3D Printing

May be I mentioned it before but an update won't do any harm. My son purchased a 3D printer kit, the ABS Prusa Mendel. We have now put this together and it looks like this:



We have tried to make as neat a job of it as we can, since we have seen a lot of Heath Robinson printers on You Tube!

However its not yet printing. The available software is a shambles, largely because it is developed by hundreds of people and there are few, if any, commercial offerings. We are running both PC/Windows 7 and Mac OSX computers. So far we have not managed to get the PC to run the printer at all (strange since there are more packages available for the PC and more developers). But we have one good package working for the Mac, this is Repetier-Host, using the slicer STL file to g-code converter. It looks like this:



At the top are the basic buttons, for such things as connect to the printer, Run etc. On the right you can see the g-code that has been generated and an image of the object on the printer bed is on the left. As the printer runs around a red line is drawn on the blue image to show the current slice and ABS extrusion taking place in real time.

Sound easy? It certainly seems to work. But this is only half the story, the difficult bit is calibrating the software to correctly drive the printer - temperatures, dimensions, extrusion rates, layer thickness, and on and on. We have not yet solved these issues but a few hours would do the job.

Stay tuned.