6. 3D scanning and printing¶
This week, i worked on preparing a design to be implemented on the 3D printer. Also, the constrains, restrictions, as well as guidelines for the preparation and usage of the 3D printer was done.
Fusion Design for 3D printer¶
First of all, a distinct design was made that could be only comfortabily constructed using the 3D printer. A spinner is designed in Fusion 360, to be then constructed in the 3D printer.
The design consists mainly of three parts: The body, the handle and the tip that the spinner spins on. First of all, the body was designed using a circle and a square which are then connected together using the loft command. The dimensions of both the circle and the square where later scaled down to meet the required limitation and given specifications for the 3D printer. Firstly, the dimensions for the geometry were specified as follows, which were scaled down later to meet the specified requirementes:
After that, a sketch for the square was done followed up by a sketch of the circle which is below the square, with the specified parameters:
Next, the loft command was used in order to connect the two sketches together, forming the body of the spinner:
After that, the top of the body of the spinner was emptied with a wall thickness of 10 mm to manitain the stability of the spinner:
Filets were made on the interior and exterior of the body of the design to adjust the edges:
After that, the design was scaled down to meet the 3D printer specification requirements:
The bottom circle is extruded to make the handle of the spinner:
The top edge of the handle was edited using the fillet command:
A traingular shape was constructed to be used in order to make the tip of the spinner for the spinner to spin on:
After that, the loft command between the circular base of the body and the triangle was used:
Finally, a command called coil was used to make the spiral shape on the handle to give the option for the usage of a rope to spin the spinner if wanted:
3D Printer instrument and printing procedure:¶
3D printer¶
The 3D printer is one of the devices which are considered an additive method (by adding layers onto each other to get the final design), unlike the CO2 laser cutter and the CNC machine which are considered substractive methods. The 3D printer used is of a () type. It mainly consists of the flexible bed, the fillament, heating and cooling element (cooler and heater for the fillament tip (extruder) and heater for the flexible bed). For instance, the 3D printer mainly melts the fillament and then shapes it onto the flexible bed in layers to form the design required.
Preparation and procedure¶
Here, a view of the 3D printer:
The flexible bed will be added to the 3D printer, it will act as a board for the design to be shaped and it being heated will prevent the design from the sudden shrinking due to the sudden change in temperature between the departure temperature of the fillament and atmospheric temperature. A picture of the 3D printer after adding the flexible bed is shown below:
Then, the fillament is added to the extruder in order to be heated and used:
An A4 sheet was utilized to determine the heigh between the extruder and the flexible bed:
After preparing the device, the following program (called ultimaker) was used after copying the designs into a usb drive:
Then the STL files are added
This will show up, if the design is not within the printing area it will show with a grey color as shown:
The follwoing shows the options for the quality of printing, and the support option for better printing and the temperature of both the fillament and the flexible bed:
The following is an estimation of the time of the design:
It will look like this:
After the preparation from the device, the files are put in an SD card and put in the 3D printer, the follwoing pictres show the control panel view on the 3D printer:
The extruder and the flexible bed needs to be preheated before the start of the printing procedure:
This will show the settings:
Use this command to print:
Here is a view of the printer printing the design:
The final design will look like this:
The design in action:
Group assignment¶
With regards to the settings to choose the fillings and other things, it was all stated in the group assignment which is linked below:
link: Group assignment
3D scanning¶
Skanect¶
Skanect is a program utilized by the Kinect device which is used to scan an object or a body in a 3D scanning format and capture their motions. This device works on the princible of detecting where the body is with respect to the device and tries to scan the body. If you are going to scan a body ( for example your body), you will need to be in a position where you are close to the device and the device has to detect every part of the body. Then you need to start the scanning procedure and in the specified duration, you need to rotate in a 360 angle (i.e. rotate in a circle) in order for the device to scan every where of the body. A picture below shows how the procedure is done:
Firstly, a new file is created and was chosen to be a body:
This photo shows the option that could be used to change the duration of the scanning process, and the red button is used to start the scanning procedure:
Here, after scanning and the figure is shown, you can use the following option to fill the holes that the kinect was not able to scan (mainly on top of the head and the bottom of the figure )
Also, the removal of excess parts is done by this command in order to remove the particles that were present due to any disturbance done during the scanning (the command is remove parts):
Then the file is exported as an STL file which is later printed in the 3D printer.
The outcome will look as follows:
Qlone¶
Qlone application was used to 3D scan the object printed in the 3D printer prepared by the kinect. First of all, the Qlone application was downloaded on the mobile device. After the completion of the download, the application was launched and then used to scan the object as stated previously. The program requires you to scan the object from all angles (i.e. in a 360) on specific levels like (low, high, top and in the middle) which is as follows:
When the angle in the specific level is covered for the scanning, it will disappear:
The scanning results will look as follows:
A gif view of the design is shown below:
