Yup. Starting into 3D printing. That was the “very very specific project”.
Say hello to my first ever print!
(Yes, it’s just a calibration cube.)
Seems quite simple but went through quite a lot to get to this stage. Obviously had to buy the printer.. actually that’s another tale for another time. Once I had the printer, a Printrbot Simple Metal, I ended up breaking its auto-leveling sensor through a combination of assembly problem and operator stupidity, and had to wait a week to get the sensor replaced. The local distributor was nice enough to do a replacement wiring job, and in the process also do a calibration run, so this is actually the second job it’d done.. but the first done by me.
This little cube took about 9 minutes to print. Relatively fast.
So.. the other part of this project is a Raspberry Pi Model B co-opted into a OctoPi print server. I’d need to get it set up properly, then I’d be able to separate the slicing job and the G-code management. That’d really free me up to do more things while the printer is producing stuff.
What do I intend to do with this? Prototyping really. I’ll go into an article on that at some point. Right here, it’s an addition to current capabilities. 🙂