[#35] 西瓜甜不甜？甜！🍉 | Reprogramming a 3D Printer to perform 2D Embroidery

When: 19 July 2019, 10am
Members present: All 🙂

Here’s what we need to get done:

ADMIN

Confirm project title with Qian Xin (19/07 2pm)
Technical contributions doc (24/07)
Final presentation slides (30/07)
1-2 min video (08/08)
A1 project poster (08/08)

PROJECT

Tidy up wiring
Solve overheating of yarn feeding stepper motor

Closed for cleaning 🙁

BUT… Tony closed the lab for cleaning today, so we couldn’t do anything in the morning 🙁 Instead, we spent the morning very productively, helping Tony clean up the lab and also making two more yarn spools. We also ordered pizza again!! Tony’s treat 🙂 THANK YOU TONY! 🍕

With the lab closed, we (obviously) couldn’t work on our project, so we’ll probably be doing more of the admin things today!

… Fortunately, Tony opened up the lab again after we had lunch, so we got to do some stuff!

Update on the Styrofoam Base

We were informed last night that the base we were trying to print in CR10 failed because of some issues with the printing nozzle 🙁 Today we requested for Tony to let us use the Extreme 2000 to print our base, and he helped us with the slicing and loaded in the print for us!! Thank you so much, Tony!

Printing our base in Extreme 2000, which would take another 18 hours.

Testing Prints, Again

Once we got hold of our embroidery machine in the lab, we couldn’t resist trying to print more things. But first, Alexis had her first go at pulling out a print from the styrofoam base!

Ozonne Clone, freed from its Styrofoam Prison!!

Mickey Mouse Ring

We replaced the pink felt with some white felt, and started printing a Mickey mouse ring that we designed for Guo Yao’s girlfriend 💑

Fusion360 file of the mickey mouse ring for Guo Yao’s girlfriend. Please apply for BTO using this <3

At first the print looked really weird, like it was printing out some sort of tentacle… because it was! For some reason our machine tried to print Ozone clone again even though we selected the Mickey mouse ring.

Timelapse of a …. Ring? Nope, it’s a stray tentacle!

We started the print again, this time making sure that the machine was actually printing the ring. The print took surprisingly long, but after one hour or so, we obtained a pretty successful print. However, without a suitable method to remove the print from the felt below, the ring we printed couldn’t really be a proper ring 🙁

Timelapse of the mickey mouse ring print!

Mickey Mouse Ring, final! Looks almost identical to the Fusion360 design, no?

Heart

After the successfully printed but not successfully removed ring, we decided to print a 3D heart (MYHARTMYSOUL.gcode) to test whether our printer could actually print in 3D!

The Fusion360 file for our 3D heart. We added fillet edges, to test whether we could see the 3D effect.

Timelapse of the heart print.

Final print of our “3D” heart.

Although it did turn out quite dense and had more volume than our 1-layer print, it can hardly be considered as three-dimensional. 🙁

Problem 2 | Solve overheating of yarn feeding stepper motor

While the heart was printing, we found a temporary solution to the overheating problem: stick a large heat sink onto the stepper motor! This helps to dissipate the heat so that the motor itself doesn’t become too hot.

Picture of the heat sink stuck onto (and blocking) the yarn feeding stepper motor, featuring Min Htoo’s penguin giving moral support again, and Ammar in the background, hard at work.

Other shenanigans while the heart was printing … !

We had a lot of down time today, since our printer pretty much works fine at this point. There was a lot of fun as we tried out Claudia’s rhythm games (on Osu!)

AND we took our first full group photo! 🎊

“西瓜甜不甜？甜！” Happy faces all around while the printer tries its hardest to print in 3D.

Our secretary, Alexis, also helped us to type out each of our technical contributions, shown below. Of course, this list was made for formality’s sake – all of us worked very closely together over the past few months on our project, so there was significant overlap in our job scopes.

A summary of the technical contributions of each member.

Bloops (the fresh fruit juicer group) also kindly gave us watermelon juice to enjoy! Thank you Bloops! 🙂

This is what we managed to accomplish today!