Ok so I print it, I put it on the top of the bottle, try to screw it. It's going to be difficult to achieve the water tightness as it is done with the cap material because PLA is harder but I'll try.īut before I print the whole system, let's make some test on the thread. This is a part that cannot be manufactured substractively. To help me, I cut in half a cap and reverse engineered it ! Let's make a part that can easily turn two plastic bottles into a water level. One thing that's very handy on construction sites is a long distance level. It shows with the gaps in the model : Only two are actual gaps in reality. So I'll have to take this in consideration for future designs. 5mm difference between the measurements in the CAD software and reality. We contemplate our first test being printed :Īlright, so what's working and what's not ? Good, the brim is one single thin and continuous layer. I also correct the buildplate temperature. The Ultimaker has a nice tutorial to get it leveled.

To correct this I do two things : I make sure our plate is level and at the right 'zero height'. Traces not touching during the Brim process When our print starts, I notice that the Brim is not working properly.Įvery tracks should stick to each other, which is not the case : Your browser does not support the video tag.

Till melted plastic exits the nozzle smoothly : Right before printing the machine (nozzle) heats up : So we generate the gcode and save it to the SD card that the Ultimaker 2 reads. There is many other parameters we can play with in expert/advanced mode such as the thickness of specific layers, the speed, how the model is attached onto the printer plate (brim), if it needs support underneath, etc.īut for a start, to print our test model, we'll just use the normal print from the basic mode : It basically builds a very thin layer of the material we use (here PLA) around the base of the model that's easy to break off after the print is done. These softwares are called 'slicing software' because they split the model height-wise in many layers that will later be printed one by one.Īfter we've installed Cura, gone through the doc and updated our Ultimaker's firmware, we load our test model and here it is in Cura, all sliced :Ī nice feature to make the model stick to the heated plate of the 3D printer is the 'Brim' feature.

So the next step is to download a software that can generate a gcode from a model, usually in STL format. This is a set of basic instructions, like 'move from here to there at this speed'. We'll be able to try many different challenges that occur during 3D printing.īut first we need to be able to transform our model in something that the ultimaker can read. Understanding the challenges of 3d printing (overhang, bridges, tolerances) I picked this one on Thingiverse: I started to look for a test 3D model to try our Ultimaker 2 here at the GreenFabLab.

Solidworks with kinect