Test the design rules for your printer(s)

Overlod Pro

My 3D printer was bought in the mid of 2015, which was based on delta struture, it was made my DFRobot, a wellknown robot module and 3D printer company.

It’s printed object size : Cylinder : 170mm x 260mm Height. I once test it with a status like this, it looks fairly good.

It has many advanced feature such as:

– Dual color print.
– Break point resume
– Auto/Manually calibrate buildplate
– Heater bed

Cura

Cura is developed by Ultimaker to make 3D printing as easy and streamlined as possible. It includes everything you need to prepare a 3D file for printing and to print it. Cura is fully preconfigured to work on the Ultimaker. Cura comes with a friendly setup program that help you install the latest firmware as well as calibrate your printer.

For the overload pro, dfrobot provided a detailed setup manuan which can be download here:
overlord user manual(pdf) . I will not repeat all the settings here.

STL TEST FILE

From thingiverse, I download an “Test your 3D printer” from web.

Cura’s quick print provide 4 options of printing:

Object size is : 505014

• Fast print Layers:92 0.15mm
• Nomal print Layers:138 0.10mm
• High quality Layers:229 0.06mm
• Ulit quality Layers:344 0.04mm

I printed 3 version of this model, fast, normal and high:

It takes less than an hour to print the fast one, and takes 2 hour to print the normal one, the third one uses 3.5 hours. The third one has a lot of very very thin filaments between the cylinder and cubes. The normal one seems good in all of the three. The fast one has many large end points on it.

I think there maybe a lot of parameter to adjust, such as the temperature, fan speed and the nozzle temperature. For our overload, I think 0.1mm fairly good for printing. If need to print larger objects, I can try the 0.15mm settings.

Design and 3D print an object (small, few cm) that could not be made subtractively

The second objective for this week was to design and 3D print an object that cannot be made subtractively. I highly enjoyed this assignment because it allowed me to think creatively, develop an idea, and then turn that idean into reality - in the span of a week. Since the objective was to design something that could not be made subtractively, I thought I would design some structure that is trapped inside a larger structure.

At last I found one thing, it’s the sample object of overload pro, A whistle. Inside a whistle there is a ball in it. when blow the whistle, the ball will vibrate and make the sound. It’s not easy to make it using subtractively way.

Another interesting is the Jellyfish. It has long hands, by randomly print 16 line beam without support, it will fall to the ground like the hands of Jellyfish. The randomness is because we are deliberately “printing in the air” to create the “drooloops” (droop+loop) that make these jellies look so amazing.

The model:

3D scan an object (and optionally print it) (extra credit: make your own scanner)

3D scanning device is under contruction.

To be continue…