really big hopes for this filament. But it doesn’t pass a simple continuity test. Super disappointed. Otherwise, its a great PLA filament… for 4x the price!

So it took me a while until I got around to print with this filament. I was hesitant as reviews describe it as rather abrasive and will quickly wear down the nozzle but I felt I didn't have too much printing to do. Use case - small basic PCB for a few surface mount units to use inside enclosures I'm 3D printing. It felt like a great opportunity to make basic and simple routes directly onto a 3D printed surface inside the unit I created. However, a first test print of a 4x2cm "circuit board" gave me some bad results. It looks GREAT - no striking, it adhesives great to the surface and all in all, my expectations were high. Until I put a multi-meter to it. Over about 1cm I get about 2k resistance. A bit longer I get up to 5K resistance. This is a circuit were my resistors are 330ohms (yeah, small LED). It's not even close to being useful for anything low power. If you're interested in converting a gerber to stl for printing, I used KiCad's print to svg and then converted the svg to stl (lots of software can do that - even free online services). But while it looks great I'm not even going to try to put a component on it.

I have tested out all the conductive PLA versions out there I can get my hands on and this one is the best. It is a bit harder to print than a standard PLA. Takes some refinement. I find 225C print temp is ideal for our applications. I have purchased this probably 10 times and the quality is consistent.

Very finicky to print with. High impedance is not great for my purpose.

Ordered 3 spools and it was unusually brittle. Kept breaking off during feeding into the printer. Have tried other brands of conductive PLA with no issue. Not reccomended.

Me enviaron un rollo de material totalmente distinto, no solo en propiedades sino tambien en dimensiones, lo que hace que ni siquiera pueda utilizarlo