3D printing/scanning

I attempted to print a small petri dish (3.5cm in diameter and 0.4cm in height) with a solid divide with holes. This device will be filled with agar medium and will allow to grow different bacterial/worm cultures on two sides.
I designed the plate in Antimony (complete plate) and printed it on Makerbot at Harvard's Science Centre using low resolution for speed (and with support enabled). The first attempt was obviously unsuccessful:

On one hand the mesh was missing entirely - the reason was that the layer thickness was set to 0.3cm and the mesh thickness was about 0.2cm. The software did not produce any warnings and continued to omit this part of the object. The other lesson learned is that support is very difficult to get rid of:

In the above image the lower, flat platform (that will ultimately stop liquid agar from leaking out) was attached to the sidewall through four small joints (0.25mm in size). Because the gap was large enough MakerBot software filled it in with support that was extremely difficult to cut through with a knife and the process would easily compromise finer structures in the process. Therefore I decided to split the design into three pieces (bottom plate, sidewall and mesh in the middle) and print them as separate parts:

The mesh fitted inside the sidewall with a bit of mechanical trimming:

But it was clearly missing certain sections (a result of low resolution?). In addition a sidewall, was made up of two shells that were separated on one end:

3D scannning

Dima and I have found a very reliable way to scan people (and other objects). Instead of walking with a scanner around the object (it's very easy to lose continuity) we left the scanner in place and sat the object (in this case Dima) on a rotating chair to slowly rotate around:

with tantalizing results:

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And finally, the 3D printer has decided to become a little creative itself upon the exchange of filaments: