I scanned a small succulent plant of mine using the 3D Systems Sense scanner. It was really hard because you have to hold the scanner very steadily while moving it around the object so that it can capture good images. Through 30 minutes of trying, I learned that resting one end of the scanner on the table while moving it around the object is really helpful, but even so I still couldn't rotate the scanner all the way around the plant without the scanner losing the object. Luckily, the software has a "solidify" tool that extrapolates the rest of the object that you didn't scan, and it did an okay job for my plant.

As a group, we tested the design rules of the 3D printers in the EDS (2 Sindohs and a Prusa) by printing various objects to help us determine the printers' capabilities for printing different overhangs, clearances, angles, bridges, and more. Some examples:

This week, I wanted to 3D print a turtle pot for my plant! Since I knew nothing about 3D printing, I first designed a very basic tiny turtle in Fusion 360 and printed it as a test to make sure it would not turn into spaghetti. It turned out pretty well! This turtle definitely cannnot be made subtractively because the inside of the shell is hollow :)

Funny story, the right Sindoh printer was acting weird so Anthony used my design to test the printer on various settings. It was very amusing to walk into the EDS and find a bunch of partially printed turtles lying around everywhere.

Next, I tried to make my turtle slightly prettier and added a hole in the top for the plant. Shout out to Devin for showing me how to make a hole and improve my design workflow so that my components were always centered and not sideways lol. I actually re-CADed the whole turtle for this version but I was like 3x faster this time!

I knew 3D printing was slow, but it was even slower for my turtle because I had to turn on supports and rafts since the turtle legs were small and couldn't support the larger body of the turtle alone. As a result, I scaled my turtle down quite a bit so that it would print in about 2.5 hours. However, getting the supports off the print was extremely annoying. I was not strong enough to pry them off myself so I had to use tweezers, angled cutters, and sandpaper to get the supports off completely.

Since I had to scale the size down to reduce the printing time, the pot was a bit of a tight squeeze for my plant, but I managed to stuff it in there! I think I'm going to take the plant back out later though so it doesn't suffocate.