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APRIL 1st - EXPERIMENTAL OBJECT DESIGN

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Because I had to leave town for the second last week of classes, I didn't have the opportunity to contribute to the project as much as I would have liked as it was developing. Instead I made sure to help organize and develop during the idea generation stage.  During our first meeting we came up with two possible projects. The first: a comparison between 3D and 2D printing in layers on the CNC machine versus the PRUSA mini. We would each have contributed a layer to be stacked onto the previous, arrange these layers in rhino and generate the gcode in grasshopper, then print it in the air to droop over the previous objects. At the same time, we would have run the same layers on the CNC machine, having it draw in different layers and colors. In the end we'd have two similar but different objects depending on the printing method.  The second idea we came up with (which we decided to develop) was proposed by Aryan. He had the idea that we each contribute a piece of a drawing and tra...
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MARCH 20 - NONLINEAR FDM TOOLPATHS PART 2

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  The first attempt at this print was a link wonky because of an issue in the grasshopper definition I was using that caused the machine to crash into the bowl. For this initial test we just stopped the print and manually extruded a certain amount, as well as manually moved the print bed to simulate what the print would have been. This experiment taught me that the speed of the movement was the most important thing for free-flowing noodles. That, and turning off the fan while it extrudes so it cools as slowly as possible. I needed to let gravity and the air do half the work for me.  The first experiment (tiny 2cm diameter version) suffered from some very stiff noodles because of the speed we printed it at.  The bottom of the bowl was a little warped as well because the print was exactly at 0 on the Z axis rather than being slightly above. This was also probably due to the extrusion factor.  The next version of the print we attempted took a few tries to narrow down th...
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MARCH 09 - NONLINEAR FDM TOOLPATHS - Pasta Experiment

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I decided to experiment with GCODE by making a bowl of pasta. The trick is that the pasta is going to be printed in the air and droop into the bowl from above. Hopefully without melting everything that came before it? Here's how I set it up: I used the trick with the Spiral + Intersect on a sphere I cut in half, then used the rectilinear fill definition to cover the bottom of it. I joined the two curves to make a sort of imperfect (and very tiny) bowl. The "spaghetti" is just two other curves I projected in the space above the bowl. As it prints, I'm hoping it all spirals into the bowl below like noodles that have just been thrown in there. I also took a look at what this might look like with 0.5mm wide pipes. From there I just put the curves into the gcode generator and tried it out in NC Viewer to make sure everything printed in the right order. The organization by Z axis made this process easy to set up. Here it is on the printing bed as well.
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FEB 26th / MAR 07 - CNC DRAWING

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The progress I made since the CNC demo has been slow comparatively. I had to clean up my files and organize the layers into colors to prepare for printing. This week I am preparing to try my file on the CNC machine. That is tomorrow's project because Thursday morning was the only time I was available. I will update this post after that process. On FEB 27th and MARCH 3rd I printed my drawing on the CNC machine. Overall I'd say it took 4 1/2 hours.  The first two layers, I did in one session. They had wider grid infills but covered more space overall so they each took about the same time as the final layer, around an hour and a half each. The first layer was done in red and green. I switched to green because the pen ran out of red ink. I was using a color changing pen for ease of color switching. After the end of the first print I switched to blue for the second layer. I didn't have to re-home it or anything because I was just clicking a button on the pen. The blue ink lasted...
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Preparing A Drawing for the CNC Machine

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  First I went through some planning stages with the composition I wanted to use. When I was happy with the design I added it into Rhino to begin tracing the layers. I had to trace each layer using curved lines, then hatched them to get a good visual of what they would look like with infills over each other. My hand hurt from all the clicking but I finished it in an hour. This was the final image before I started introducing the numbers to the background. For the numbers, I wanted to generate a random sequence in Rhino to fill in the background, as well as insert a sequence in binary to spell something out. This didn't end up working out for a few reasons. I'll get into why the numbers didn't look how I wanted them to below. I started using the rectilinear fill to create grid patterns. Two fills per layer, one at 90 degrees and the other at -90 degrees.  HELP NEEDED: For some reason one of the curves did not register with the fill. This is the error message that it generate...
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