06: 3D Design & Printing

Lab July 17th, 2019

In class this Tuesday we were introduced to the infamous world of 3D printing and design. We watched three demos about different aspects of 3D printing including 3D printing scanned objects. We were told about the different kinds of 3D printing, and learned what the limitations of 3D printing were. Turns out 3D printing isn't as versatile as many believe it to be. We also got a quick look at how the 3D printers process designs as g-code after being put through a slicer. Our assignment for our next lab was to 3D print a small design in preferably less than twenty minutes. Given a few tutorials and otherwise a lot of freedom we were left to create a design using Fusion 360. I originally had created a coin like design that had a few holes and an H in the center by following one of the tutorials, but this design would have taken ages to print. The shortest amount of time I got it to was still six and a half hours, so I decided to scrap that design. Instead I made a small little "o" shape. This design ended up on the other end of the time limitation as it only took four minutes. I decided to print it just to see what it was like.

This is what my design looked like in the slicer we used called "Cura":

This is a time lapse of my design being 3d printed on one of the Prusa machines:

This is what my design ended up looking like, and for referance that second photo is my design next to my finger nail.

After experimenting a little more with a new design I created a new ellipse shaped container like design in the hopes I would use it to hold my arduino in my final project, but this is most likely not the way to go as it would take forever to 3D print. Instead I decided that for my final project Iwould 3D print some decorations to fit the theme of my tank which is Miami. In the sketch below you can see very crude drawings of somethings that represent Miami including Dominoes, Casa Cuba, Azucar, some palm trees, the Miami Beach sign, and some other things from home.

This is what my larger container piece looked like next to my original piece:

Here is my sketch for my tank decorations:

Here's a sketch for a potential building:

Click to download my STL file