Description of my process:
The design process started out simple and got more ambitious as things started to go more and more wrong. My first shape was the christmas tree, the shape started out as a death spiral turtle but I could never make him go back on the path after jetting out. So for all my artifacts I went to absolute position and had the turtle fill in the path between jumps. For the second shape I wanted a complex curve based on a sine wave. This shape was tested about 15 times and utterly wrecked my 3d printer. For the last shape I wanted to make a hanging circle in the a circle, because I thought it would be cool.
Explanation of why your shapes cannot be generated by a traditional slicer.
Shape 1: It can not be made on the traditional slicer because it has floating filament and when I did try reversing the gcode to stl and back to gcode it added sports for all of the little branches.
Shape 2: Has a complex curve that can not print as smoothly as my g code printed and if the slicer tried to make it would have a stair stepping effect.
Shape 3: has a floating section and fly aways that I do not think the slicer can handle well or at all.
Discussion of your iterative design process:
Large present of my time went towards hacking an old bambu labs gcode setup and tear down into a turtle code. This led to the top a 3 worst sounds of my life and burnt out my timing belts. I forgot to turn on ‘G91’ and the negative numbers for hitting 0,0 slipping and grinding away at the timing belt that I over tighten on purpose to get nicer prints.Turns out this did not need the enders 3 gcode does work fine. The 2 fixes to the code needed where you can not end at 0,0 because that is a crash and schmear at the start of print needs to move a few units over or it will rip the front cooling fan off the printer and error out.
I think the nice thing about my print is they would fail fast, so I don’t think they will fail in meanful print ruining day way. The worse issue I ran into was on the comprex curve, It turned my 3d printer into a “shaper machine”(*) for a few hours while I slept. It clogged the nozzle and scraped the top of the curve. I thought I took pictures of the before but I did a lot of clean up to show the shape.
Slicer viewing gcode:
Shape 1:
Shape 2:
Shape 3:
Great picture of arifacts:
Shape 1:
shape 2: picture 1 is the profile and picture is an explanation of the profile.
Shape 3:
Asides:
Also print time on the bambulabs is a comment in the gcode so the 3d printer can not calculate the print times.
I think print 3 was the most dense thing I have ever printed at 100% infill. I has a density of 1 228.47934 kg/m^3
Nick,
Looks like you had an interesting time with this project. I also had a lot of issues with getting the GCODE to work on my printer. After a few tweaks to the header, it was off to the races. That was the majority of the battle for me, sounds like you had additional battles. Luckily you persevered and presented us with some great prints. All of them came out really well! I especially liked your first one, I am curious if you made those outside extrusions curve like that on purpose? That is a really cool look to the overall print. That also looks like some pretty solid filament. Anyways, great post and print, I really enjoyed seeing them. Look forward to what you do next!
Justin
Thanks you Justin for your comment. The complex curve was made by using z=amp*sin(scaller*(x+y)). This gave a shap with a curve and building layer by layer by layer increasing the amp would give the curved shape. It took 12 hours but I think the shape was from the nozzel scraping the top insteed of it realy printing.
Hi, I love the way your first print came out with the looping extrusions around the cone. I would definitely agree that the biggest struggle with this project was getting the gcode header setup. I had a lot of issues with setting up the relative vs absolute positioning mode as well. Overall, you made some really cool models. Great project!
Thanks samuel. I was realy confused at frist why things were going so wrong but the flash backs to the class made fix the issue fast.
Hey Nicholas!
Your christmas-tree print is very neat, in both senses of the word. Did you do anything special with the speed/temperature to keep the loops so tidy? It’s evocative to me of aquatic plants.
It’s a shame that your timing belts bit-the-dust mid-project… Props for persevering though!
I think the nice-ness of christmas-tree was a fluke. I went for a reprint to try to make the inside smoother and it kept poping of the build plate with a single layer at the bottom. I did minial testing to get string it “just worked” but I did turn on the fan and leave thing the door open. I got the timing belt replace it only took 2 hours of dozen of tiny screws…