GCODE – Nathaniel Filer

My Process

I had a bit of trouble with this assignment (thus why it’s four days late). Originally, I wanted to make three designs with inspiration from illustrations in a design book I have “Designa: Technical Secrets of the Traditional Visual Arts” by Adam Tetlow. I was planning to do a Celtic cross and make it look like it had been braided, an Islamic geometric design, and something else I hadn’t decided on yet. I got started, but I was trying to write code that would generate gcode from scratch, without using the Turtle library, which ended up taking too much time (I only got as far as generating a small version of the base for the bottom of the cross design).

I finally gave up that approach on Wednesday night, but by then it was too late to finish before the presentations, sadly.

The three designs I picked on Friday were a cylindrical vessel with the geometric designs from the Designa book (so I did get to do one of my original ideas!), a rectangle with non-planar movements on the z axis, and another shape with lines of filament strung away from it to give a textured look.

Why A Traditional Slicer Wasn’t Adequate

The first shape, the cylinder with the geometric designs on it, would be very difficult to do with a traditional slicer. It might have been possible to create small thin pipe shapes and run them over the surface of a cylinder to create the designs, but that would have been much harder.

The second shape, the rectangle with two sides curving higher that the center, would be possible with a traditional slicer, but the layers would be step-wise, and the top would not be as smooth!

The third shape, the shape with fuzzy lines strung away from it, would not be possible with a traditional slicer at all, because single lines of filament were drawn out into space and left to hang there.

Iterations

I went through a lot of iterations when I was originally trying not to use the Turtle library, especially testing how to control extrusion, but I ended up taking an easier approach in the end.

I still had to iterate. For the second shape, at first the sides curved up too much and the print head hit the side while printing the center, so I had to adjust the height of the side to be a little lower. For the third shape, I tried several prints to see which texture I liked the best, but I ended up keeping the first one. For the first print, which was in many ways the most complex, amazingly, I only had to print it once. I think that’s because even though it was the most complex to generate, it was the most simple as far as the printing was concerned.

My Code

Cura Screenshots

Object Images