Week 6:

3D Scanning and Printing

Learning outcomes:


* Identify the advantages and limitations of 3D printing and scanning technology

* Apply design methods and production processes to show your understanding.


- Modeling Designing and Printing -


There are so many super things I wanted to learn in 3D printing week and honest saying, I had zero clue about this digital printing machine. Well, I learned much more than I expected during this week espicially this week matched our Dubai Maker Fair So, I had an extra chance to know and explain about a 3d printing and the Ultimaker +2 and Ultimaker 3 Extended machines. Not mentioning the softwars used for 3d design like Fusion 360 and Ultimaker Cura

I learned more about the materials you can choose from when it comes to 3D printing as we use in our lab PLA and ABS for printing. So choosing the perfect material for sure could help to shape a better quality for your object and of course, the sitting in Cura based on the speed, type, minimum thickness, texture, etc.. before you give permission to print. Whether you’re looking to 3D print a prototype or any 3D object.

My reason of choosing the bolt and nut is that I tried to design a thing which we can not create it in anyather machine except 3D printing, So the thread can't be created in laser machine or CNC but in 3D printing. Thats why.




I have used the default setting of the Ultimaker 3 Extended to print bolt and nut.
This cylindrical design and successive lines inside the nut and bolt are difficult to design in any other way like laser cutting or even molding and casting as it wont be as good as if we use 3D printing, it is an excellent way to have good outcome of the desige.

Both designs have same default sitting





The mission is to apply design methods and production processes to show the understanding.

I designed her the sample or prototype of my final project.





Well, if you can see in the above picture of testing the quality by changing different variables you could notes the variety of nut size which caused me the difficulty in scaling it with the screw. So, I had a problem in scaling the nut with the screws, which were too small to fit so I tried changing the scale of the object in Ultimaker Cura by making the difference between then just 5mm. In this case the nut can fit into the screw and spins softly.

Second test

This is the second printing test where I made sure that the design can only be done on the 3D printing machine by adding a ball inside the shape.

- 3D Scanning -

For 3D scanning We used sense 3d scanner which each of us did scan an object.I was fortunate enough to participate this technology “3D scanning” with my friends at Fab Lab. I had a fun day, learning the technology and the process of 3D scanning. Scanning the mini cakes, food, artificial plants around lab and scanning people too “Zobair 😊” >> our colleague.

We all used the same scanner to perform scanning but different objects to scan. So I decided to scan a mini desirt to see how it will look like in 3D scanning “maybe more Yummy :p” !
Learning this skill of scanning wasn’t hard and I think the outcome of combining 3D scanning with 3D printing is cool and really excited.

The thing in 3D scanning when we scan we are the one who moves around the object very slowly by holding 3D scanning and the one we used is "Sense" as I mentioned above. Also, scanning trying to scan the edges to have better scan.






Scanning steps



Well, the first step in the process of 3D Scanning is to choose the size of the thing you want to scan from these three options if small object, medium or larg object. So I went for small objects tissue paper and my shoes.



Here, Wendy and I were looking for something shiny to scan, so we chose the shield to scan, but when I was driving the device over the place it was hard to determine which thing to scan because it was transparent so the side and the background was under the green square not the object I wanted.

Thank you Wendy for taking pictures of me during the scannig.



Then we moved to scan a tissue paper, the result was better than the previous because obviously it is not transparent but the edges here are hard to scan. But the result frankly impressed me and the final shape was very nice.



Try to have the green box around the pbject you want to scan by moving the scaner you hold front, back, up and down .. and then if you have that green square exactly around the object then press start scan.



While your are scanning try to move around the object slowly and make sure you arer covering the details of the your object to have nice outcome and complete. Also you can let somesome help you as Wendy did help me in this proccess so one time she hold the scanner for me and I turn the object around and vise versa.



Stop scanning and I have this NICE clean shap of the object.



I used erase tool, which helped me to get red of extra shapes around the object as you can see im erasing the extra scaned thing also in the yellow cercle showing the little of bottom part of the stool where I put the object "shoes", I removed that part by using it.



I used solidify tool to get rid of the extra scanned things around the object in a clean manner and does not hinder or change the desired outcome or shape, also solidify do the oval shape more solid and cohesive as you can see in the picture.





These are the tools by which you can go to the main page to re-scan and choose the size of the material and other icons are easy to be identified .