Tag: 3D-printing

Recently I printed a new support for the petal PCB:

I made it thicker than before, which will allow the PCBs to be more pressed in the structure, and thus easier to attach.

Although it is thicker, it is actually lighter than the previous one (which is good so that we don’t put too much strain on the motor), because this time I made it less dense, except for the part around the inserts which need to be very dense. I used the same technique for this than here

Here’s the result with the dummy PCBs I printed:

They fit very well 🙂

You might remember we talked about a quite unfortunate software limitation in this article, which was preventing me from printing a phyllo sculpture with both a hollow thin shell and filled petals at the bottom.

Well, it turns out it is possible to do this using another software for another printer which also has the benefit of being free and open source: Cura

We first didn’t use Cura because it was meant for the Ultimaker 2 printer, which seemed to give less detailed results when printing phyllo sculptures. However, it turned out to be not that bad and had some advantages over the Zortrax printer on some points.… Read more

Yesterday the print for the support of the LED PCBs finished, and it was a success:

This was again printed using the Ultimaker 2.

Under it you can also see the support for the processor PCBs, everything fits well:

We also had our school mechanic drill all the necessary holes on the PVC platform, and we will try to make the whole structure turn with our motor today.

I also printed a model which exactly matches the size and shape of the top PCB, and one for the petal PCB, and it fits very well:

As you can see both printed PCB perfectly matches the holes of the structure 🙂

We’ll keep you updated on how well our structures fares at 30 rotations a second !

Today I managed to print the support for the processor PCBs without any major flaws:

I changed the design a little bit in order to ease the printing and make the structure more robust: I removed the openings / holes on the sides and made the whole structure thicker. I also used the Ultimaker 2 printer of the fablab instead of the zortrax since the zortrax are somewhat broken right now. (hopefully it’s not because of all our printings)

I also printed a piece with the same shape and dimensions as our processor PCBs, and it fits perfectly in the structure.… Read more

One has holes in it, one was printed in the wrong material (phosphorescent ), one got too small after our acetone smoothing test, one got warped due to wrong temperature settings… and the last one seems just fine, but might potentially explode in a thousand pieces when we’ll try to spin it at 30 RPS 🙂

We would like to thank the Zortrax M200 who spent 120 hours in total printing these, hopefully it will get some rest one day (not today though, we still need to print a bunch of supports )

In my last 3D printing post, I showed you a sculpture printed with the new translucid filament we bought, and a first test gluing a filled petal to the shell.

The last shell had some major flaws due to wrong print settings, but we fixed it and printed another one:

As you can see this one has support structure on the outside, this type of support is very easy to remove. The shell also has some support structure inside it, as with our first shell. It might be possible to remove these structures with acetone steam : acetone steam can be used to smooth a 3D model printed with ABS filament, and since the structure is made up of loose and messy filaments steam acetone might remove it, or at least smooth it.… Read more