Last Day!

Today is our last day of A-Term. It's exciting, yet sad at the same time! We have learned so much throughout this A-Term. From actually building 3D printers, to programming, to designing, to scanning, to printing, to tinkering problems as we go. We faced so many challenges through out the term but we grew and worked so well together. Everyone really came together to solve problems.

What was your favorite moment of this term? 

Daniel- "Printing cool things out."

David- "I really liked building the delta." 

Brandon- "Learning how to use Tinkercad was so cool!" 

Zineb- "My favorite moments were building the delta printer."

Conor- "Working on the scanning and my Exodus print."

Nathan- "Getting the delta printer to work." 

Joseph- "After all the struggles we have been through with building the printers all the printers really came together. And I enjoyed that my printer works the best."

Julian- "My favorite moment was when we finally got the printer to work."

Andrew- "Seeing the models be created after we made these printers."

Ms. Novak- "Seeing the students finding their passion."

Mr. Mike- "I think it was so cool that you guys went from knowing nothing about printers to understanding every part of them.

All the students can agree that the moment we got the printers to work was an amazing feeling. There were so many problems with the printers and to overcome them was just perfect. Watching our group grow and learn was so great. We really got to see some peoples passions blossom. These pictures show our progress and our work. We are all proud of the things we have accomplished this term.

Day 8: Doggo

Today, we spent a lot of time fine tuning, test printing, and working on our presentation. We were able to print out a range of things today on both of the Reprap Prusa i3 printers including a plane and a dog along with most of our heads printed out on the school's printer. It has been a very interesting journey in order to get to where we are today. We've gone from doing the macro fixes such as assemblage of the larger pieces and wiring the mother board, all the way to the micro fixes such as getting a paper thin space between the hot plate and the extruder.

Our presentation is finished as of today as we finished up the last few loose ends and assigned parts to different team members. Sadly we had to restart, but things ended up going well.

The delta has also been coming along in a good manner as well. We were able to print some of the Eiffel Tower on it, before it was accidentally interrupted from printing (but Andrew was able to print one successfully). All printers have had small issues, but we seem to be ironing out the final issues with the printers.  It is saddening to think that A-term will be ending tomorrow, but it has been fun while it lasted and it was very interesting and educating.

3/30/16 3D printing A-term

Today, we got both of the Reprap Prusa i3 printers to print a non-distorted cube. Of course, a lot of calibration needs to be done before we can begin printing more complicated things such as triangular prisms (So how was that jab at humor? Wait, where are you going!?)

The Delta printer continues to have some issues with printing, so we are working diligently to fix these issues befor Friday. We have attempted multiple prints, and each one gives us new calibration issues. Every time an issue is fixed, another four take its place (like Valve game balance patches).

Overall, things are going well and the printers are nearly finished. Now that we know all the printers can print, the focus will likely shift to design software. One thing is certain, though, we will be printing multiple different miscellaneous objects for our upcoming presentation and for our own amusement.

   
                     DAY 6:
   
Yesterday, by the end of the day, we retested the Delta printer to make sure that there was no other problems. Fortunately, the Delta printer was able to make a quite perfect and satisfactory white Stanford bunny, although we had an issue occurring in the cable management. The cables weren't attached to the printer in a proper way, which caused difficulties in printing the Stanford bunny faster and easily.

This morning, we fixed the cable management problem, and then we printed another Stanford bunny (four times bigger that the last one)  to see rather or not the new organization of the cables was good. This design took 3h to print, but was perfect. I guess we fixed the problem successfully. 

   




On the other hand, we have both Reprap printers that were facing several problems this morning. We were expecting that they will take few more days, but, luckily, they are quite done now.
The first group (Andrew-Brandon-Lauren) tested their printer by making a Stanford bunny. It was, actually, good for a first try, but, for sure, they need to adjust few little details. While the second group (Daniel-Julien-Joseph) couldn't print because their printer was making a weird noise. They need to find the cause of this problem, and fix it.

               

We, also, spent the day scanning ourselves. David, Brandon, Conor, Lauren and I scanned everyone in our class, including Maestra, Mike, Mr. Moudry, Miss Basham, and Mr. Raphael. Then, we are looking forward to print everyone, as we did with Conor, although it takes 8h for each person.

Today the delta needed some final calibrations. One of the extruders needed to be raised because it was short by one millimeter and would scrape the heat bed. But towards the end of the day the problem was solved and the delta was making decent prints.

Because we didn't have internet connection at school for the first part of the day we went to the Black Hole to get internet connection. Once ther we were able to get on thingiverse and tinkercad to design 3D prints of our own.

Torwards the end of the day we started 3D scanning. It took problem solving and patients because if we made a wrong move the scan would mess up. We had to come up with the best way to scan our models. In the end we were able to successfully print one of our models heads. 

 

Day 4

Today, we started with trying to get the 3d printers to work. The Delta printer was almost working, but not quite. The two repraps computers were just starting to work, but they weren't quite there yet. Eventually, they started to work, but many problems were faced during the process.

The Delta printer being fixed on (left).

Daniel Mendoza, Joseph Orr, Julian Porra Parks, and Andrew Lu are working on fixing their printers.

We printed three more objects today: a Lord of the Rings ring, Sleeping Cats, and a square. We created the square because we were testing the delta computer to see if it worked. It did, but the calibration needs to be improved.

These are four things that we created. Going from the Stanford Bunny, a Yoda Buddha, an Exodus logo, and some Sleeping Cats.

Next, we have a standard square. We used this to see if the delta 3d printer would work, so we put the easiest thing to make there.