Wildcard week: Robotic Pellet 3d Printing

This week our lab decided to use Rodrigo’s extruder and workflow to design big pieces.

Design Rules for the robotic extruding

Some design rules need to be followed:

• Only design and print in vase mode. Vase mode is a technique hwere the extruder continously outputs material in a big spiral, with no pauses. This is because the extruder is not as agile as a desktop 3d printer and any pause takes a long time to be reflected on the print.
• Overall diameter needs to be over 150mm. This is because since we are printing a lot of material, our temperature in the extruder is quite high and this affects the adhesion of layers when the previous layer is not yet printed.
• First layer should avoid violent vertices and corners. Best recomendation is to have a circular first layer. The warping in our ABS material is quite substantial, so hard corners tend to warp a lot. Bed adhesion is an issue so circularity helps with differential warping.