I blame Darren - 3D Printing

Brent Dowell

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So, a little while ago, Darren pings me and sends a link to a 3d printer that was only 179$. I looked at it, and well, at that price I told Santa that's what I wanted and Santa pulled out my credit card and the rest is history.

Darren must have had a chat with Santa too because apparently the orders were placed in mere minutes from each other.

The printers are are the Anet A8 desktop printer and is a clone of the Prusa I3. http://www.gearbest.com/3d-printers-3d-printer-kits/pp_343643.html?wid=21

You can find these in a lot of places on the internet for a variety of prices. Apparently the price had even been down to 149$ at one point.

Now I don't know what happened, but after we placed our orders, gearbeast claimed something was up with shipping and charged us an extra 16 bucks for shipping. They did ask first,and we could have said no, but we both said yes and got our printers shipped to us in a matter of days, I think it only took like 5 days to get here all the way from China.

I have to say, it does come nicely packaged, if you leave the straps on and pull it out of the box right side up.

anet8 in box.jpg

Building it is pretty easy, and it goes together quickly if you follow the videos on youtube. The pdf instructions that come on the sd card are pretty worthless though.

ANET8.jpg

One of the biggest challenges though is that all the pieces of acrylic are covered in protective paper and peeling it can be a chore. I found using a little razor blade tool can make that process go a lot faster and smoother.

[video]https://goo.gl/photos/B631TrYNbJyd9CaF9[/video]

I got mine running tuesday of this week (it's friday now) and I've been using it pretty much non stop.

Here are a few successful prints.

A volume knob for my jukebox

jukeboxvolumeknob.jpg

a 3/4 cup measuring cup for feeding my starving dog logan who only gets 2 of these a day
3.4_Measuring_Cup_Scoop.jpg

A little air duct for the blower on the hot end.
fanshroud.jpg

Here's a pretty good picture of a failed print. I was trying to print an Ocarina, and it fell over halfway through.
3dspaghetti.jpg

Unfortunately, today when I was changing the filament color, I managed to torque the filament guide in 2 and break it. I have managed to get it back working and jury rigged. The new parts won't get here until late next week, but It's actually still printing. I'm just not going to mess with changing out the filament until then.

At this point I'm mostly printing out accessories for it to do cable management and clean things up a bit. I've already gotten into designing and modifying parts a bit in Sketchup and I have to say my head is fairly exploding with ideas for things to print. Not to mention there are a TON of things already available out in the 'thingiverse' that you can download and print.

I have to say, This is one of the more fun toys I've gotten in a while.

That being said, 3d printing is not something that is a guaranteed success. Other than my fault in breaking mine, I've been quite lucky in that I've been able to print things pretty easily right out of the box. It seems there are a lot of variations in the materials used and how they stick to the bed of the printer that can cause results to vary.

Ok, I've said enough. Time for Darren to chime in!
 
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Haven't gotten around to scanning things yet. I've been either grabbing things from thingiverse, or drawing them up in sketchup.

There are a few tricks to creating things in sketchup to make it printable, but if you know sketchup, it's not too bad.

But I am looking forward to being able to scan things and then duplicate.
 
Well, as Rob refers to me..."The Enabler"...guilty as charged.

This printer has been pretty amazing for the price. And like Brent, I've mostly been working on projects that folks have posted to improve the quality of the prints done by the printer. I've also done the nozzle and tonight worked on the spool holders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awNn3LlTf64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xba-WBSZTk

2016-12-23 19.34.21.jpg 2016-12-23 19.40.32.jpg 2016-12-23 19.40.40.jpg 2016-12-23 19.41.31.jpg 2016-12-23 19.43.26.jpg 2016-12-23 19.44.43.jpg 2016-12-23 19.48.24.jpg

Those bearing press fitted right in nicely with only minor cleanup of the excess plastic on the edges.

I also worked on a project for my wife she's been wanting for a while, but this will be a work in progress for a while. I drew the object in sketchup, then used the "Sketchup to STL" plugin to export the file out to to an .stl file to import into the 3d slicer software. I used some glow-in-the-dark filament for this one.

2016-12-23 20.40.52.jpg 2016-12-23 20.40.46-2.jpg 2016-12-23 20.41.46.jpg

Currently I'm printing a glow in the dark "Buzz LightYear" for my grandson...
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1045054

One thing to mention is that the print materials aren't all alike. I had some sample PLA that stuck to the bed and printed perfectly. The red PLA used on the spool holder wouldn't stick at all. I finally played around with the temperature and got it to stick at a higher temp and with a bunch of glue stick on the bed. So it may take a few tries to get things going when changing materials. You also have to keep the PLA in a dry/cool environment as it does get affected by humidity.
 
Wow, I threatened Darren and Brent to post something before 10pm (PST), or I would do it. That was at 4pm and I see this post started at 4:32.

I know it's a "toy", but glad to see them having some brotherly fun with it :poke:

Yeah, my poor wife has been a 3d printer widow lately too. ;) So what has Brent made you with it Sharon?
 
I am

JEALOUS

GREEN WITH ENVY


I am most definitely going to be in the 3D printer camp one day. Chafing at the bit, but I MUST do so many other things before I start on a new obsession.

We have also been talking 3D metal printing at work. Industry is moving in the direction of additive manufacturing. It is near a million dollars. I may be involved with that project when it does happen - I do hope so

 
What is the largest size this can do a single non build print in? Give your review of how hard it was to assemble, and get the head level etc. (early on, I heard that was always a pain, don't know now)
Have you done any of the picture to 3d image thing, and what did you use (remember to update this thread later as you do these things)? I wonder about this, as I have seen objects that are out of magazines, or shows, that seem to have used screen grabs.
It has been quite a while since I remembered hearing thingverse mentioned, I had no idea it grew so much. This is getting tempting at this range.
 
What is the largest size this can do a single non build print in? Give your review of how hard it was to assemble, and get the head level etc. (early on, I heard that was always a pain, don't know now)
Have you done any of the picture to 3d image thing, and what did you use (remember to update this thread later as you do these things)? I wonder about this, as I have seen objects that are out of magazines, or shows, that seem to have used screen grabs.
It has been quite a while since I remembered hearing thingverse mentioned, I had no idea it grew so much. This is getting tempting at this range.

These are pretty small machines, They claim 220x220x240mm, so something that would fit in an 8.5" cube. There is a lot of stuff though that you can print in that size range, and if it was going to be bigger, you'd be looking at some very long print times.

I thought it was fairly straightforward to assemble following some video instructions. It's not terribly complicated, but definitely not for the crowd that would have trouble assembling Ikea furniture, lol.

Haven't tried scanning or creating 3d prints from images. Been basically just having fun printint and designing accessories for it.
 
I've also only done either pre-designed items or a couple of small ones I did in sketchup and converted. There is the Autodesk 123D Catch app (http://www.123dapp.com/catch) I've been wanting to try out. Like with most scanners though, you need to have the right setup to capture things without them getting distorted by the background, surroundings, and lighting. I may try printing out one of the scanning rigs to help with that, which will hold the camera and lights consistently as a part is rotated on a turn table.

I'd agree with Brent on the assembly, it was pretty straight forward. There were only a couple of areas where things were a bit confusing, mostly to do with which way a motor was installed (pig tail to the left or down), but reviewing other parts of later videos revealed the answer. There is a pretty good community of folks that have this machine, so getting answers has been pretty easy. Lots of good reviews on youtube as well.

Given that this is only a $179 machine, quality was reduced by using the plexi frame. Therefore there are several mods to strengthen the frame and even replace some of the original parts. There is a Geetec version that is about $300 which has an aluminum frame that is built on the Prusa i3 design (as this one is). I may have gone with it if I had seen it first, but I had already seen good reviews on this one. Mostly, just don't get too rough moving the machine around and don't over-tighten the screws and things will be fine with it.

I'll post up some pics of the Buzz Lightyear I printed last night. I think I accidentally printed it at .05 mm layer height, it was supposed to take 5 hours, but instead finished about 4 AM today. From the quality I saw last night at midnight when it was at 40% it looked pretty darn smooth.

There is the discussion of software to use. For the past two weeks I've been trying out Sketchup plugins, Autodesk's Fusion 360, & Autodesk 123d. I'm really growing to like the Fusion 360 software, but have yet to get comfortable with how to verify and set measurements in it. I keep reverting back to sketchup since I have an stl plugin for it now especially. I'm just more familiar with it. However, I'm really intrigued by Fusion 360's ability to create connections and movement of parts and how multiple parts work together, so I'm going to continue getting familiar with it.

For printing you'll need to use a slicer software. There are several softwares available, this one comes with Cura, but Slic3r, and simplify3d are two other major ones, the simplify3d software is commercial ($140). I'm still doing trials on the other two, mostly using Cura, but reviews say that the commercial software really makes things easier to use. I suspect that this is much like the comparison of free cnc software in comparison to using vectric. Now that I've got vectric, I'll never go back to using the free stuff as things are so much easier. I'm just not yet to the point I'm ready to even look at it as I want to know what the comparisons are and if it's worth the compromise to stay with the free stuff.

Lastly, keep in mind that the 3d prints take a while to run (from minutes to many hours). You have the option to simply just run it from the sd card (no computer connected), a dedicated pc connected via usb, or there are some distributions for Raspberry pi to connect usb and run from a web interface. The benefits of running from a computer or Pi would allow a web cam to be connected for remote monitoring, which you could do un-connected from usb, but being connected allows you to stop the printer if things don't go as planned. ;)

I've been playing with the OctoPi (https://octopi.octoprint.org/) distro, but have yet to connect it to the printer. It runs headless (no monitor), so it's light weight, and has a web cam view on the control section of the web interface. You can even setup automatic time-lapse recording using the web cam right from the software. I'll probably work on getting it setup next week, but also have my shop computer setting right there by the printer should I decide to go that route.

Let us know if you have more questions. :wave:
 
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