Prints That Go Boom in the Afternoon

More work on the temperature tower, since I want to calibrate that for PLA as well. Also, I should probably calibrate it separately for separate nozzles sizes. Anyway, feeling too lazy to change all the numbers in Bob long if-clause, I change it to this:

; For Fast_Informative_Temperature_Tower, 10 levels at 8mm

M104 S{230 - (4 * int((layer_z / 8)))}

While this doesn't show the exact temperatures at each level, it is a lot more concise and easy to adapt to other temperature combinations.

Printing the temperature tower with the 0.25mm nozzle takes a lot longer than with the 0.8mm, but it actually looks nice, and doesn't wobble eerily when printing the top. This minimal tower is rather unstable.

The PLA tower with 0.25mm nozzle is simply... perfect. At all temperatures from 230 to 190, no stringing, no change in the quality. I had to go into the gcode and double-check the output from above to convince myself that it was doing the right thing. 

No, it's not twisted, that's just the perspective.

A PETG tower with the 0.25mm nozzle (Z offset -1.05) and temperatures from 250 down to 210 gave me an entirely new experience: An exploding print. I was sitting next to the printer when I head this sound of plastic bouncing around, and this is what I saw:

Look in the background, there's where the parts landed.

The pieces collected. A part of the foremost pieces has also fractured off, but stayed put.

At too low a temperature, the print simply fractured - probably from the stress of being pulled back and forth. It's really difficult to see the stringing, but I think 230 is about the right temperature. Unless I am missing a chunk, it broke off while printing the 224°C layer. So my previous test with the 0.8mm nozzle giving the best result at 220°C doesn't work well here.

I'm surprised that this would happen with PETG, it's supposed to be less brittle that PLA.

Perfect prints produced by Prusa printer

It printeth! Verily, it printeth! My new Prusa i3 mk3s printeth! And wow, does it do a good job of it. Here's the obligatory Benchy McBenchface, in a quality I haven't even gotten close to on my old printer:

None of the sloppiness around the brow, no extra lines around edges, the print on the bottom totally clear, and it's almost possible to read the tiny writing on the aft. Impressive!

I got this as a kit (of course!), and putting it together was pretty easy, though not trivial. There's quite a tome of a manual, with each step illustrated with photos and text. No soldering is involved, and all the necessary tools were provided. On the down side, some texts were ambiguous ("put the screw in the left hole" - but I can turn this thing any which way!) and the photos were not very good, especially since they had to show details of black on black. I could certainly take better shots (and did a couple of times, just as a sample). I worked together with my friend Christina, and we only made one mistake where I had to go back and undo some of the assembly. Inserting the nuts was sometimes tricky, in most cases we were able to pull them in using a screw from the other side, but not always.

The basic design is the same as my current one, with the bed moving in the Y axis, the extruder running along the X axis, which is in turn lifted by threaded rods on the Z axis. The details have improved a lot, though. Gone are all the endstops, since the motors are able to sense when they skip, which is enough to detect the end. The extruder has a built-in filament sensor, so it can stop printing if running out of filament. There's also a power panic system in case of power outages. The bed is with a separable bendable steel plate, held on by so many magnets that there are warnings not to use it if you have a pacemaker.

The operations are also very easy. There is a panel in front with a little dial, which allows controlling the printer in many ways. Starting a print from an SD card is three clicks away, and it auto-calibrates the bed height before each print. The self-test and larger calibration was quite effective, pointed out an issue I had missed.

For Z axis calibration, there is a live adjustment option, so while the print is happening I can adjust - micrometer by micrometer - how close the the bed the first layer should be. To get the right height, I printed the Prusa logo model that came on the SD card, adjusting the height by 0.05 mm every two centimeters or so. I stopped printing after the first layer, so I could see the quality:

Top side of print. Left part is with the nozzle closer to the bed

Bottom side of print. Left side is nozzle closer to the bed. 

It was clear when the nozzle was way too low or way too high. In between, at about -0.95 to -1.1, the printing was just about perfect. This is a way better calibration than the single-strip built-in method.

The main problem since I got printing going has been to make the prints stick during printing. At first, I just used the recommended isopropyl alcohol swap to clean the plate. That didn't help much. Increasing the bed and extrusion temperature made it possible for a large flat piece to stick. Washing thoroughly with soap made things somewhat better, but printing this little hedgie proved too much for that. Next step was my trusty hair spray, which didn't help either. The trick from this video of putting a bit of gluestick on and spreading it with alcohol made no difference whatsoever. Only when I smeared the printing area with gluestick did it actually stick, but then that also adds more thickness. After reading various discussions about this problem, I ordered a flat sheet instead. It's supposedly less durable, but being able to print without smearing the plate is important.

I also ordered some filament - this is a 1.75mm extruder where my old printer is a 2.85mm - and some different-sized nozzles. I even got one of the experimental 0.15mm nozzles, since I want to try printing miniatures for gaming. I understand even using the 0.25mm one is tricky, so I don't expect instant success. I grabbed a 0.8mm nozzle for the old printer, it can be relegated to the easier tasks.

All in all, this is a really nice printer. The printing world has moved a lot since I got my Mendel90 half-kit, and it shows. I expect (hope) to be able to spend less time repairing the printer and more time designing.

The new wonder! What shall I call it?

Make Munich: Sensor chips, all-in-one printers, and some ideas

Make Munich is this weekend. I went out there for a couple of hours, that's all I was up for. It is better than last year, with more interesting little start-ups and creative groups rather than big commercial entities taking up chunks of space.  There were quite a few pretty retro things, as well as some really nice art pieces done with paper and lights:

Dragon!

I found a company called Aconno, which has done the small cheap battery-driven humidity/temperature/light sensor I've been thinking of for a while. At €30, it's quite a steal, and rather than having to be plugged in, it can do intermittent recording and use BLE for sending the measurements, leading to a lifetime of about 1 year with fairly regular logging, longer if you reduce the frequency. They have a nice app, open-sourced, so I don't have to worry about getting locked in. And the device itself can also be reprogrammed. Once they come out with some that do a bit more buffering and the price drops more, I'm going to get more - I already got two today.

I was also looking for something to potentially be my next printer, though no earlier than next year. There was a nice little 3-in-1 3D printer, CNC, and laser cutter called Snapmaker for €700 - smaller build volume than my Mendel90, but having my own laser cutter would rock.

One idea that crossed my mind was an easier way to make custom masks. Yes, it's possible to take a face mold and scan it, or scan straight from the face, but then turning that into a mask plus printing a curved surface nicely is not so easy. A simpler solution may be to print a generic (or possibly parameterized) mask flat using PLA, then heat it up to where it becomes bendable, and just slap it onto the face to shape it. Obviously, some face protection would be required, possibly foil, and some way to align it properly. A quick search doesn't show anyone having done such a thing. There's plenty of pages on making molds with 3D printing, or using 3D printing for various skin treatments, but so far little on hot-shaping PLA and only one page on doing it onto skin. There's this Reddit thread on hot-shaping which talks a bit about various people's experience with hot-shaping.

WARNING: Potential for burns ahead.  THIS HAS NOT BEEN TRIED!

I'm thinking laying the print flat on something pillow-like in the oven and heating it to its glass transition temperature (~60C). This allows pressing more evenly than if you press directly. Though maybe oven mittens for pressing would also work. Cut a piece of aluminium foil and two pieces of thick cloth, layering the foil between the cloths. Cut this sandwich to somewhat beyond the shape of the mask, with holes to put elastic band around the head to hold it in place. Then place the mask as symmetrically as possible and press.

Another less dangerous idea: 3D Julia sets. The 3D Julia sets are nice, but you can get some awesome structures out of 3D projections of 4D sets calculated on quaternions. And yes, people have done it, including a number of designs as vases, which is another thing I was thinking I would like to print.

I also want an illuminated hat. Not just a hat with an LED strip doing fun stuff, but where the light is more dispersed and just looks spooky.

Printing with flexible filament is fun

I'm just about out of the purple Innofill plastic. For purposes of printing things for our kitchen, I'm looking for a matching red color. Turns out there's a color scale I hadn't heard of until recently, namely RAL, and some things I spraypainted were RAL 3003, a nice deep red. So let's see if that's available in filament!

At https://www.plastic2print.com/ral-classic-custom-colored-filament.html they offer any color filament you can pick out of RAL, but you have to buy 10 kg at a time, which is a bit much. They don't state the RAL for their regular spools.

At https://www.dasfilament.de/filament-spulen/2-85-mm/134/pla-filament-2-85mm-kirschrot I find exactly the right color, at an almost suspiciously low price, 16€ for 800g. Looks like they're quite active on the reprap.org forum, and I don't see any complaints there.

http://3dk.berlin/en/content/12-farben (argh! When did "berlin" become a top-level domain?) has a nice overview of their colors, but alas no 3003.

dasfilament.de it is. Got here just before we left for the US, but not in time to do anything with it. Also got a sample of PETG, which I hadn't heard of before, but sounds like it's worth trying.

I'll need to do a better filament setup. From what I'm reading, the way I've just had the spool hang loose with no guiding and letting go of the end, I've set myself up for the tangles I now suffer from. I broke the spool holder that came with the kit, plus it was for larger spools AFAICT, so now I'll just use the rest of this spool to print the holder for the next.

For a quick test print, I reduced infill from 20 to 5%, set 1 top and 2 bottom solid layers, set infill_only_when_needed to true. Then I printed a reduced version of this filament holder to check that it matches my spools. Looks good, though it was probably designed to just let the spool sit loose and accept the bit of friction. I started designing a spool holder rolling on four ball bearings, so there's practically no friction, but then it struck me that a bit of friction may be a good thing. Instead I might just want to guide the filament better, maybe with a bit of PTFE tubing and a longer way from the spool to the extruder. Only problem with that is that cold pulls become harder.

And because I was running low on the normal filament, I decided it was time to try out the flexible filament. At the same settings as my regular PLA, it came out quite nice:

This is not an extremely flexible filament, just enough that I can compress the sides of this cube. I was going to print at 25% speed, but it didn't get picked up, and printing at 100% worked just nicely. Let's move on to testing ObPhoneCase by intersection the design with some cubes and printing that.

I realize now that placing the design centered in 0,0 would have made some things easier, for instance scaling.

Looks like I set the Z adjustment a teeny bit high, but the flexible filament doesn't seem to curl when cooling, so all that does is make the bottom layer less flat. That simplifies things!

The trickiest part of the phone case is getting the holes right. While some overhang is doable, it's not so predictable. However, printing with support doesn't work so well for this kind of structure, the support generated by Slic3r is fairly heavy-handed and doesn't come off nicely in this case:



Overall the case looks good, though:



Eventually I just decided to do my own support for the holes, with little cubes literally hanging in mid-air, but with a fraction of a millimeter distance. That actually came out really nice:

They come off at a light touch (actually some fell out just due to the bending when getting the print off the bed) and leave only the smallest of marks.

Step up the reactor power three more triangles!

Took apart the hotend after failing to do an atomic while it was put together. Saw some black stuff on the second pull. These pulls are more difficult than I'm used to, I guess the tolerances are smaller.

Several pulls later. It still takes a lot of pressure to get filament through, even at 200 C. At 210, it goes smoothly (and slightly smokingly at first!), but soon becomes tougher and eventually it becomes almost impossible to press anything through. The pulls come out clean, though.

Could I be feeding filament too fast? I would rather not turn down the speed, but it could be a start, then up the speed to as much as it can handle.

Could there be a gap between the nozzle and the heat break? Then filament would squeeze in there once it softens enough and gets under enough pressure, and that would create extra drag.

I also need to fix the gears before they eat each other. Dremeled the hole some more, and rotated the nut, now it

Weird. I set up to do a 5cm test extrusion at 25% speed. When I first hit extrude, it ran crazy fast for a few seconds (while actually extruding), second try was indeed at very low speed.

Doing a second test, I notice the filament comes out at an angle before falling down nicely. I seem to remember that being a sign of clogging.

Second test @25% speed, 200C (properly measured) was spot on in length, good.

Third test, same settings, the filament doesn't fall in the same nice circle, but more randomly. Length is 4 mm short.

Pro tip: After doing test extrusion, check for random pieces of filament around the moving parts.

Fourth test @25% speed fell 2mm short. Chalking this up to random variation or poor measurement.

First test @50% speed (50mm/min). Extrusion is now straight and the filament falls in a nigh-perfect circle. 4 mm too short.

Second @50%, accidentally 10cm. Fell 9.5 mm short.

Added a piece of soft foam at the filament intake to get dust off.

Third test @50%, fell 4mm short. I'm starting to see a pattern here.

At 75%, fell 4mm short. Good.

There's definitely drooling going on at 200C.

At 100% speed, fell first 8 then 10 mm short. Not so good.

Back at 75% speed, first 6 mm short, then 5mm, then 6, then 5.

Some posts indicate that the e3d is not the best for PLA, because it has a relatively small heating area, so you need to raise the temperature or lower the speed. That matches what I have seen. I guess I will print at 200 or 210.

Recalibrates ro 204.5. Look, I gained half a millimeter of printing height due to much engineering effort on the e3d team's part.

Putting the new fan duct on. For reference: Red goes on the left of the two bent fan pins,  right goes on the loose wire from the ribbon cable. Gcode to start/stop fan is M106 S127/M107.

The current assembly (not cabled to avoid touching the bed yet). If you look carefully, you'll see the hotend mounting screws sitting at an angle and not all the way in.

Aaand... it's totally misaligned. There is no way this fan will work, it goes over a centimeter below the nozzle. A better design would lay the fan flat like the original, but just have a wider opening for the hotend.

Update: Looks like this design might work: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:631311