Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am printing myself a bookmark as a “Hello Again, World” project. Let’s get started!
I have a Monoprice Maker Select Plus 3D printer. It’s a rebrand of a product made by Wanhao. For those keeping score, I am running Debian 10 (Buster) on my laptop, and I’m migrating different tasks over to Linux that I can.
My problem: My printer shipped with a version of the Cura slicer specifically tailored to work with it — on Windows. By default, the version of Cura I found on the Debian 10 repositories does not come packaged with presets for my printer or its original branding. Furthermore, the software has had several more years of development since the kiddie pool fork of the software I was used to playing with.
Since last week, I’ve realized that as far as someone at my skill level is concerned, all the specializations are are just a few numbers a sufficiently resourceful individual, such as myself, can look up, punch in, and fine tune as necessary. With the right numbers, I can see where a printer can safely print multiple small jobs on the same bed without waiting on the head to move to each one every layer.
A slicer is only any good if I’m going to print something, so I modeled up a bookmark in Blender. That interface is a new sight for my eyes to behold. I eeked out something for a first prototype using my fragmented knowledge from when I last put printing away.
Over in Cura, I used a slider to set 100% infill; I don’t want this thing breaking on me. I told it to go with structural support and saved it to my SD card. I really like this version of Cura over the dinosaur animal cracker I used to work with.
I went through about half a thing of canned air on my printer and leveled it with an assortment of junk mail and a bubble level. Fortunately I didn’t need to reapply grease. I did have to reassemble my MacGyvered filament holder atop the printer. Somehow, I found the same piece of PVC pipe from before in another part of the house, but I used a rag instead of a strip of cardboard to secure it.
When material started getting laid down, I noticed another old problem. Filament wasn’t quite sticking at the very beginning of extrusion. As the printer continued laying down material around where my bookmark was soon to take shape, I recognized it as a brim. The malformed plastic was relatively isolated, and the print continued without further incident.
Lacking my proper spatula, I peeled the fresh bookmark off the buildplate by the deformity from the beginning, but I quickly learned how easily freshly printed plastic can deform. It twisted and left a minor, permanent warp if one were to look closely enough. Next time, I will let it cool.
The brim was a lot harder to get everything. Between the prototype being too thick for a hardback and me not liking the pointy bits I designed into the sides, I took the design back to Blender, where I had to refresh my memory again on proper modeling methodologies and that’s were I stand now.
Final Question: How frequent do you come across a 3D printer operator using Linux?