The FabLab Aachen offically has two 3D printer, a DREMEL® 3D IDEA BUILDER and a Dimension Elite. But beside that, an assistent owns a CTC Bizer series Dual Nozzle 3D Printer. In the pictures below you can see the results of the DREMEL printer in red and the results of the CTC printer in white. One can see immediately that these printers have an inconsistent behaviour. The environmental conditions (room temperature, air breeze, dust, fillament material, etc.) have significant influence on the result. Nevertheless, the DREMEL and CTC printers are well suited for rapid prototyping, because the fillament is cheap and the printers are easy to use. On the other hand, the Dimension Elite has a closed, seperated room, and support material. The fillament and the support material is far more expensive, such that the dimension is used less on daily basis.

Source of the interlocked sphere: Thingiverse We have a person scanner which uses the depth camera of a Mircosoft Kinect to create a 3D model of an object or person. (We tweaked that machine in exercise09.) I scanned myself and added a plate below me with OpenSCAD and exported that to .stl to print it with the DREMEL.

Non Substractive print

I designed a sphere whith a flower like pattern inside. This pattern is visible when placed in front of a bright light source.I started with the large spere and substracted transformed spheres from it. Then I added the transformed cylinders and substractet transformed spehres from it again. Since all of it is prarmetric you can play around witch leads to slightly different patterns.

Design Rule Test

To test the capabilities of different 3D printer I took these test model from Thingiverse. The settings were set to highest on each printer with a standard distance of 0.3 mm. The result of the Dimension is black, the one of the Dremel is red, and the outcome of the Ultimaker 2 plus is silver. The result of the Ultimaker is the best regarding the level of detail. However, the hemisphere has some residues on the left side where the Dremel and the Dimension have none. The Ultimaker took 3,5 hours to finish the job where the Dremel finished it in 50 minutes. Additionally the Ultimaker is able to print thin support structures with the regular fillament in contrast to the Dremel (no support features) and the Dimension (separate support material). The fence like structure was best printed by the Ultimaker due to this support feature and worse by the Dremel. To conclude I would recomend printing with the Ultimaker if high level of detail is required and without unaccessible support fillament. If you want a job to be done rather quickly ("quick" with respect to 3D printers) I would choose the Dremel. If cannot get around support material and have some money at hand then I would go with the Dimension.