Pictures of Objects

While it is disappointing not to be able to print objects of our own design from SketchUp, we have had some great successes today:

Yifu found a chess bishop online and we were able to get it
into printable form. 

We had to enlarge the base so it required so
post-production work.

Jake and I modified an existing
template for a basketball hoop so
that it would stand up on its own.

Fedor and Nikita printed a Lego brick from
 an existing template.

We printed a ship from an existing template.

Harry found a blade online--it took some work
to make printable and is only a partial success.

I printed a solid of rotation.

I found out about this project from a suggestion for using this printer to help visualize solids of rotation, which come up often in calculus classes, but that students often manipulate without really understanding. This is the intersection of a parabola and a cubic, rotated about the y-axis.

Husky 3D Printer group heads to the "Make it Labs" hack-space!

The Husky 3D Printing group headed down to Nashua, NH on Wednesday night to visit the "Make it Labs" hack-space (1 of only 3 in NH). Mr. Paul Hardin gave the students a tour of this unique "cooperative-style" space where people can rent their own space to come work on a variety of technology, mechanical, crafts, glasswork, pottery, and electronic projects. He shared his particular expertise in the area of 3D printing, and taught our students about how to run a commercial Maker-bot 3D printer. In these photos you can see Paul sharing the many objects he has created, and the Maker-bot printer itself. Below you will find the students reflections on the experience:

SOLOMON: I learned many things from our field trip. I learned that there are many commercial printers that you can buy, but they are very expensive. After seeing how the man printed little objects that help in his home, it made me want to buy a 3D printer to print my own little tools. But, after hearing how long it took him to make some little pieces it made me have second thoughts, as I don't think I would have the patience or knowledge to do it.

HOTARU: I saw the 3D printer that can make bigger and more complicated structures than ours. The process to print a structure is almost the same as ours, but their 3D printer does it automatically so it is so easy to print. The dragon that the 3D printer produced was so cool.

RIKAKO: There were many interesting machines. From the printing machines we could know the printing structure. One of the machines created objects from a thin thread, melting the thread and move to X,Y direction on a plastic platform. The 3D data comes from a memory card. The thread freezes with a constant temperature. This theory is the same with our simple 3D printer. Our printer freezes the yellow coagulation water through constant temperature, and we give the fever from the scanner's heat. I also learned that when we made the 3D image with an app, we should imagine how the figure is with height and depth in our head. This structure is very interesting for me and I learned some interesting things from the trip.

JAKE: I learned that the technology used in 3D printing is rapidly advancing, and today's technology could easily be outdated in a couple years.

NIKITA: The Field Trip went very successful, and I liked it - We have learned a lot about new 3D printing technology, which is a very important invention in today's scientific world. I liked the idea to be able to print unmoving parts with no effort, but the trip was too long.

IVAN: On Wednesday, our group went on a field trip to “Make it Labs” at Nashua, NH, and were given a tour by a scientist there who was interested in the 3D printer. He introduced the process of how his printer works and printed some examples with the printer. He also dropped some knowledge about the program for our model-making experience.

TIM P: I loved the whole area. I think that when I'm older I'll rent space in a workshop like that. I really liked that he told us about all the different details of how the dragon-head was made and gave us so much background information. I wasn't aware before this that you could 3D print in anything other than plastic.

HARRY: Mr. Paul is fabulious, he told us a lot of cool stUff about the 3d printer. He has a 3d printer, and he knows a lot about 3d printing. He can solve all of my confusion about 3d printer, such as how big can a 3d printing object be, can 3d printer print out color, how much does an ordinary 3d printer cost, etc. He also showed many of his masterpieces objects, they are really cool. The most impressive one was the bat-man ninja star, which was really, really, really cool. In summary, this field trip is one of the bst field trip I have ever been on.

FEDOR: I liked the idea that I could print most non-moving parts with virtually no effort.

Frustration...and Progress

The goal this week was for students to print objects they designed, or at least found online and wanted to see in 3 dimensions. One thing we have learned is that translating a 3-dimensional model in the computer into 2-dimensional cross sections that can be used to print an object is extraordinarily hard.

The students have been getting really good with SketchUp. Meanwhile, I have found a plugin that translates .skp files from SketchUp into .stl files that can be manipulated in FreeSteel to create .png cross sections. Unfortunately our only viable FreeSteel installation is on an Windows XP machine, and we have to run the the cross section program, slice, in DOS. Slice works wonderfully sometimes; that is how we created the skull. Other times it gives a variety of errors. With Fedor's object, it ran out of virtual memory, with Yifu's it had an internal error due to cross points too close, and for other students it tells us the triangles are too big.

When slicer works, we get .png files that we have to create negatives for and sometimes re-size in xnconvert. Then we have a program what we run from command line on the Mac (using Mono as it is compiled for use in the Microsoft .Net framework) that turns the .png files into a slide show. Harry and I worked together to try to print a small sword. There will be a picture up tomorrow but it was less than fully successful.

With the likelihood of printing our own objects dwindling, we have refocused on creating some objects from the online library of the folds at NANO-CEMMS who designed our printer. Fedor and Nikita created a lego block from one of these files, and the other students will be printing from this library tomorrow.

Additional progress... A skull

Significant steps forward were taken today, while we are still hopeful for continued improvement. To be continued...

Designing the 3D object

Students working diligently in the design stages to create their desired 3D object on Google SketchUp prior to the eventual printout process. Creative minds at work!

The Husky 3D Printer

This is the Husky 3D Printer created by our tech-savvy students earlier this week. Every student in the group played a role in its construction. We'll be in touch soon with updates on progress as this complex process unfolds...

Small steps... but seeing progress!

Day 2 found students continuing to refine their 3D images on their computers, while adjustments to the projector settings are hopeful steps to continued improvement towards a successful outcome.

Day 2: Our first 3D object!

Test-run #4 produced a legitimate identifiable object beyond just a basic cube or ring: It's a Pawn from chess. Next step: the students will begin using the 3D-printer they've built to create their own objects designed on their laptops using Google SketchUp!

Progress towards printing?

We just had time for a second attempt at printing this afternoon. We attempted to print a file which should have produced a ship. Instead, we got a blob. Definitely a 3-d blob, but not what we were looking for. There might be a picture on the Twitter feed, but I didn't bother to get it on my computer.

Tomorrow we will start by trying to print something simple--probably a small cube, just as proof of concept. I think we need to play with focus, timing, thickness of layers, etc. Hopefully in about 14 hours there will be a picture of a success up on the blog, and maybe then I will post a new picture of the failure for comparison.

Fail Early, Fail Often

We made our first attempt at printing an object this afternoon. Here is the result:

Even in better focus, this would still be just a thin, shapeless strip of plastic. Still, we are getting a light-initiated reaction that turns our liquid polymer into a solid. I think that the platform on which we are printing was too big to allow polymer to flow properly. We have cut the platform down a little and will try again!

Building a Simple 3D Printer

How can we use technology to help us visualize and create in three dimensions?

Ten students and two faculty members will find out over the course of the next week. We are going to build a simple 3D printer based on a design created for high school students by the Center for Nanoscale Chemical-Electrical-Mechanical Manufacturing Systems in Illinois.

This is our crew on day 0.

We have a lot to learn about taking ideas from our heads and getting them into a form that we can print. However, most of us have ideas about what we would like to print:

• Mr. Freeman: Some solids of rotation to help calculus students visualize problems.
• Mr. Petrocelli: Skis.
• Fedor and Nikita: Abstract geometric shapes that they already have in SketchUp.
• Tim: A skeleton or skull.
• Harry: A knife.
• Solomon: A husky head.
• Jacob: Gears.
• Ivan: Dice.

All of us--including (especially) the leaders--are learning about software for 3-D design. Programs that seem useful include:

• Sketchup
• 123dapp
• Meshlab

(Students in this group--this means it would be a great idea to download these now).