During this week one part of the assignment was to make a 3D design which cannot be made subtractively, some simple examples that must not be easily made with subtractive fabrication (lasser cutting or cnc) are pieces with transverse holes
Some machines could be able to work in more than three axes but if not it’s difficult to achieve this kind of finish because of the tool freedom and material’s gross. For this week I designed a piece that further will be used to organice the cables in the machines we are going to create.
Here I show how I work in Blender designing my piece.
Blender is openSource and Free Software, you can download freely from their website
I started cleaning all the objects in the scene, them i established the units to work with millimeters this can be done in the right pane and selecting the scene icon, another important thing here is define the scale factor to 0.001.
After define the scene almost everything in blender begin with a cube.
use the scale option to give the desire shape to your objects.
I used the loop tools to create more faces in my shape and with the knife i removed the faces that I don't want.
if you remove faces you will obtain open object and you can fix this selecting the vertices's and creating more faces with "F" key
you only need to create one object after that use the Shift + D combination to duplicate the objects, use the rotation tool to position in place all the objects.
when you're done with the design just have to export to STL all the shapes and you are ready to print.
3D Scan
3D Scan is an amazing and easy process, for this part I used a hand Scanner we have in our Fablab, its the Sense 3D Scanner from 3Dsystem.
The process is very easy, I show you in the next video the basic function of the scanner and how to save the objects you scan in the different formats that its own software allows you to use.
3D Print
In this part I used the software Cura from ultimaker to make the slice and generate the code of my objects.
I used and old version of the software exactly the version 15.4.6 this because our 3D printers are a little old too.
Cura is a very intuitive program but I'll give you a brief description of the use.
in the 3 area in the top left you have to options the left command allows you to load a file the next its for save the code after you're done with the settings.
in the top right corner you have a control bottom here you can visualize the code once its generated.
in the bottom left here we have three options, first in the left its for rotate the object, in the middle its the scale command and the last its mirroring the objects.
In the left panel you have the most important options, here you can define the layer height, for this printer you can modify from 0.1 for the best quality 0.2 for medium and 0.3 for fast printing but exposing the quality of the final result.
the most amazing from cura its that you only have to select the brand of your printer and version and cura gives you the best parameters for print.
in this panel you can modify the way how you can add a platform adhesion and if you want to use support material.
Finally, here is the result of my testing the 3d Printing.
and here you can download the project files