Tuesday, March 18, 2014

3D Printing part 5

I finally received my new laptop, so I was finally able to install Mathematica with full license. This means I'm able to export to .stl format, which is needed to communicate with MakerWare.

One of the homework assignments from class was to make an "egg carton." I decided to start with an egg holder without lid. Not really a carton, but I figure that's fair since I'm a beginner.

Although I tweaked the parameters a bit, basically my surface is z=sin(x)+sin(y). Mathematica draws it with lots of gaps, so I needed to increase PlotPoints up to 200 before it looked even close to okay. That significantly slowed down the plotting.

Once I had a plot, I exported to .stl. The syntax of the command is Export["filename",whattoexport], which took me a while to figure out, because I was too lazy to look up the help reference. In the end, I would have saved time by looking it up first.

Next I opened the file in MakerWare, which immediately asked permission to put the drawing on the platform.  Good call, I thought. It looked really tiny, so I tried scaling it up, and clicked the command to print.

The Replicator 2 makes all sorts of cute noises as it prints. I let it run for a while, but it became clear I wasn't getting good results, I think I need to level the Plexiglas surface. Try again tomorrow.

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