Carbon Fiber Filament Winder

Carbon fiber has an incredibl strength-to-weight ratio, making it appropriate for tasks like model rocketry, high-performance automobiles, and more. Working with it, however, is less than straightforward and requires specialized filament winding equipment that can be very expensive. To make custom carbon fiber (or fiberglass) tubing for the CU InSpace rocketry club, Adrian Comisso designed his own filament winder, aiming for a $400 budget.

As seen in the demo video below, the winder operation is quite fun to watch, as it rolls fiber in a looping pattern over a round cardboard mandrel. In theory, with the addition of epoxy that’s applied via a bath and wiper setup onboard the device, the process should produce light and strong tubing for model rocketry. Current experiments have resulted in a less-than-solid mesh, but the basics are there and issues should be worked out in V2 and/or with more experimentation.

The winder uses a pair of stepper motors, along with a servo, for control, plus an encoder for feedback and troubleshooting. Several lights and buttons are provided for user input/feedback, but, like many other CNC machines, a computer is also required for higher-level functions.

The device originally used an Arduino for processing, but this wasn’t fast enough for the resource-intensive stepper control routine implemented, along with everything else going on in the code. Comisso therefore switched to a Raspberry Pi Pico for its better clock speed, and opted to use C++ instead of Python for programming.