Week 4: 3D Scanning and Printing

Characterizing the Printer

We were asked to print many sample parts to characterize different aspects of the printer. The EDS has 3 different 3D printers: UPrint, Sindoh, and was setting up the Prusa. Most of the parts were printed using the UPrint so that we could queue up parts as a group and switch them out throughout the week. Some of the parts we printed were:

For the clearance print, the smallest segment that could rotate was the 0.6" clearance. When we set up the unsupported prints, we originally did them on the UPrint but realized that all of our prints would come out with supporting material, defeating the purpose of trying to characterize the unsupported print.

For the unsupported overhang print, we reran it on the Sindoh which gave us the option of specifiying no support material.

The piece on the right was made on the Sindoh. Even without support, we were able to print out even the longest bar.

CADing the Whistle

I wanted to design and print a whistle that had a ball inside. I used Fusion360 to CAD up my design. The .stl file is here.

I chose to put the bead tangent to the interior curve of the whistle because I wanted this to be printable even without support just in case the UPrint was not available. I was hoping that I would be able to break off the bead using a screwdriver after I printed the part.

Printing the Whistle

I used the UPrint to print out my whistle. The software had the option for auto orienting my piece. In this screenshot,

the red shows where the material will be deposited and white is where support material will be deposited. The piece took around 55 minutes to print and ended up looking like this:

The bath,

dissolved all the stringy bits left from the printer and the support at the base and inside the whistle. The bead was attached inside but was easily removed with a flathead screwdriver.

Scanning

Many of the objects I tried scanning (matte black headphones, lime) would not work on the Sense3D scanner because the material was too reflective. The first object that I had success with was my shoe. The software for the scanner had a "Repair" and "Erase" tool that helped me get rid of the excess scanned area and fill in the bottom of the shoe. All of my 3D objects were rendered using Meshlab.

I also scanned in a silk worm (.obj file here), which was much more succesful than I anticipated given the size and the likelihood that the worm would move around.