Home to a Bluetooth Printer

We spent the night in Whitby at the Dolphin Hotel. We had a lovely large room which overlooks the bridge right in the centre of the town. I took the photo from the room first thing in the morning, just before we headed down for a really nice (and huge) breakfast. If you are looking for somewhere to stay, I strongly recommend the place.

Then we headed home and I found some time to finish off the hardware for the Bluetooth printer I've been working on.  Note how it is a Bluetooth device, and I've put it in a bright yellow enclosure. And why not....

When I designed the box it seemed like a good idea to put the switch in the bottom. Of course it is actually a bit silly, as whenever you put the box down you turn it on or off. Fortunately I have some bit stick-on feet that help with this, but I'm going to have to refine the design anyway as I don't seem to have left much room to allow the actual construction of the device.....

This is the guts of the printer, just a bunch of batteries and a trusty Bluetooth adapter. I'll post full details of construction and the software later this week. 

C4DI Hardware Meetup - With Nerf Guns

Lots of Industry

Tonight was our second hardware meetup at C4DI. I knew that things were going to go well when I arrived to find everyone had already set up and was building stuff and making it do things without us needing to do anything. Peter was in charge of the exercise tonight (you can find his lab here) and he had made really good use of the flex sensor in the SparkFun Redboard Kit to create a shooting game that you can play with Nerf guns. Which he had thoughtfully provided too....

Everyone had great fun building up the circuit, getting the software working and playing with the result. The lab was great because it shows how you can create a fully formed solution (a shooting game where you have a few seconds to hit the target three times) based on this technology. 

No Cows were harmed in the making of this game

Peter had even provided a bunch of 3D printed parts that support the flex sensor target, and some cows (taken from milk cartons) to use as targets. 

Making 3D Pictures with Cura

Just found out that the lovely Cura software that I use to slice 3D models for the my lovely Ultimaker printer will also import images and then create 3D landscapes from them. It will assign the height of points on the surface to the brightness (or darkness) of the image. You can use it to make rather nice renderings of text. I've actually printed out the above and will be giving to one lucky person who registers for our Careers and Internships event next week.  I'm also going to print out some 3D Business Cards. 

The event is on April 2nd and there will be free food, drink, business cards and mugs and other merchandise. Just for turning up and maybe getting an internship or a career. 

You can register here.

An Ultimaker 2 in the Department

I've had my Ultimaker printer for nearly two years now. It was around now in 2012 that I ordered it, and the kit took around 6 weeks to arrive as they were very popular.

I've had a lot of fun with Una the Ultimaker. I've replaced her drive mechanism, print head, pulleys and print bed supports and added end caps and a bunch of other things. And I've printed one or two items as well. I like Una very much and most of the time she rewards me with good looking output.

Mr. Burns seems to approve

This week our departmental 3D printer arrived. They asked me what to get and of course I said we should get an Ultimaker. But I suggested we get an Ultimaker 2 as this is pre-built and looks to have moved the field on a bit. It took around 6 weeks to arrive as they are very popular, so some things haven't changed I suppose.

I set the new printer up in my office and had it working within half an hour or so of opening the box. It is fundamentally the same as Una, but is much more of an appliance.  It has lost a lot of the "home spun charm" of the original, but replaced this with a slickness that would make it much more viable as a printer that you get because you want to print stuff, rather than tinker with the printer itself.

Some design changes took me by surprise. You now set things like print temperature on the printer rather than in the slicing program. This actually makes a lot of sense, in that you will need to customise your printing for different kinds of fibre and you don't want to re-slice the model every time. The integration with Cura, the program that converts your designs ready for printing, is impressive and once I'd fed the fibre into the machine (the only tricky part of the setup) I was turning out prints that were at least as good as ones from Una. The only real problem for me was that the heated bed was set to a temperature which was much higher than it should be for the PLA plastic I was printing. I turned the temperature down to 60 degrees and things got a lot better. 

I do miss the sense of control that I have with Una. The print display on the Ultimaker 2 just tells you how much time is left on the print, rather than the other useful metrics that I get. However I'd be much happier leaving the new one to print on its own, something that I'm not keen to do with my printer. 

One major improvement with the Ultimaker 2 is the fan arrangement around the print head, which blows cooling air from both sides onto the object being printed, so that there is a better chance of the next print layer being put down onto solid plastic.

I really liked this, so I had a look around to see if I could find something similar for Una. I found this design and so tonight I spent a happy couple of hours installing some new fan ducts along with a pair of very posh fans that are completely silent in operation. I reckon this has made quite a difference to the printed output, the definition on both sides of my owl test piece is now much better than before. Previously the right hand side of the owl face was a bit of a mess because it faces away from the fan. Now things are a lot more symmetrical. 

The next step is to change the fan arrangement on Una to make her a bit quieter. The Ultimaker 2 is very quiet in operation and I want to get rid of the rattling fan that was supplied as part of my kit, and seems to be rattling even more now.

If you want to get a printer that represents state of the art in FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling) printing then I reckon you'll do well with the Ultimaker 2. It produced some of the best prints I've ever seen right out of the box and is a very well presented package. 

Printing Vases with Ultimaker

Some time back I found the "Spiralize" options in the Expert settings for Cura, the slicing program that I use when I'm printing with Una the Ultimaker. This lets you take a solid object and generates a print that just wraps a single layer print round the outside of the object.

It is called "Spiralize" because the print ends up being one long spiral, with the head laying down successive layers as it goes round and round in circles. The print that you get is very thin, rather like a lampshade, but if you use translucent materials (like the  nice transparent fibre from Faberdashery) the results are rather good.