21st June, 3:00PM, Making & Tinkering Lab
Shawn, Hung, Kang Hao, Xinhui
After experimenting with Pronterface, it led us to try out another approach.
We managed to send a serial communication (Gcode) to Arduino Mega via Raspberry Pi instead of using a laptop. The library used for Gcode processing is pyserial.
While looking for inspiration online, we discovered software used for 2D drawing on a 3D printer, Inkscape. With many tutorials online, Inkscape seemed promising, so we decided to give it a go. Following this tutorial, we started our experiment. We tried to draw a spiral at first, converting it to Gcode using Inkscape, and loading it into Pronterface. We then connected to the Ender 3 and to our relief, the Gcode seemed to be correct as the extruder was moving in a spiral, as expected.
Since Inkscape was working, we designed a temporary pen holder to fix onto the 3D Printer for test drawing.
Feeling ambitious, we decided to draw on the cube straight away. Unsurprisingly, as we did not calibrate the machine properly, we broke the tip of our marker pen. We took a step back to draw on paper instead, and the results were actually not that bad. We still have more calibrations to do, but at least we know that Inkscape works with our project.
