I have a friend who goes by the nickname Tuna.  He does really cool work with concrete which you can check out at ecoconcreteconcepts.com.  He was really interested in the work that I've been doing with 3D printing and I told him I was going to make him a tuna.  Initially I was going to make flat puzzle pieces that assembled into a three dimensional model.  But I just couldn't get things to look the way I wanted, and I was running short on time to get this thing done.  I went to Thingiverse.com and found a good model called 3D printable blue tuna. 

The original file was only half of a fish and it wasn't really optimized for printing.  It was also smaller than what I was after; something that you could put on a desk.  I cleaned up the model, integrating what were originally discrete components into a single solid watertight model using Google SketchUp.  I also learned a new trick to mirror the half fish that I had in order to make a complete fish.  Using the "Flip along axis" feature in SketchUp, I was able to make an exact opposite copy of the original.  I printed this using 3mm glow in the dark ABS and the results were pretty cool.  Tuna really liked his fish.  I have about 5 hours of re-design work and 6:32 print time.  #Abstract2Actual 11:32

Thanks to ELIJAHXXL for the original design!!!  My remix of this original design can be found HERE

A friend of mine is doing some cool work with Augmented and Virtual Reality  (AR) (VR).  He was going to use Google Cardboard to make a VR headset for demonstration purposes, but when he found out I had 3D printing capability, he asked me for help.  He sent me a bunch of design files from Thingiverse.com, and asked if I could make the OpenDive model.

OpenDive is a really nice looking model created by Durovis.  It sliced nicely, and printed in about 8:30 on my Prusa i3.  I couldn't wait for lenses from Amazon, so I found an old junk pair of binoculars, and scavenged a pretty good pair of lenses from them that fit in the goggles.  Focal length is off a bit, but at least it gave me a rough idea of how these things are going to work.

Next step:  download the Dive City Roller Coaster app on an iPhone and take a ride.  These things are COOL!  I also downloaded Protect The Planet from the windows app store and played this VR asteroids game onmy Nokia Lumia 1020.  All you do is move your head to shoot down asteroids.  Here, the focal length of the lenses is a problem, because you can't see the whole screen.  But still, it was really fun to be able to move my head and look around in space, and shoot asteroids.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what we can do with these things.

OpenDive VR Headset.  #Abstract2Actual 8:45

I could not get the Taulman Bridge Nylon to print well on X3REX printer.  It has a .5mm nozzle, which I can't get the Nylon to flow consistently through.  So I decided to print the Gyrobot hand body on my Airwolf3d v5.5 machine which has been printing Taulman 645 Nylon very successfully.

I loaded the print file, and everything was going along swimmingly until ... (play scary music here)  about 85% of the way through a 16 hour print job, I realized that the 5.5 machine does not have the build height required for the hand.  The height of the hand is 114.9mm and the max build height on the this machine is 104mm. :-(     I let the print continue until the printer got to 104.9mm and I killed the print job.  The hand was complete enough for testing out, but the guides around the index finger joint were missing, so there is the possibility of the finger sliding off to the side.  Another shortcoming of the 5.5 machine is that there is no control over the bed temperature: it is either on, or off.  That normally isn't a problem with ABS since it heats up to a maximum temperature of about 100C.  But the Bridge Nylon has a recommended bed temperature of 70C.  above that, the glue cooks, burns the nylon at the base of the print, and curls up.  So I'm going to have to go back the the X3REX and figure out the settings for Nylon.  X3REX is RAMPS 1.4 controlled, so you can precisely set the bed temperature.  I also have a .35mm nozzle for the Airwolf JRx hot end on X3REX. I'll install that nozzle and use the 645 Nylon slicer config that works so well on the 5.5 machine.

Aside from the base layers getting burned, the Taulman Bridge Nylon printed pretty nicely.  I did notice some layer separation up around 58mm from the base.  I'll have to play with the configuration a bit more to figure out how to solve that.  Maybe a less dense fill rate.  It is possible that this type of printing is just not suitable for the design.

Flexy-Hand #Abstract2Actual: 71:51 and counting

printed well and stuck really nicely to the bed, but once the print job got up between 2 and 3 mm, the hot end would jam.  After a few failures like this, I manually retracted the filament and measured the diameter at the tip.  It was 3.15mm, which prevents it from moving into the heated part of the nozzle. I reduced the retract length and increased extrusion temperature which allowed for another half mm of print height before jamming.  I suspect this has something to do with my retracts, which have to be a little longer than ABS retracts in order to minimize oozing.  After many hours of trial and error, I still cannot get the nylon to print reliably on X3REX (my modified Prusa i3).  I've decided to print in red ABS until I can figure out the right configuration for the nylon on this printer.  Time spent trying to print nylon parts 4:15

I modified the finger plate .stl file, adding the manually defined support elements to all the pieces.  Since I already had a spool of 3mm red ABS installed on the Prusa i3, I printed the finger plate there.  Print time was 6:08.  With a 4mm brim and the new supports, the pieces all turned out really well.  I only had to do a little trimming with an X-Acto knife to get the brim and supports cleaned off.  Cleaning the brim off of the joint (hinge) material was a little more difficult since the pieces are so small and the flexible PLA sticks together so well.  Putting the fingers together was like putting together a puzzle.  There is a diagram with the design files, but many of the pieces look so similar that it's hard to tell if you've got the right joints with the right fingers.

I decided to also print the hand body in red ABS, and I printed it on X3REX since it is a quieter machine than the Prusa i3.  This print took 6:24.  As I feared, there was some layer seperation, and the holes for the tendons got a bit clogged up.  Although I am going to have to reprint it, the piece printed well enough to use for testing fit and finish.  Installing the palmar digital joints was tricky.  I wound up using a screwdriver to compress the pieces and stuff them down into the palm body.  The fingers were pretty easy to press onto the joints from there.  The result is this pretty cool looking red hand.

I'm going to have to reprint the palm body in nylon to resolve the layer separation issue.  I am pretty sure I'll be able to do that on my Airwolf3d v5.5 since I have a nylon configuration file that works really well on that machine.

Flexy-Hand #Abstract2Actual: 43:29 and counting

Today I posted some of my designs on Thingiverse.com.  I've downloaded and printed lots of cool designs from the site and thought I'd share some of my own work.

I posted my streetlamp files HERE
I posted my Mexican Bulldog Collars HERE

I have a Nokia Lumia 1020, a Windows phone that I like to watch videos on.  There are two small problems I have doing this.  First, the phone will not stand up on its own, and won't stay standing if I lean it against something. Second, the speaker is on the side of the phone, which means, if I do manage to get it to stand up, I don't get the full sound because it is directed 90 degrees away from me.  I'm going to build a three piece stand with two uprights and a brace to hold them.  the upright on the right side has a curved piece to channel the sound around to the front.

It took me 36 minutes to design the stand in Google SketchUp.  It took another 18 minutes to prepare the printer, and slice the file.  Part of the printer prep time was switching to 3mm black ABS plastic from the flexible PLA that I used for the finger joints on the prosthetic hand project.  Printing all three parts took 2:19 on my Airwolf3d v5.5 printer.  After 7 minutes of cooling, i popped the parts together and found a couple of problems.

The brace didn't fit as snugly as I expected, so the uprights would wobble around and the phone could fall out of it.  Also, I didn't take into account that the lens on the back of this phone protrudes another 3mm from the back of the case, so instead of sitting all the way back against the brace, the top tilted forward, which put the speaker forward of the sound channel, rendering that feature useless.  Finally, the uprights were just at the edges of the phone, which left no room for error when placing the phone in the stand.  It only took two minutes to figure this out.

All of these problems could be resolved by making a few tweaks to the back brace.  The uprights could be used as they already were.  I went back to SketchUp and made corrections to the back brace, which took  11 minutes.  Prepping the printer and slicing the .stl file only took 3 minutes, since there was no filament change-out required, and I started heating the printer when I sat down to redesign the brace.  Reprinting the brace took 44 minutes.  It only took 2 minutes to cool the part and get it off of the printbed because I shut off the bed heater during the last 5 minutes of the print job. #Abstract2Actual 4:12

Today I printed the finger joint hinges using my Airwolf3d v5.5 printer.  I printed them out of FormFutura Flex EcoPLA.  Slicing and printer prep took 10 minutes, the print job itself took 2:22 using a rather slow 30mm/sec print speed.  I printed all 15 pieces in a single print job.  Since they're small pieces, I printed them with a 5mm brim, to help keep them stuck to the print bed.  This worked out really well, and I think these pieces printed a lot cleaner than anything else I've printed with the flexible PLA.  The only other notable configuration change with the flexible PLA is a 4mm retract, which is twice what I use with rigid ABS.  The flex seems to ooze a bit more than rigid plastic.  The extra retraction takes care of this which prevents strings from forming between parts and gives nice clean perimeters.  You can find a good description of extruder ooze and how to prevent it, inthis article at www.slic3r.org

Flexy-Hand #Abstract2Actual: 26:52 and counting

I've decided to 3d print a prosthetic hand for a networking event next month. I figured this would be a really cool way to showcase the complexity of what you can do with a 3d printer.  I'll keep track of the time I spend on this, which I imagine is going to be a lot.

I'm starting with an open source design Flexy-Hand 2, designed by Steve Wood at Gyrobot Ltd.  According to an article on 3Dprint.com, Jeff spent about 20 hours designing the hand.  I spent about 2 hours this evening studying the design and figuring out the best way to print it.  The files, which are available at Thingiverse.com are already laid out for printing, but there are some overhangs that are going to be a problem with my printer.  I added support material, but it ends up being too much support along the sides of some of the phalanges where it really isn't necessary, and will be a beast to get off.  So I'm manually tweaking the finger plate a little to include support for those overhangs.  Someone probably knows an easier way to configure the support material, and there may be a better slicer program out there for this sort of thing.  If you know of anything, let me know.  Until I learn a better way, I'll just add some little blocks to support the overhangs.

I printed out these three pieces in 3mm yellow ABS to see how my support elements worked.  They are too thick and poorly placed, so I'll try again tomorrow. They do look pretty cool though.  Ultimately I'm going to print most of the hand out out of 3mm Taulman Bridge nylon.  This is a newly formulated nylon that resists curling much better than earlier 3d nylon blends.  I'm thinking I'll use flexible PLA  which I got from 3Dsupplyworld.com, for the joint material, but I'm not completely set on that yet.  Nylon is pretty flexible and I may be able to tweak the filament, density, and wall thicknesses enough to use nylon throughout.

Flexy-Hand #Abstract2Actual: 24:20 and counting (including Jeff's design time)

One of my neighbors threw out a standing floor lamp after breaking the shade, or globe, or whatever was on top covering the bulb.  There was nothing wrong with the rest of the lamp, and, although I didn't have any real plans for it, I took it home.  It stood unused in the closet of my in my apartment for about 6 weeks.  I had ordered some 3mm glow in the dark ABS filament, and thought, what if I create a lamp shade out of this for the lamp.  I thought I'd do something really off the wall, and started the design as lamp looking thing with lots of holes in it, so the bulb wouldn't overheat.  It took me about 8 hours to design it, and I sent it to the printer.  One of the problems with printing surfaces with holes in them is that the plastic has a tendency to curl as it cools, because it cools quicker out at the edge than it does in the center.

About half way through a 12 hour print job, the curled up portions got in the way of the print head.  when the print head hit the curled up portions, it stopped, skipped steps, and continued to try to print, but everything was now out of alignment, so the layers were not printing where they were supposed to. :-(  I realized this artistic design was just not going to work with this kind of printing.  It also looked more like a block of Swiss cheese than the cool lamp I thought it would be.

I had some 3mm transparent ABS filament that I used on another project, and figured it might make a pretty cool looking lamp too.  Although the filament is transparent, it becomes translucent when extruded.  I redesigned the shade in Google SketchUp to look like a street lamp, which would go really nicely in my apartment against the full length wall mural of a London city street.
The lamp is a two part design, with a top and a base, so you have access to the bulb by removing the top.  The redesign work took about 4 hours.  I printed the top on myAirwolf3D v5.5 which took 3:41.  I couldn't print the base on the Airwolf because it only has an effective build height of 100mm (4in) and the base is 195mm (6.7in) tall.  So I printed that on my modified Prusa i3 which has an effective build height of 255mm (10in) Printing the base took 15:32.

Since the bulb is going to be fully enclosed, I chose a10 watt TCP LED bulb for the lamp.  Here is what it looks like in my apartment.