Hey! I learned something!
Well, we tried. And its better. But it ain’t fixed.
Here’s the first bits of print that came out of it. You can see the dark stuff that was either the old filament or burnt:
However, the stream of filament coming out the end keeps varying. Sometimes its good, and then other times it fizzles out:
Conclusion: There’s something still clogging the bottom thing. More work needs to be done.
I’ve been playing with “structure from motion” / “photogrammetry” apps for a bit. Lots of stuff still to figure out, but here’s a possible interesting path. Note that none of this is optimal – wrong camera, wrong print medium, etc – but its fun.
1. Start with a Video of walking around The Dude Abiding.
(His name is Joel, he’s one of my coworkers, he also teaches kids how to code)
2. Using VLC, play then Shift-S to snap, then plan, then Shift-S to snap, to extract a bunch of frames.
3. Load them into Agisoft PhotoScan ($179, or you could go 123D Catch from Autodesk, that one is free, but possibly less accurate?). Run “Align Cameras”, get point cloud.
4. Crop in the model box, hit Build Dense Cloud. This is where it starts to look really interesting.
5. Build a Model .. Build Texture. This is what the result looks like at “medium” resolution:
Not the greatest, but that’s because of the camera I used (video compression = artifacting = bumps) plus camera lens distortion etc.
6. However, that doesn’t work for what we’re doing next. I don’t own a $10k color 3d printer. So instead.. paper!
Build a model at lower resolutions:
Don’t forget to close holes! (tools menu) … build texture…
7. Export the model. This is the $179 pay for step in Agisoft PhotoScan.
Note that this saves both a .JPG and a .PNG texture. JPG on the Left. I might be mistaken, but I think they were saved at the same time. Actually, the .JPG might be the overall “build me a texture”, and the .PNG is the “export my model to wavefront”. It’s a little freaky.
8. Load the .OBJ into Pepakura. $39, I totally plan to buy it.
9. Unfold, and Print:
10. Print it out on cardstock, cut, and fold ..
I haven’t done this part yet.
These screenshots were from my second attempt. Here is Joel holding my first attempt, which was 500 faces, a bit too complex:
The other night (Time of writing minus 4 days), I set up a hi-resolution Black Dalek print in motion. I also pointed the Dropcam at it.. what I saw at 8am the next morning Shocked and Amazed me!
(clog at 1:19 or so, but its hard to tell)
The head was swooshing and swishing unrestricted in the air.. no plastic coming out. But, the filament still seemed to be attached. (in the past, the reel had developed a bind that had pulled the filament out of the printer) What? My first clogged head! (10,000XP monster!)
(I still got some good parts out of the print):
Here you can see the stripped filament where the gear could not push it in any further:
This was as far as I had disassembled the printer before.. knowing I could buy a new print head for $59, I went for the full disassembly. I referred to several videos online, especially this one:
I successfully exploded it everywhere and got down to the offending parts:
Now what? I’m using PLA, so I couldn’t soak in acetone..
Just for the heck of it, the wife and I tried using a candle flame to localize heat up the barrel. It worked. First try. The glops globbed out. The glips gleeped. The wires were not affected. There was much rejoicing. My wife is awesome.
There was a clog in the peek barrel as well .. I had to use a nail, and then a really small hex driver, and a hammer, to get that one out of the way. It worked.
I did hook up the barrel assembly to the heaters and test them before I started putting everything back. It was a little hard to push by hand, but the filament did make it all the way through. Large glops of black ink (I think the black is VERY inky) came out – I suspect I’ve been running it at too high a temperature, and magic happened, and a lot of ink collected in the barrel.
I’m in the middle of putting the printer back together.
Luckily, I used a sharpie at a diagonal across the 5 clear pieces so I could figure out how to put them back. One of them broke, a bit, not too serious, I don’t think. I’ve stopped at the point just before I put the extruder motor back on. I expect I have to recalibrate the z-distance, because I’m pretty sure the barrel is now sitting lower than it did before. Luckily I had Kapton Tape that I could cut up to reattach the thermister. Hey There, Mister.
I’ll get a chance to play with it again in 2-4 days. I hope I can get it back together.. I got my second ever “actually useful” thing to print (for a friend’s arcade machine build). And I want to do some more name coasters.
Playing with font extrusion.. trying to make interesting shapes:
I did this by combining 4 things:
This was all done in blender, then cleaned up in Netfabb, and then printed.
The drawback is there’s a LOT of support structure to remove. I might try printing it on end with the fonts facing “up” at a 45 degree angle, but then I run into stability problems.
This shows the bottom. The previous print had been dark blue (a TARDIS Chess set, if you must know, printed by Joel), and when I changed to the light blue (throw away) filament, I just let it do the color change while printing. I like the effect! It hardly ever lasts more than a layer, so I might keep doing that, its fun.
Its not really a Coaster. Thanks to the dip, cups don’t sit well in it. Need to inset it with a square next time. Or a cylinder, and make it bigger.
I wish I could do multicolor prints.
Thanks to DropCam and a $10/month subscription, I have a 7 day window that I can create Time Lapses from.
The Dropcam has a hard time focusing this close, so it’s a bit blurry. You can see the pauses and filament changes in the video.
I’ll point the camera out the window and see if I can come up with some other cool timelapses.
I did a random search for “Ames” in Thingiverse and I found this gem: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:171194
Seeing as I grew up in Ames, IA .. heck, I have two jobs and one house and my disc golf course on that map.. I was super excited to print it out.
Unfortunately, the model is HUGE and it has some problems. I did what I could on short order .. 6.5cm (no scaling), at 0.3mm resolution. I did use the three colors I had, by injecting some code into the generated gcode:
G1 X155 F4000 @pause
And this was the result:
Pretty nice as far as “striking”; fail in terms of detail. I could do better.. XY scale x2, and 0.1mm depth? Subdivide into N prints to get the XY resolution right? I might need a bigger computer first, to do the slicing.. it topped out at 2.5GB of memory used, and “the wee laptop couldna’ handle it” (Scotty, Star Trek) (Nuclear Wessels).
My nephew loves LeBron James, so I pieced this together for him.
I got the logo and basketball from thingiverse. The logo was a bit tricky – it was a cellphone cover. I had to “extract” it by differencing it from a block, and then scaling the block up. The basketball needed to be squished a bit.
I combined the number six, a cone (base to help it stand), the logo, basketball, and his initials for the final. I printed it in black till about 5 hours in, then switched filaments for white.
Delivered yesterday. He liked it.
In an effort to post more often, with half baked semi successful projects rather than comprehensive completely solved ones, I give you:
The idea was to take each letter and extrude it, cutting it out of the square. Having three letters lead to some juicy geometry on the inside…
The fail part is, I could not dig the supports out. A thin piece snapped off as I struggled with it. I would have to print it in sections and glue it together.
Also note that the interior has shells that are not joined to the exterior.
My next attempt is/will be a coaster. Of my name. I would like to get it such that I can print it without supports.
Tools used for this: Blender.
Workflow: add text, convert to mesh, remove doubles, mesh cube, Boolean, difference, export to STL, net fab, repair, export part.
It has been forever since I posted. Life has been happening – first, my we had a vacation in Florida. Then, my step father died. Then, my cat died. And I’ve been trying to catch up ever since. I’m not caught up yet.
Just before all of that happened, though, I had started playing with a 3D printer. I left off with almost getting a successful print of a LEGO block.
Since then, an abbreviated list of what I have learned:
It is much, much easier to print larger parts with PLA. It works very well on the Solidoodle:
I did the same print over and over with different types of infill. The best, most consistent one was rectilinear – which ends up looking like a bunch of squares. The other fancy ones.. HilbertCurve, OctaSpiral – cool ideas, but very often ended up with unsupported infill layers, which lead to lots of droop and havok on the inside.
This was partially motivated by large ABS prints lifting all the time, I was trying to figure out “least infill possible”, but in the end, PLA solved that problem.
And thus I had to special order those from Amazon. This is to get a longer Z-stop screw so that I could clip on a glass plate or other such thing to the print bed.. so that I can prep a plate, rather than prepping a print bed, for a print. I’ve heard that ABS on Slurry on Glass and PLA on heated glass are awesome. I still need to get some glass – a friend suggested picture frames. #pendingExperiment
So far, I’ve done two Yoda’s, R2-D2, a Dalek, a Weeping Angel, and a TARDIS.
I’ve done some painting with Enamels now; I have more to learn about Acrylic and base coats #pendingExperiment.
The best part is giving them away (if I don’t want to paint them myself) to other people who would love them and keep them and call them George.
And that’s all the time I have to write for now. Later!
First, what are the actual measurements we must match? Taking multiple measurements: 
Then, using NetFabb against the model (click image to for link to ThingiVerse): 
My guess is that they reduced the size of the nubby because it would ooze a bit; the other two dimensions appear to be about right.
And the printed out ones:
| Slice | Scale | Flowrate | A | B | C | Fit? |
| 0.3mm | 1.0 | 0.6 | 4.67, 4.82 4.69, 4.79 |
16.07 15.93 |
9.64 mm | Very Loose |
Interesting! The nubbies are coming out a bit smaller, but the part is a bit bigger. The height is within 1 layer of where it could or should be.
Now, I want the part to print out nice and snug. Its hard to measure, but it looks like the receptor diameter for tne nubby is about 4.8mm – ie, they’re using a flex of about 0.1mm to keep things snug. So, I want to print out with a diameter above 4.8mm.
Lets try something at Flowrate 0.65, just to see what happens:
| Slice | Scale | Flowrate | A | B | C | Fit? |
| 0.3mm | 1.0 | 0.65 | 5.02, 4.8, 4.95, 4.86 | 15.93 15.84 |
9.73 | Pretty good! |
And what do you know! It fits! Pretty snug-gly!
Although, due to a hole in the original .STL file, the entire bottom of the piece got replaced with a solid face.
Mission Accomplished. 0.65 might be the answer, although it disagrees with the single-wall-thickness calibration.
