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3d printing

A 3D printer turns ideas into reality.

infill

I spent a long longer than I should have looking at infill patterns. Use gyroid, it lets the prints get a good level of compressive strength from most directions.

Another benefit is the nozzle doesn't bump into infill lines whilst traversing across previous print lines.

beep

I wanted to get a audio tone from the printer at the end of the job. I put this in the end gcode to beep four times, after each S261 tones there's a silent tone:

M300 S261 P900;
M300 S00 P900;
M300 S261 P900;
M300 S00 P900;
M300 S261 P900;
M300 S00 P900;
M300 S261 P900;
M300 S00 P900;

It'll beep for a bit so you can get to the printer before it cools down. This is important as it'll get on with the next job quicker as the warm up sequence will be reduced.

openscad

I wanted to get into blender a bit, but I struggle with it. I found openscad to be much more up my street. To make objects, the following commands can get you most of the way there:

cube
cylinder
translate
difference
import
group
union

cube can do cuboids, cylinder can do cones!

translate will move you around.

difference is a function that cuts away from an object. If you want to make a ring, you could do it this way:

difference() {
    cylinder(h=10, d1=20, d2=20);
    cylinder(h=10, d1=15, d2=15);
}

This gets you a ring with outer diameter 20 and inner diameter 15.

materials

TPU needs to be printed much slower than PLA. Speed x1 settings slower.

work out the zoffset

This is the amount of room between the nozzle and the print bed. The bets way I've found to do this is to make a single layer cube and print it. Then you can see the line separation:

cube([50,50,0.2]);

That's all you need to do. If you want, print this all over your bed to check for high/low spots.