Large Assignment 4 – Logan Sullivan

I’m going to be honest, this project has gotten me pretty burnt out right now. From the stress of my Ender 3 V3 breaking down with hardware and software faults I can’t readily solve without getting a replacement, to the many, many headaches caused in the domino effect of losing the printer at such an unfortunate time.

I’m currently using an Ender 3 lent by Leah, but to say it’s caused complications is an understatement. I won’t go into details, but there were many, many failed prints and hours of calibration, fiddling, and nozzle disassembly, about 80% of which I’d chalk up to the 2017 model’s limitations and touchiness. There were a lot of times where something that was working just moments prior would begin to fail just because the printer felt like it, needing another pass of troubleshooting.

But I digress. Only one (possibly two) of the four main print ideas I had ended up becoming impossible or greatly hampered by the limitations of the Ender 3 compared to the Ender 3 V3. Those ideas were the suspended cobweb and the meld blob. The suspended cobweb is maybe still possible, but after hours of tweaking values and retrying, I couldn’t get the printer to not spontaneously stop or greatly reduce extrusion partway through drawing out a string and breaking it. As for the blobs, I got some out of it, but all at very, very small sizes. For whatever reason, the Ender 3 would interpret the full set of instructions as being instantly completed any time I set numMoves to a non-zero value, no matter how much I debugged it or examined the output gcode. Thus, the prints were limited to only going straight up, stunting their size.

The Cobweb

I wanted to see if I could make a cobweb shape suspended in the air instead of flat on the print surface, to let the strings droop down and make messy shapes as it all connects together. This, along with some parameters to randomly remove some strings or slide them around could lead to some interesting spiderwebs. However, as mentioned earlier, I unfortunately could not bring this to fruition in the time available to me. I’ve left the code for it in my submission if anyone wants to try to make it work in their own time.

The Diamond

A cone and an inverted cone, stacked on top of each other, but with random horizontal offsets as the path traces around. I also wanted to try constantly randomizing the extrude rate instead of position, but unfortunately it all just smooths out in the end. However, it did occasionally cause a bit of tugging in some areas, which compounded enough to make certain portions collapse in, which was interesting. I did have to stop the print early, as it was at risk of toppling over due to becoming loose from the bed.

The Meld Blob(s)

I was curious to see if I could make a big, mostly smooth blob of plastic from extruding in place and occasionally moving up and/or to the sides, with all the filament combining into one solid piece. The result was interesting, a bunch of small pebbles almost. In one of them, the printer went idle for long enough that it decided to disengage the stepper motors and crashed the nozzle right into the still-hot plastic, making a big indent. No damage was done, but it gave me quite the startle.

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The Ring

A simple, tall ring, with the twist that each layer has bonus height from a sine curve that grows in amplitude as the layers progress. It creates an interesting effect where the layers begin to separate, but eventually the gap is too much and the filament just starts making a straight line path instead as it moves unimpeded through the air.

Thoughts

Designing and coding up (minus debugging) the gcode files themselves was fun, like a small series of puzzles to get such strange shapes to work and become more varied. Less fun though was having to wrangle with a printer that refused to cooperate half the time, but sometimes that’s how life goes. I’m curious to see how my Ender 3 V3 would fare with these prints, if I can get it working or replaced.