MakerBots, RepRaps and UP!s: It's 3D printers!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Hobbies, Crafts, & Houses > MakerBots, RepRaps and UP!s: It's 3D printers!

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

I've lurked a bit in this thread earlier, but thought of it again, when my friend sent me this picture. See, he just got a new cellphone (HTC something) and it was so new that no one made a car mount cradle thingie for it yet. So what do you do? Well, you CAD one up i SolidWorks and print it off on your employer's million dollar 3D printer, is what you do.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2011 09:13

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 08:21

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

Well hello there 3D printer thread.

My colleague somehow convinced my boss to shell out for a Robo3D, but so far the performance has left a lot to be desired.

Issue #1
It seems like the servos skip steps. Once in a while, an entire layer will shift roughly 1mm along an axis, and then the rest of the print will just continue from there:

(That side should be completely flat.)

Issue #2
Round holes have a very jagged edge, and when the machine is printing it, it shakes like nobody's business. Is this machine really not capable of making a smooth circular motion in one plane?

(This hole also shows the step skip issue from issue #1)

Issue #3
This is actually the major issue. We haven't been able to complete a print yet. Sooner or later in the process, something causes the hobbed nut to start gnawing on the filament, eventually eating a nice little arc, thus no longer feeding filament, thus ruining the print.

(Also, are the burr-marks on the filament normal.)

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

bolind fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Aug 16, 2016

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 15:03

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

Geirskogul posted:

Check your hotend temp, and raise it.

Already at 216C...

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 15:24

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

PLA. 1.75mm. Black, if that matters.

I'm speculating that the skipped steps and the gnawed filament are related. What if a step is skipped downwards (so the printer is effectively trying to print the same layer twice) - would that give enough resistance to the extrusion to cause the gnawed filament?

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 16:28

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

Wade Wilson posted:

I found the problem.

EDIT:

Seriously. I've had two Robo3D printers--one I actually purchased and the second that was from winning a Facebook contest for one--and both of them died within two months of getting them.

The warranty/support is a joke (literally waiting four weeks for them to get around to deciding to ship warranty parts, etc.), and you're basically poo poo loving out of luck if you didn't just immediately return the printer to Amazon.com or Bestbuy within a week of testing it and not getting it to print a circle properly.

If you bought it directly from the company that makes it, congratulations on your $700 paper weight. They want you to pay to ship the printer to them for a return plus some 20% "re-stocking fee" even if the printer is dead on loving arrival.

That is leaving aside the fact that their build space is misleading because the heater on the bottom of the bed is only 8" x 8" and randomly placed at assembly (anything that falls outside of the area covered by the heater will not print properly).

Meanwhile, that $350 Monoprice Maker Select I bought that is the favorite newbie printer in this thread and Reddit? It runs figurative circles around the Robo3D printer in every metric that matters.

Tell your boss he got hosed and laugh at your colleague for being a loving moron for recommending that printer for use in a business setting.

If your boss is really wanting a 3d printer that is useful in a business setting he should go up to the $1k+ class that the Ultimakers and Rostock Max deltas live in, or take a look at the actual $6k-$700k honest-to-god made for industrial use 3d printers (Stratasys or PolyJet manufacturers of said printers) instead of the hobbyist printers we talk about here.

We're not making parts that really matter, just a few enclosures for Raspberry Pis and such. It's 100% not business critical.

That being said, aforementioned colleague has two of these at home, and one is hosed too, so I'm not entirely sure why we went for a third one. He keeps claiming the working one works beautifully though. We bought it in the US and had it shipped over to Europe, and I can sorta sense that support and warranty is a joke already now. It was well over a grand US after shipping and duties.

Rubiks Pubes posted:

My printer ate filament like that at first and it was due to the extruder getting hot from being right above the hotend. Printed a little fan mount and have a fan pointed at the extruder and never had another problem with that.

It works fine for a while and then it chokes, so that could be it.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 17:33

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

It probably is. Thing is, we're making custom stuff for rack mounting them, and it's also other boards similar to the pis well as fully custom stuff. That being said, I suspect more than a little bit of the reason is simply as a perk to the guy who bought it.

Personally I'm just treating it as a "for fun" side project. Fundamentally I don't care whether the stupid thing works or not.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 19:15

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

I have a Fusion 360 question, and 3D Printer Expert Extraordinaire and all around awesome poster Queen Combat directed me to this very thread.

I'm trying to model a lot that we bought, to illustrate how the different buildings will sit, elevation wise. The end result should be a 3D print of the terrain plus buildings. The lot is basically a rectangle, and I have the elevations from the survey. How can I make a super simple polygon mesh in one plane, then elevate certain points/vertices to a value I set? Or another approach to model a terrain where a finite number of surface points are known.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2018 12:01

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

Explain automatic bed levelers to me. Do they compensate for a slightly off bed, or do they help you achieve a perfectly level bed (with manual adjustments?)

Or do they simply ensure that 0 on the z-axis is exactly where it should be?

# ¿ Jan 6, 2019 13:13

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

Cross posting from the Raspberry Pi thread:

bolind posted:

I heard this thread likes Raspberry Pis.

So do I (well, my company):

Mix in a bit of 3D printing...

Some off-the-shelf hardware...

Assemble...

Add one (1) surplus 19" PoE switch... (sorry about the shite image quality - not much light in the server room)

And you have yourself a fairly decent 3U collection of remotely power cyclable ARM linux nodes on which you can do TOP SECRET stuff.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2019 15:44

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

Greatest Living Man posted:

So... bitcoin mining?

That�d be a losing proposition even a decade ago. It�s intended for many, many automated tests on the ARM platform.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2019 20:23

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

porktree posted:

Well thats some cool stuff.

Thanks!

Assuming one were to buy a 3D printer for work, and one was more than willing to pay for having something that worked as hassle free as possible, where should one look? I�m thinking in the 1-2k USD range.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2019 18:47

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

So I just printed an M30x1.5 nut at 0.06mm layer height and OMFG that�s actually nice for coming out of a $500 thing from China and having the part designed and manufactured by this 220 pound gorilla. Threaded right on where it should.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2019 15:29

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

goodness posted:

Right now I am extruding at 200 and the bed is at 60 (I'm assuming its Fahrenheit on the Ender 3).

# ¿ Jan 21, 2019 18:08

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

Got the chance to do some work on a ~1 year old Prusa mk3 and it�s very nice. Still not quite print-and-forget but by far the nicest I�ve played with so far.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2019 11:56

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

^^^ what I thought but couldn�t be bothered to articulate.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2019 16:51

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

My 1 week / <20 hours print time old Prusa MK3S gives me "THERMAL RUNAWAY" errors, twice in a row now.

Any idea what causes this, and what's Prusa's support like? Contacted them through their on-site form.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 12:19

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

AlexDeGruven posted:

Thermal runaway = 'I've applied power to the heater but the temp isn't going up'

Or, "Temp dropped more than 15C, bailing." in the case of Prusa.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 14:24

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

BabelFish posted:

I've only got a MK2.5S, but right after I did the upgrade to S I discovered that the new hotend fan shroud was so good at cooling that on large flat PLA prints at 100% fan speed the hotend couldn't keep up with all the reflected cool air. I turned on the dynamic cooling option and set the low speed to 75%, high and bridging speed to 100% and have had no issues since.

Thanks! This was in fact a print with two large surfaces (think two XL playing cards side by side) and it consistently failed on the second layer.

I scaled down to one part, and redesigned it with some speed holes, and finally set fan speed to 75%, and, so far, 1.5 successful part.

bring back old gbs posted:

1)Hexagonal nut traps

2)threaded brass inserts you push in with the tip of your soldering iron(works great with harder plastics, I've had less luck with TPU/flexibles for the obvious reason of the threads not biting into the soft plastic)

3) or simply model the hole as wide as the inner shaft but not as wide as your bolt thread and just tap into the plastic if it's not going to come apart that often

This man speaks the truth.

I have had good luck with hexagonal nut traps. If you dimension them to true nut size they'll usually bind just enough that the nut stays put.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2019 10:58

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

I'm lazy and possibly also not all that intelligent: explain to me how I fit a Raspberry Pi 3B+ to my Prusa Mk3S such that I can run Octoprint. Bonus points for having the LAN port on the Pi accessible so I can power it over PoE.

Edit: And now Thingiverse is down. Great.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2019 13:43

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

TKIY posted:

Pi goes in a case. Hook up via USB cable. Done.

Huh. Somehow I'd gotten it into my little head that I needed to solder ribbon cables and whatnot. Working now, thanks.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2019 09:18

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 08:21

bolind: Jun 19, 2005; Pillbug

I can report that I have finally reached first layer nirvana.

Another annoying thing has come up though: printing large, flat objects, the final move of the extruder to (0,0) yields an unsigthly line of schmoo on my prints. Is there a way, in Cura, to make the Z go way up before homing (or not home at all)?

# ¿ Aug 15, 2019 14:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Hobbies, Crafts, & Houses > MakerBots, RepRaps and UP!s: It's 3D printers!