Peter Perez's Fab Academy Portfolio

Week 05 - 3D Scanning and Printing

Week 5's Goals:

3D Printer Classification - BambuLabs P1S

Before I could start designing what I wanted to, a print in place gear system characterizing the printer was of the utmost importance. Without knowing these tolerances I would not be able to design appropriately in my printer.

For this I was using the BambuLabs P1S. A new addition to my fleet of printers it has been an excellent work horse. Doing things a lot faster and more reliably than most printers that I have worked with I have been astounded by how few issues I have had. Other than pushing the printer to unreasonable limits I have pretty much only had successful prints with it.

Choosing Files

In this case, Neil was kind enough to provide a good amount of them in the Fab Academy site.

Design Rules

Setting Files to Print

On the BambuLabs Printers the easiest and most likely way to send a print is to use their proprietary software, and it is also the way I default to most of the time. The process is very simple and drag and drop as long as you are using similar settings on your files. In this project I pretty much chose only two file settings.

0.20mm Standard @BBL XIC w/supports

0.20 Standard @BBL X1C NO SUPPORTS

On the left side of both of these you see the image after I dropped the .stl files into the program. On the right hand side you see the files after I have simply clicked the slice plate option. In the version with supports you will clearly see in the green the support material that was generated by my program. Then to send to print it is as easy as clicking Print Plate. This will open a prompt to choose the printer that you are sending it to and should all be ok your printer will print it nicely.

All the files you see were printed in BambuLabs PLA Matte specifically the chocolate color, which I just like because it looks smooth.

If you want to print the files the way I did you can use these two files:

The Results:

I will say that the print files impressed me and definitely gave me constraints to work with for my design.

The Insights About the P1S

Though there were a lot of insights in printing all of these files I did have a few key takeaways from my printer when doing this

Using all of these insights I wanted to design something I have never done before: A print in place mechanism

The Print In Place Gearbox

Part of what I wanted to do with my final project DAP-R is design an educational system for my robotics course. One of the main things that I do is gears and gear ratios. Though the exact ratios I was doing right now did not really matter with what this current project was doing. The fact that it had gears is a big step. Now, gears do not come super cheap when sold as educational supplies so I thought, hey, I can make my own.

Design on OnShape

Because I have been using Fusion for most of my design in this course I decided to use that for my project now too. This was an interesting idea but I learned quickly that I do not like the gear generating tools on Fusion.

I was more comfortable doing this on OnShape so I transitioned to that program. In OnShape, ONLY ON DESKTOP, you can access add-ins for the program. One of them being the Spur Gear add-in.

You find this by clicking on the right hand side of the screen "Search Tools" and choosing the appropriate gear tool.

When selected it gives you the options seen on the tool such as Module, pitch circle diameter, etc. You just generate your gear after this.

Using this I created a little file that looked something like this:

The important tolerances were between the axle and the hole and the distance from the gear to the walls. For both of these because of the test print I chose to use a .4mm gap This turned out to be ok for the axle gap, but nowhere near close for the gears, I had axles that moved but a gear that stuck.

I also ran into the issue that the infill on my printer was too sparse and when I tried to turn the gear I just shattered it.

This led me to change the design in two ways. One for printing and one for the design. First, I could not see what was going on inside the print to see why it was jamming so I opened some "windows" in the design. Second I increased my infill to 50% to give the print a bit more stability. After doing this I started the process of making a ton of alterations until there was one that moved the way I wanted

The final design had a gap between the gears and support beams of .6mm. This allowed for a good tolerance that didn't need a lot of spinning and grinding down to get a good flow. I also printed a model out of resin but it is very wobbly and I am working on the different constraints for that model.

The Print in Place Files

If you want to print my files you can click right here and try it out yourself! Just keep in mind I did use supports and a 50% infill.

An Embarrasing Update

Well since I wrote this I have found out that Fusion indeed DOES have an edit tool for gears, and it is, in my opinion 100x easier than using the Onshape one... Will update shortly.

3D Scanning

This was my first foray into 3d scanning and it was very interesting indeed. Because in class Neil mentioned the Ferret device from Creality I purchased one for the lab.

My only experience in 3d scanning in the past was doing manual photogrammetry in college using Matlab, 3 pictures, and a lot of algorithms. And using my phone that glitched out constantly. This was a new experience.

At first I tried to scan my little super hero an old student made of me who is in Pratt. To set up the device you connect your phone, or device to the the wifi of the Ferret Pro. Once that is done you download the Creality Scan app to connect the tools together.

I was noticing that I was missing a lot of the bottom of my files but losing the tracking with the device when I did. So I decided to do what everyone else would do and scan myself!

This led to an interesting outcome:

The Ferret Pro hates beards?

I really wanted to 3d print a bust of myself. But I couldn't figure out in the time that I had the scanner why it did not like my beard. I have about 5 full scans of my face, no beard...

Speaking with Ohad this week he advised that the reflectivity of hair is something that scanners struggle with. So I would need to buy some matte hair spray and try again. I have not gone around to do this but soon I will try and hopefully have a tiny 3d printed me to set on my desk.