5. 3D Printing

Hero Shot of the Week

Summary

Work Process

Intro

Henk and Saco did an introduction for 3D Printing.

We first started to look at the guts of the GCode. Lots of coordinates.

I also learned that we can create the code to generate the GCode. But that seems more work than necessary 😅.

A Slow Motion video of a 3D Printer printing.

Different Materials

Material Comparison Tables

From Prusa From Simplify3D

Pollution

This is an article about the release of particle while printing.

Printers

History

The invention of the 3D Printer is quite complicated as it seems multiple people developed the same technology at (more or less) the same time without the knowledge of the other.

RepRap Family Tree

But this guy video presentation debates the first use of a "3D Printer". It is about a special concrete pourer.

Multi head Printers

With multi head we can do lots of interesting / fabulous things.

One of them is printing in multi-material. This allows us to created flexible objects like this bone hand medical example.

Programs

MeshLab

So there is MeshLab to optimize the 3D models. As the last update more than a 1 year ago I was curious if it was abandoned. GitHub says no. Last edit was a month ago.

This app should be useful for D&D figurines.

Prusa Slicer

Super Slicer

A fork of Prusa Slicer.

home page

Design rules

Brick Layers

The article shared in the zoom meeting.

I was curious if it was already present in Prusa Slicer, but seems like it is not based in this open issue. But this would definitely improve the strength of the print. And maybe even its watertightness.

BUT

While in the intro Henk showed us this guy GitHub page where he made a post script to implement the brick layer technology to Prusa Slicer.

So it is not officially implemented but has people working on it.

AH

It is a patent issue...

Learning Outcome

Digital Files and Links

Assignment Check

  • group assignment:
    • test the design rules for your 3D printer(s)
  • individual assignment:
    • design and 3D print an object (small, few cm3, limited by printer time) that could not be made subtractively
    • 3D scan an object (and optionally print it)