Week05 - Jason W

Week 05
3D scanning and printing

For this week, I have three assignments:

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

For the first one, I decide to use Rhino as a practice to recovery my Rhino skill, since I haven't been using it for years, and recently decided Sketchup is not enough for my need. The object I'm going to make is one of the parts of a new open source 3D scanner, Ciclop, a line laser holder. The reason to ramake it is because the original file is for lasers with diameter of 8mm, and the line lasers I have in my possession are 12mm in Diameter.

2. 3D scan an object (and optionally print it)

Since I don't believe my Ciclop 3D scanner won't be build in time, I'm still going use a Kinect as a 3D scanner to scan myself with a software called Skanect.

3. Building a 3D scanner

For me, after trying 3D scanning with Kinect, I decide to also build a 3D scanner that can scan small objects, because the poor performance of Kinect when scan anything smaller than 30cm high. As mentioned above, the 3D scanner I'm going to build is Ciclop, a newly open sourced 3D scanner that use two line laser and a webcam to scan small objects on a turntable. Since everything is open source and I just learned how to mill PCB, I'm even going to make the PCB from scratch. This will probably take more than a week, but I will come back here to update the progress.

Laser holder stl file.

Idelarm stl file.

3D scaned stl file of me.

3D scaned ply file of me.

1. Design and 3D print an object

As a Rhino recovery practice, I use Rhino to draw the part. To begine I use Netfabb Studio to do the measurement of the original stl file. Netfabb's measuring function are one of the easiest and powerful to make some quick measure, even finding centers of circles are easy a pie!

Using the dimentions I measured in Netfabb, I start drawing the part with a different sized laser holding hole.

The ability to change between views (viewing angles and the ways object appears) right away is easier for me to draw complex object.

Fillet is one of the functions Sketchup is lacking without plugins, yet very important for a last minut refinement.

The part only take me about 1 hours to draw, so I decide to also draw another part to improve my 3D printer (a MendelMax2.0 variant I build myself from scratch). This time, with Sketchup. Here is the orginal part I use on my 3D printer, which is too flexable because the nature of PLA.

And here is the new improved part with much more reinforcement, and also a tilted screw hole to compensate the flexablity of PLA.

For slicing the stl file into g-code, I use KISSlicer. I love KISSlicer because the parameters are explained clearly and easy to understand, hence the greater control of the slicing.

Another good thing about KISSlicer is how fast it can slice, at least much faster than slic3r :p

Print out the parts

To print out the parts I just drew, I use a MendelMax2.0 variant 3D printer I build from scratch. It use a much cheaper aluminum extrusion than the original MendelMax2.0 uses (Misumi). The coast of the enitre printer is only 2/3 of the original MendelMax2.0.