Assignment 5

After we have characterized three of the 3D printers we have here in our lab, I started desgining my piece to 3D print. I go the inspiration for Pinterest for a cute lamp. I learned new skills like adding Sphere, manipulating using the move and rotate function to make sure it is inside the box. Other functions I alreading used like extrude for cutting and joining pieces together, also adding arcs into my desging by extruding half squares together with rectangles on each side to form this Arch door entrance. It iwas quite fun. I also added alittle figurine by using spline tool and drew it on the plane, then rotate it 90° to appear like it is standing on the plattform. To form the arch ceiling behind it, I added an Offset Plane right behind the figurine to sketch another arch on it and created the 3D illusion. For visual effects, I added Fillet to the arch and Chamfer onto the stairs to smoothen them out. The overall piece was 150 mm long, 100mm wide, and 60mm high.

After exporting my design as .STL file, I installed Ultimaker Cura 5.8.1 and I opened my saved file. To set the setting, I selected material to Generic PLA 0.4 AA, the infill to 15%. In order to make sure my oject doe not have any overhang or sagging, I ticked the option for "support" and I chose the type to "Normal". It required alot of post processing, but I did not want to change my design so I had to take responsibity for my decsion. After slicing, it stated that the print will need 11 h 5 min.

with the normal type support, the material could not be removed at all without breaking pieces apart. Therefore, I decided to give it a shot with the organic support type using the Bambulab that Lysander characzerized. I also reduced the scale down to 35%, so it is significantyl less time and material costly. After slicing, it took roughly 45 min to print!

Since printing my lamp was not a very successful practice using the ultimaker normal support setting, I designed the box with the sphere inside and I added a tube going through the center of the sphere by sketching a circle at the bottom surface of the cube and extruding it from top to bottom of the cube, and set the operation to join, so the support is techincally not needed.

Subtractive manufacturing principle is based on removing material from a solid block, which limits it to objects that the cutting tools can easily reach. In my lamp design, there are many intricate details—like the curved arches, and internal cavity with the sphere inside, which makes it challenging for CNC machine to make it accurately. In the case of 3D printing (additive manufacturing), builds the piece layer by layer, which allows for creating delicate figures, without the constraints of tool access or the huge amounts of material waste like in subtractive methods.

For this task, I decided to 3D scan my teammate Mika's Week 5 and vice versa so we helped each other!. For calibrating and setting scanning parameters, I used Shining 3 D . After we calibrated EinScan H2, which is a scanner primarly used to scan human bodies,I started setting the parameters for scanning progress. I selected the scan mode to be "IR Mode". Then, I created a new project folder and named it "MikaScan". Scan Target was set to "Portrait", the alignment to be "hybrid", resolution to be "medium".

Afterwards, I started slowly with the machine scanning all angles slowly trying to get as clean scan as possible. Finally, I pressed to be done and manipulate the scan on the software. For that, I removed all random points. After being satisfied with the result, I carried on with "optimizing and generating point clouds". This is done by the software to try and patch the missing points from the scan.

Then, for meshing I set the mesh quality, filter, and smooth to "medium".

Lastly, I saved the files in all types (.stl, .obj, .ply, .mdf), and I scaled down the size to 30%. These files could be used for further processing in case Mika wants to 3D print a miniture version of himself :D.

After Mika scanned me and the mesh turned out to be very good, I was curious to 3D print the resut! For processing I used PrusaSlicer and MeshMixer For the print to be stable, I designed a small square base using Fusion360 and exported it as .stl file. Then, on Prusa, I opened my scan and tried to manipulate the scan and make sure that the bottom surface of the feet is flat and leveled. For this, I rotated the perspective 180°, used the function first "place on face", selected the bottom surface, then performed function "cut". The print was scaled down to 20%, ended up with the dimensions of 67 * 21* 17 mm.

Then, I saved the new version of the scan and reopened it on MeshMixer now to combine the base and the figurine into one .stl file. First, I dragged and drop both files. Then I went to Edit > Transfrom in order to select the right coordinates for the figurine to be placed right on top of the base.

After placement was checked from every angle, both the base and the figurine were combined using the combine function. Finally, to set the printing setting, I went back to PrusaSlicer. First, I switch from "Beginner" mode to "Expert" mode to be able to manipulate more settings. Then, I went to "print setting" and ticked on generate support material option, and I set the style to organic, and ticked on Support on build plate only option.

Finally, the print was ready for slicing. Pritning time was 2 h 2 min.

While trying to updload the original mesh with 100% resolution, I hit the soft limit for the GitLab repo storage (941 MB). I reset my repository by cloning the old version from my repo locally, then adding slowly from the fresher local version folder, pushing and commiting step by step. Now, only the STL file for the figurine was left. Therefore, I had to use QuickSurface to reduce the mesh down to 5% (8.5 MB). The only downside it is not open-source, but we have it in the lab PCs so why not use it to serve the purpose!

For comparison between the old and new mesh, I opened both stls in slic3r. If we zoom in we see the triangles being more rough in the reduced version. However, for 3D printer, the difference will not be visible.

All I can say is that it took long time and maneouvering with the ply in order to remove all the support material. I will try for next time to have design that requires less support!

Advantages: 3D printing offers design flexibility, which enables printing of intricate geometries and complex structures that traditional subtractive methods cannot easily achieve. Additionally, it minimizes material waste by formin objects layer by layer and supports rapid prototyping.

Limitations: On the downside, 3D printing is often slow prpcess compared to pther techniques such as laser cutting, and the printed objects often require post-processing. Additionally, the selection of filament is also tricky; it depends on the mechanical properties of the printed objects that serves the function you desire!