Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am not doing anything too exciting. Just a quick touch up on last week’s topic and then I have some thoughts on building milestones for myself to reach. Let’s get started.
I ended up using the rest of the sample filament on a pair of unknown prints from the sample SD card. One turned out to be a sitting elephant and another was a scaled up version of the butterfly that came attached to the printbed when the printer shipped. Of note, the first layer of the raft was of a different thickness each time. Of course, I rechecked the printbed each print, and I got a little better pseudo-understanding of how the printer in at work is supposed to sound. I’d like to upload a video with a sample, but this week was a little too slow for my intended project.
Future plans. I still want to build and program a social robot, but I definitely need some intermediate steps before I get there. I wasn’t planning on the 3D printer at this point, but since I have it, I’d like to use it. My sister suggested I build a drone, and after rejecting the idea, rethinking it, and deciding it wasn’t a bad idea after all, I decided to research the best one for my purposes.
There is A LOT of information out there about 3D printing drones. Lots of it is up and above my level for now, and since drones aren’t my goal, I’m looking for a lower-cost drone I can print myself. It turns out a lot of the results for 3D printed drones are about getting drones that happen to have been 3D printed. So far, the only drone I have seriously considered is the Pixxy drone. It’s fairly small and cheap to build. Just what I need to learn some stuff from it and move on.
After I am done learning with the drone, I really need to check into learning about ROS. At that point, I should look into learning Gazebo alongside it. Learning some more about Linux, like remoting in to another machine should come in handy for when I build a more advanced bot running Linux with ROS on top.
But everything else aside, I have animals in the house. The 3D printer is a new thing. The dogs went to check it out and seem willing to leave a print job in place for now. My cat Orbit, though, can’t seem to go a day without gettin’ into trouble of one sort or another. The printer needs a case to keep him out. I’m hoping that will be next week’s project.
Final Question: Do you have any experience in 3D printing drones? If so, know any good, entry level ones?