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?
The model is a Monoprice Maker Select Plus 3D Printer. From the information I’ve been given, it should work well with at least Linux and Windows; both are OS’s I use. Included with the gift were a pair of filament spools for printing. The printer itself can do multiple colors, but not more than one at a time, but only if one swaps out the colored spools while printing. Multi-color heads tend to send the price up fairly quickly and most patterns are a single color anyway. I think I will invest time in painting models I want color on.
The printer is assembled, but I still haven’t turned it on. I scraped off the butterfly that it supposedly served to test everything out, in the factory I’d think. Disassembling it was fairly enlightening. While 3D printing is less wasteful than machining a similar product, printing is not without waste. A base layer called a raft is lain down first. This seems to serve as an anti-stick measure to the hotplate and a debug mechanism for when first starting a print. The raft peeled off the butterfly itself fairly nicely, almost too nicely; but I’m not complaining.
When the printing proscess started up, it sounded like something straight out of Forbidden Planet. The motors are a little hard on my ears, but then again, more than the average number of things are hard on my ears. It’s made some more progress, and it looks like some sort of arm chair so far. I’m using the sample filament that came with the unit, so I hope it lasts.
Success. It is a chair. I poked around in the menus a bit more and caused the printer to try tearing itself apart when it tried lifting its z axis too far while looking to unload the filament. It would have been helpful if the thing had told me about its auto-eject for the filament. I’ve also been getting this pretty strong notion that the thing was made in China for China. Any measurements outside the instruction manual are in Celsius or Centimeters, the English is worded terribly in places, and the language selection is a toggle between Chinese and English. And the icon has a character on the top. I’m not offended, just a bit wierded out.