New toy arrived.

[karbomusic]

Slightly off topic but still DIY... My new 3D printer arrived on Monday:






Now I can make all those custom jigs, doodads and widgets I seem to need on a daily basis. I printed a guitar pick with my name on it last night. How cool is that? Run out of guitar picks and print one in 2 minutes flat. 

[Luke51411]

Now I can make all those custom jigs, doodads and widgets I seem to need on a daily basis. I printed a guitar pick with my name on it last night. How cool is that? Run out of guitar picks and print one in 2 minutes flat. 

And not have to worry about forgetting your name 
But seriously, looks like a sweet new toy!

[midwayfair]

Dude's already seen some things. 

[armdnrdy]

That's really nice Kary! When you're done playing with it....can I have it? 

[karbomusic]

Now that I have it, no reason I can't use it to just print you one Larry!   

I'm gonna have to make a custom pedal knob to keep it on topic. Seems like the right thing to do.

[bloxstompboxes]

Yeah, my supervisor bought one and is going to make some knobs for me. That is, if I can ever remember to bring some in for him to use as a reference.

[Mustachio]

Oh man that looks awesome ! Is that a Wanhao Duplicator 4s ? That dual head extruder looks great! What material are you printing with ?

I'm still slowly building a 2020 aluminum framed Prusa I3. I sorta wish I would have went with a prebuilt from Wanhao now , but hopefully this kit I have will turn out ok.

There's a bunch of knobs and other things to print over at http://www.thingiverse.com/search/page:1?q=knob&sa=

Nice if you wanna grab one as a base and then "remix" it to your own style.

[karbomusic]

Oh man that looks awesome ! Is that a Wanhao Duplicator 4s ? That dual head extruder looks great! What material are you printing with ?

I'm still slowly building a 2020 aluminum framed Prusa I3. I sorta wish I would have went with a prebuilt from Wanhao now , but hopefully this kit I have will turn out ok.

There's a bunch of knobs and other things to print over at http://www.thingiverse.com/search/page:1?q=knob&sa=

Nice if you wanna grab one as a base and then "remix" it to your own style.

Hey Jimbo, I was hoping you'd see the thread...

I'm using a FlashForge Creator Pro and ABS material. I wouldn't be surprised if they were very close to the same thing.  FlashForge's customer support is amazingly good FYI.

Thingiverse is great so I look there first in the event they have it and I used some of their designs for testing and calibration already. I also bit the bullet on a Blender 3d online course (just a 7 hour video series). I have some light modelling experience from a decade ago so I'm not coming into it cold thankfully and Blender is really all I need for this.

So far it's been great fun but still learning. I'll post some pics of some test prints once I get a chance. Take care!

[Mustachio]

Nice man that looks like an awesome machine! I just looked it up , seriously impressive!

I picked up a spool of ABS to start out with too. I've been looking at some other materials, I believe FDA just approved a few food safe materials which will be cool for printing stuff for the kitchen! I have a small sample of PLA, I hear when PLA prints it smells like sugar and is a plant based material. I've heard a lot about ninjaflex and PLA wood, so many cool materials to print with!

Oh man blender, I'm not a fan, but it is a powerful program. I been using 3dsmax and autocad since the late 90s and am sort of bias toward using them but it all comes down to preference and what your comfortable using. You might want to look at sketchup as well , its free and there are some 3d printing plugins/extentions for it. I find sketchup pretty easy to use.

If you ever wanna talk modeling or anything hit me up! I can't wait to get my printer going and tuned!

[karbomusic]

Oh man blender, I'm not a fan, but it is a powerful program. I been using 3dsmax and autocad since the late 90s and am sort of bias toward using them but it all comes down to preference and what your comfortable using. You might want to look at sketchup as well , its free and there are some 3d printing plugins/extentions for it. I find sketchup pretty easy to use.

If you ever wanna talk modeling or anything hit me up! I can't wait to get my printer going and tuned!

I'd much, much prefer 3ds max since that's what I used back around 2004 but the price tag is astronomical. I've touched blender several times in the last decade and was typically disappointed but this last go seems to be better for whatever reason (still prefer 3ds though). Yep, I'll have to hit you up, fun stuff!

[Mustachio]

Yeah 3ds max is extremely expensive, I'm still using a rather old version because of the price.

Have you played with sketchup at all ? It's not to shabby , there's even a version of Vray for it! I did my enclosure designs in sketchup because the tool sets made it soo easy. I used a box unfolding plugin that let me flatten my model and export as an svg so I could print templates for cutting and bending the sheet steel. The dimensions tool is nice for doing build guides, I used it to make a few wood work tables this last year.

I haven't actually messed with blender since the early 2000s. I do remember seeing some amazing work done with blender. Learning blender with the online courses and massive amount of tutorials floating around can't hurt ya. I had a friend that worked for adobe that always used to say if you can master blender you can master anything.

I've been pretty busy lately I almost forgot about the autodesk 123D apps !! http://www.123dapp.com/

There's a bunch of them if you scroll to the bottom of the page you will find em. Tinkercad is extremely easy to knock out a simple 3d part or what not for printing. They're all great tools for free!

Recently I was working on an augmented reality app that had to do with 3d food. We used 123D catch app on the phone to take about 40+ photos of plates of fancy food, the program stitches it all together into a very high rez 3d mesh and uses the photos as textures. I was skeptical at first but the results where great! I brought the models into another free program from autodesk still in beta called Memento. This allowed me to clean up the model and decimate the poly count in the mesh. It even has an export to 3d printer option or you can export to a few diff formats like fbx obj.

And if you want to mess around with some character design I found this https://www.mixamo.com/ the other day, the rigging looks way too easy, ugh I used to spend nearly a week rigging a character!

I'm still on the fence with that one, I installed and opened once and it felt like the sims/poser. But you can import your own models and rig them and animate them yourself instead of using pre-fab content. So it might be real nice for some things.

[karbomusic]

Played with sketchup some in the past but haven't gotten back to it only because I have so much on my plate. Since I'm only using Blender for 3d printing I at least don't have to worry about shaders, physics, lighting etc. just yet.

I did see the 123D apps, just haven't had a chance to explore

I have had a developer version of a Microsoft Kinect for a couple years now. I just downloaded an app/driver that should allow me to scan real objects to a mesh then translate it to an STL file; I'd be pretty stoked if I can make that work well. 

I'm still sort of feeling my way through which things need to be which thickness etc. It's kind of surreal printing out objects from the computer, there is a translation between senses that I'm not yet used to.

This a simple box with a sliding lid that I just modeled in Blender and is printing now. Curious to see if the lid works. If it does, it's going to be the enclosure for that laser trip wire side project I posted not too long ago.

[karbomusic]

Here's a pic of the box above. That white mesh underneath is raft support but I really didn't need that feature for this print (forgot to turn it off when generating the gcode). The piece on the left is going to be the box, the right piece will be the sliding lid. You just peel off the raft support mesh when done fyi.

[Mustachio]

Lookin sweet! I think I missed the "laser trip wire side project" and searching laser trip just gave me flash backs of pink floyd laser light show at the planetarium 

[mth5044]

So jealous. Can't wait to see what what you're creative mind manages to make. 

Dude's already seen some things. 

Thought the same thing 

[karbomusic]

It printed but I made it too thin again. And the slits/insets need to be a little larger, too snug. I'll certainly be glad when I get past the guessing stage LOL but only had it 3 days so far par for the course when learning something new. It suddenly began building this sort of hair-like mesh near the end, I thought something went wrong. I then realized it was creating its own bridge for the slits in the side of the box for the sliding drawer.




I just pulled that hair like stuff out after it was done and there was the slit. Crazy!

[LightSoundGeometry]

right on Karbo..now I know where to get etched pcbs from lol

you can etch me a Tycobrehe PCB ? 

[karbomusic]

right on Karbo..now I know where to get etched pcbs from lol

you can etch me a Tycobrehe PCB ? 

Actually, I can. I recently etched that one and built it for myself so I know it works. Also an update from the 3D printing front. Been printing stuff like crazy learning the process...

Key ring I made in Photoshop's 3D editor; all other prints were designed in Blender..



Needed a fat Sharpie holder..



Replaced the shower drain (wifeypoo justification for the purchase):



3d scanned my big ole head with my Kinect...



Box with sliding lid for a small electronics project...



And plenty of other stuff, some good some not so good. Going to try some custom pedal knobs soon.

[LightSoundGeometry]

I got a chuckle out of the face, and wife justification  lol.

alright karbo, etch me a tycobrehe pcb. we can work out a deal for price n shipping!  I have two transformers , and two chances, to get this right. I would just buy a repro but they are almost 300 bucks I think , out of my price range !

[armdnrdy]

Key ring I made in Photoshop's 3D editor; all other prints were designed in Blender..

Kary,

You do realize that in 500 years...this key ring will be unearthed in a landfill...and it will be believed to be the missing key in unlocking the secrets of the universe!
Scholars will devote their lives to deciphering the hieroglyphics! 

Nice job by the way!