3D Printed Red Nose Day Tags

Tags Ready for printing

Red Nose Day is a UK charitable appeal. I do Lectures in Rhyme for it and all kinds of silly fun stuff. If you want to sponsor me for the next one you can do so here:

http://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/robmiles

Last time we had a Red Nose Day I had some RFID tags that I used as the basis of a raffle. The holder of the winning tag won a rather nice Gadgeteer kit.

This year I thought I'd try something different. I thought I'd 3D print some tags and sell those instead. Each tag is completely unique thanks to a Python program that I've written that creates a combination of square and round layers of different sizes on the top of each one. Above you can see how this works. Each tag has five layers on top, of which two are square, the rest round. The square layers are rotated a random amount too so that there is plenty of variation.

I'm going to print only one of each tag design, except for the winners, where I'll print a "golden" tag as well.  We'll draw out the golden tag at the lecture on Friday 13th and find the winner. 

Printed tags. I'm going to do lots of different colours.

I'm quite intrigued by the idea of using software to produce 3D printed objects which are unique. This lets me explore the field in a good cause. 

The tags will go on sale later this week at a two pounds each. You can do what you like with them, they'll come with a keyring attachment, but you could use them as unique earrings if you were so inclined. And the more you buy, the more chance you have of winning our top secret big prize.

Note: Sharp eyed readers might have noticed that some of the red tags above have more than two square layers. These are test ones that I produced while tweaking the code. 

I Want a Microsoft Band

Microsoft have just released their Band, a smartwatch/fitness device that looks really nice. They are selling very well apparently, which means that I might have problems getting one when I head out to Seattle for the MVP Summit. And I really want one.

Now, I fully realise that the pursuit of gadgets is ultimately fruitless as they lead an ephemeral life, doomed to be superseded by the next iteration and driven by a marketing beat. You could argue that people who try to validate their existence by surrounding themselves with the latest technology are perhaps only proving their ultimate shallowness. And in the end the accumulation of material goods is ultimately futile (for a full discourse on this matter listen to the wonderful "Mountains'O''Things" by Tracy Chapman).  

But I still want one. 

If anyone finds themselves in a position to get me one (medium size should fit I reckon as I'm, half way up the strap on my Pebble) I will do the following for them, in addition to paying for the device:

• supply them with a printed, autographed copy of the latest C# Yellow Book
• write a poem for them (I am a published poet) on any subject they nominate
• provide them with a unique Windows Phone Controlled Wedding Light,  in case they have a daughter getting married in the near future who needs table decorations. I'll custom build it with a choice of base colour and ship it to you anywhere in the world. 

Like I said, I may be shallow and gadget obsessed, but I really want one of those bands.

3D Selfies to Celebrate Kinect V2 Release

To celebrate the release of Version 2.0 of the Kinect for Windows 2 SDK I printed a couple of selfies of me using my Carbonizer program and changing the filament half way through the print to get a dual colour effect. I'm quite pleased how they came out. I wish I'd kept my head still during the scan so that my features show up a bit better. Then again....

With the latest release of the software we can now put Kinect for Windows apps in Microsoft Store. I might see about a formal release of the Carbonizer program. Microsoft have also announced a new $50 adapter that lets you use your Xbox Kinect with your PC, which is nice. You can find out more here. 

Rather Useful Seminar on Creating 3D Objects from Software

Fun was had at the Rather Useful Seminar today. We were looking at the way that we can create objects using software. We started of with a vertex (a posh name for a position in 3D space), combined three of them to make a triangle and then stuck a whole bunch of triangles together to make a mesh that describes a solid shape. Above you can see what happens when I use cos and sine waves to fiddle with the height of the surface. 

Then we went into Python inside FreeCad and I create a 3D model of the weather forecast which I did last year as well. 

The point I wanted to make is that all of this is software, none of it is magic, and if you want to write programs that make solids You can find the slides here.

Carbonite Open Day

I did a couple of Open Day talks today. Two good audiences, (see above). I took the Kinect 2 Sensor and the 3D printer along to Lecture Theatre A as well, so I was able to show how it all worked and even imortalise a few visitors in Carbonite.

I hope you all enjoyed the day and had a safe journey back. 

OpenJSCAD for 3D Modelling

Peter put me onto this one. We are both fellow travelers along the 3D printing/design road, although we have taken slightly different routes. Peter likes OpenSCAD, and I tend to write Python programs inside FreeCAD. I think we've both followed a programming path because we tend to prefer writing programs to grappling with complicated graphical design packages.

Anyhoo, one of the major reasons that I prefer Python to write my designs is that as Python is a programming language it supports variables. You can use it to do things like print the weather forecast in 3D. But I must admit that the environment that I have to work in is pretty horrid, whereas the OpenSCAD one is quite nice. But in OpenSCAD all the values are fixed, so you can't do programming type things very easily. This is fine for parameterized drawings, but less good if you want your design program to figure things out for itself.

The good news is that there is now a new version of OpenSCAD out there. OpenJSCAD is a JavaScript based implementation of the platform with added variables. This also means that you can do all your designing inside your browser, no need to install any complicated programs. 

This is a very enticing proposition, and may well tempt me away from FreeCAD in the future. 

Day of the Ultimaker Heated Bed Upgrade

Two owls with very shiny bottoms

Less and less of Una, my Ultimaker 3D printer is how she was delivered. Since I first built her a couple of years ago I've replaced the print head, filament feed, power supply fans, print head fans and the drive pulleys. Great fun. Like Lego but with rather more chance of burning your fingers. 

Anyhoo, I've just completed my latest upgrade and added a heated bed. This is actually a rather exciting development as it means I can print large items without them curling up at the edges as they cool.

I ordered the kit a while back and it arrived last week. So this morning I covered the floor with bits (there were a lot of bits) and got to work. Unfortunately a couple of things were missing from my kit (I think I must be pretty much unique in this - nobody else seems to have complained). I was short of the cable that links the new heated bed board with the controller, and a replacement micro-switch that makes contact with the new platform. 

Fortunately I'm a resourceful kind of chap. I found a cable with the connector that fitted and extended that to fit. Then I discovered that by sticking a USB plug cap on the back of the print bed I could make it engage with the old microswitch and so I was in business. 

Building the new bed and fitting it, along with making my own custom bits, took around the whole day. But I really like doing things like this. At the end of all the effort I now have what looks to me like exactly the same print bed as the Ultimaker 2. It is much, much nicer than the old print bed (which I didn't construct very well anyway).

As part of the upgrade you get a replacement stepper motor and drive thread which is much more positive than the original one. And the new bed is made of rigid metal, rather than the somewhat heavier and more "flappy" wooden one. 

I've done some large-ish prints with it and there is now no warping at all. Plus, by printing on glass I can get a lovely smooth surface on the printed items. 

The upgrade is a tad expensive, at around 250 pounds once you've paid for carriage, but I think that if you have an Ultimaker it is something you really should consider. 

First Year Welcome Party - With added Carbonite

We had our First Year welcome party today. In the olden days we used to have cheese and wine. We don't do that any more. Nowadays we have Occulus Rift powered racing, 10 player Xbox mayhem, Wii U, Digital Scalectrix, Xbox One and Rocksmith Guitars. Plus we will also embed you in carbonite, just like Han Solo at the end of Star Wars, courtesy of our Kinect 2 sensor and Ultimaker printers. 

We had quite a few customers for the 3D scanning. In fact we have a whole bunch of models to print off later in the week.

We had two seats set up for racing, with force feedback steering wheel, and Occulus Rift for the view. Great fun.

Thanks to Platform Expos for the use of their console setup.

Rachael came along with her big camera and took some video. The party did get very busy, we had to get some extra tables out when the time came for the quiz. To my eternal shame I didn't get pictures of the winning teams posing with their Nerf gun prizes. Oh well, maybe next year.

I was testing a new version of the TagOMatic to handle the drinks and it seemed to work OK, apart from a few "rogue" tags that seem to have found their way into the system. I'll be using the TagOMatic as the basis of an Arduino talk in the first of the new season of Rather Useful Seminars next week. 

I've put some more pictures up on Flickr, you can find them here. 

Ultimaker Heated Bed Now Available

Ha. Within a couple of days of me changing over to the BuildTak print surface Ultimaker have announced a Heated Bed kit for my printer. Oh well. There may be some second hand printer parts going up for sale soon.

I've always wanted a heated bed for my printer. Una, my Ultimaker 1, does a lovely job on very small objects, but on larger ones there is always some warping as the printed object cools and contracts, lifting the corners and turning any rectangular object into a cushion. 

A heated bed solves that. It also gives you a smooth glass surface to print on so that you get lovely shiny prints. The upgrade replaces the entire print assembly, which is also cheering for me as I made a bit of a botched job of making the original, giving Una a rather lopsided appearance. The new bed should put that right and so I've ordered one.

BuildTak Printer Surface

While I was at the 3D printer show a while back I picked up a sheet of BuildTak to put on Una, my Ultimaker printer. Up until now I've used 3M blue masking tape underneath all my prints, and it works quite well, but I've never been able to get a smooth finish because of the gaps between rows of the tape. 

The surface that you print on is actually quite crucial, in that the heated plastic must stick to it well enough to allow the item to be printed but not so well that you can't get the darned thing off the bed afterwards.

BuildTak manages to do this very well. If you're like me, and you've not got a printed bed for your printer, then you might like to have a play. I'm much happier with the quality of the surfaces that I've printed on the BuiltTak bed. They have a slightly rough texture but it is much better than the one provided by tape. The company says that the surface should last for a while, I've done quite a few prints now and it seems to be holding up well. 

Pro top: if you are printing lots of the same thing, move each one slightly on the print bed so that it spreads the wear on the surface. Also, if you want maximum quality, move the print closer to the back of the printer. This is because when the printer is moving at speed the print bed (which is only supported at one end) will tend to waggle and leave ripples in the printed surfaces. 

3D Printer Show

Today we got up early and headed off to the 3D Printer Show in London Town. This is the third printer show that we’ve been to and I think it is fair to say that we have watched the business grow up a bit. The first one was full of people who were into 3D printing. Last year there were a lot of people who had heard about 3D printing and wanted to find out more. This year there were just a lot of, well, people.

This is the third location and I think in some ways this was a bit of a step down. Last year they had a lovely large venue with a great café which overlooked the exhibition floor. This year they had a place which was optimistically titled the “Food Court” but was actually a room where a few harassed folks were selling coffee, cakes and sandwiches. They were nice enough, but it didn’t feel quite the same.

As for the printers, there were some new brands and some old brands. Most of the printers were what we call “Fused Deposition Manufacture” or FDM. These work in the same way as a cake icing machine, squirting molten material onto a platform one layer at a time to build up a 3D structure. From the look of things this has probably reached the state of the art in terms of how to get from rolls of filament to the finished product. I reckon that Una, my Ultimaker 2 printer which is now over two years old, can still hold her head up high in the company of the newer devices.

However, there are some very interesting things happening in terms of the raw materials that we can put into our printers. There were a lot of companies showing off new designs for printing materials which improve on the ones we presently use. 

This printer can print cakes and chocolate. 

This printer prints seeds and soil, all in one, so you can make things like the display at the top of the post.

I got samples of some of these new filaments, I'm looking forward to having a go with them. 

This is one of the genuinely new printers at the show. The Roland ARM-10 is a departure for the company, which makes a lot of milling machines and CNC tools. It is interesting because it uses a different technology from the filament printers we know and love. It uses Stereo Lithography, where beams of light are shone at liquid resin, causing it to harden and generate hard objects. The prints are still built up layer by layer, like the FDM "cake icing" printers, but the layers are much thinner and the quality of the finished print much higher.

I think that Roland have probably decided that the market for FDM printers is well served at the moment and that in the future there will be a move to the higher quality that this technology can produce. Having said that, these printers cost quite a lot more to feed, with a litre of liquid resin costing over 100 pounds, and the printer itself didn't seem to offer much (if any) of an improvement on the Form Labs printer which is cheaper (and who were also at the show).

Ultimaker were there too, of course, and I had a great chat about where they see the future going. There was also some amazing 3D printed art on show. I've put a bunch more pictures on Flickr, you can find them here. 

I left the show with loads of ideas for things to try and stuff to play with.

Printing the Humber Estuary

Some time back we got an email from Chris in the Geography Department. He had some data that he wanted to visualise in 3D. Warren and I thought it might be fun to have a go and so Chris sent through a file and I wrote a little Python program that converts it from the DEM format that Geographers like to the STL format that Cura and Una like. Above you can see the results being displayed in FreeCad.

This is the surface being printed. You can see that the bits close to sea level have been filled in and the higher regions are being "shaded" with mostly empty space. The printer will put those bits on later. The groove is the path that the river has cut into the seabed.

This is the finished result. If you look carefully you can spot the Spurn Point at the end of the land. The height has been massively scaled up, along the top you can see some hills, this is about where the Humber Bridge goes. 

Chris wants to use the models to help people visualise what happens when an area is flooded. The next thing to do is try to produce some models with different colours for the areas above and below sea level. 

Home Made Minishift Spacers

I spent a very happy afternoon making up an ArachnidLabs MiniShift that I got a while back. At least I was very happy until I got to the point in the instructions where it said "Now, take one of the spacers and fit it to the circuit board..."

Of course I'd lost mine.

However, the good news is that I happen to have a 3D printer. And so I was able to design and print a set in a rather attractive blue colour and then continue the build. I've not tried firing them up yet. That's for next week.

Case for Galileo

I was going to design a little case for my Galileo. But it seems someone has beaten me to it. I'm fairly happy with how it turned out, although the lettering could be a bit clearer. 

3D Printed Winterfell

I'm not a fan of Game of Thrones. But I do quite like 3D printing. Our 3D printerns found a really superb 3D model of Winterfell, which is apparently a location in the program. They used the departmental Ultimaker 2 to produce a lovely version of it, so I had a go at getting Una, my home made Ultimaker 1 to print the model. And I'm very pleased with the results, which you can see above.

The great thing about this is that it really doesn't look very 3D printed. It just looks like a little model.  Looking at the picture I need to do a bit of tidying up, but the fundamentals are very solid. 

In terms of comparing an Ultimaker 1 with an Ultimaker 2 the most noticeable difference is that the Ultimaker 2 seems to be better at retraction. This is when the printing filament is pulled back into the print head prior to a move. The printers do it so that they don't leave strings of excess printing material between features on model. Una is a tiny bit more messy than the Ultimaker 2. This is probably due to the slightly larger size of the heated head. 

But overall I'm well pleased with this. 

Microsoft 3D Model Repair Service

One of our "3D Printerns" (students who are spending 8 weeks in the department over summer working on 3D printing) was using this today. It reminded me that I really ought to tell the world about it.  (like my blog is some kind of public service or whatnot.....)

Anyhoo, one of the problems with making 3D models is that sometimes you get bits of data in there that just don't make sense from a 3D point of view. Elements can intersect in odd ways or you might get tiny holes in meshes. These imperfections can cause all kinds of problems when you try to move from a model to a physical artifact.

Normally you need a person to go through and tidy the model it up, but Microsoft have a free, cloud based, service that will just accept your models and tidy them up for you. It's all free, and very useful. You can find it here.

Improving 3D Printer Quality by Adjusting the Temperature

For a while now I've been trying to improve the quality of prints from Una the Ultimaker. I've replaced quite a few bits and bobs here and there and she is now pretty reliable. But I've been having problems with "lumpy layers". Objects with flat sides end up having lots of ridges in them, as if the printer was laying down layers of different thicknesses.

You can see the effect above. The layers at the bottom of the print are nice and smooth, and then they suddenly become thicker and more uneven. This is not a huge problem but, me being me, I've been trying to figure out what causes it, particularly as earlier prints didn't seem to have the same problem. 

Turns out that it is all down to temperature. I used a plugin which is part of the Cura slicer which converts designs into printer instructions. The plugin lets you tweak printer settings at different heights during printing. The layers at the bottom of the print were printed at 210 degrees centigrade, then it switched to 215 and so on upwards in steps of 5 degrees. The effect of the changes is much more significant than I thought it would be. I've noticed that different makes and colours of printing material have quite different temperature profiles. I think I'll have to do a test print like this for each one and then set decide on an optimal temperature.

Oh, and I also managed to include a human hair in the picture so that you can get some idea of scale. It really is astonishing how precisely this technology can be made to work. 

Update: One thought occurred to me after writing this post. The temperatures I'm quoting are as reported by Una, and are probably unique to her (it) as different machines will have different arrangements of print head and temperature sensor. If the temperatures that I mention don't work for you the try different ones, the important point here is that it is worth calibrating your machine for each different material. 

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.