Tales of Many 3D printers #tbt

[post under construction]

Is there such a thing as too many 3D printers?  I contemplated this over the weekend, as Facebook "memories' reminded me that I purchased my Makerbot Replicator 1 exactly three years ago. Looking around my classroom, I realized I have owned 10 3D printers. So, on this anniversary of sorts, I present: Where are they now?

1 Original Printer bot

[pic of printer in bin]

2. maker bot rep 1

3. Cube
Our first Cube performed great until a problem forced us to replace it. The replacement also worked well, at least until it caught fire.

4. Printerbot (donated to BHS)

5. Printerbot simple metal
Gifted by Printerbot before maker fair 2014, the kids abandoned it, and it now resides Sam.

6. Droplit
We got this as a kit that some Maker Club kids assembled. Unfortunately, the kids that put it together forgot to document the process, and it now sits in a corner. We plan to start repairs after Maker Faire, but until then, it will remain in it's corner, starring down on those who abandoned it.

7. Afinia
The Afinia is the most reliable printer we have used to date. The print quality good, but the rafts are hard to get off. It currently is suffering from a clogged extruder, and will be fixed soon.

8. maker bot rep 1
We got this one for 90$ at a maker clearance event brand new. It worked fine for a while, but there is currently

9. maker bot rep 1
This was also from the clearance event, and was also brand new.

10. Buko bot
We the Bukobot got to act as a more "kid friendly" printer (also because it could print upside down), but there is something wrong, and cannot move on the z axis, and will make grinding noises if attempted.


Others (add to the list)
2 Cetus
1 bioprinter (school purchase)
3 Ultimakers (school purchase)

Newest:
Prusa mini (back-ordered)

The Forgotten Dream: Our Glowforge Arrives! (PART 1)

Back in October 2015, we pre-ordered the Glowforge. We, and other Glowforge potential owners repeatedly received delay-of-shipment emails, to the point where many people began to jump ship.

The space had been taped off for so long and it had become a joke. Someone wrote "The forgotten dream," back in 2016, and earlier this year, someone else added "We will love love u and cherish u what scared u away?" We still don't know who wrote these messages.

And then, we received "the" email.

Thursday, October 19th

On Friday, November 3, the box arrived. (Teacher's note: Friday was parent-teacher conferences, so there weren't any kids to freak out with. I sent them an email, but it wasn't quite the same.")

Sunday, November 5, we assembled for the unboxing.

We made the same mistake we make every time we open a box with something expensive in it: we cut the tape and then realized we had opened it wrong. We carefully turned it on its side and took the laser cutter out. Looking at the unboxing guide, with the link conveniently located inside the box, we found that we shouldn't have even cut that tape.

Once we got everything out of the box, we removed the protective foam and assembled the "print head."

We cut out some cardboard to seal the window we were venting the exhaust through, and set up a table near the window. Then we plugged it in and turned on the machine. It worked as expected, making some bubbling noises from the water-cooling system. The setup process was super simple and only required us to connect it to the school's WiFi before we could start making things from their web based software (that can run on a Chromebook!).

Someone drew a simple not-so-accurate square on a piece of paper and placed it in the machine so that we could scan it. We scanned it and then put some acrylic in the machine. When we went to cut, we ran into a problem.

Here's the thing: the Glowforge was so popular because of how easy it is to use. In order to make it this simple, they made their own material presets. These material presets are only for their "proofgrade materials," which means we can't cut with our own materials. They do have a way that you can set it yourself, but the controls are very ambiguous and you can't save presets. We also didn't have our introductory proofgrade material kit, it came the day after.

So, we estimated, choose only to engrave, and ended up with this >>>

Ultimaker 2 Go Disassembly and Reconstruction

Back in April, our Ultimaker 2 Go stopped extruding.  This is not unusual.  The standard procedure is to take a look at the extruder and maybe unload and reload the filament, checking for errors. Unfortunately, one of our students decided it would be a good idea to take the entire 3d printer apart. The student took apart the entire extruder and, in the process, broke the temperature sensor and the heater cartage.

The Broken Temperature Sensor and the Heater Cartage

Despite our teacher's constant reminders to document, there was no documentation, except photos that were lost (the photos in this post were taken after the disassembly).  After disassembly, what used to be a 3d printer extruder looked like this: 

Disassembled Extruder

So, we were left to reassemble a broken 3D printer with very little documentation and no recollection of "what happened."  The Ultimakers came with an extra "Hot End Pack," which includes a temperature sensor, a nozzle block, and various other extruder related parts.  At first, we thought this would solve the problem. But ends up the pack did not come with a heater cartridge, so we were stuck. The Dynamism site (where we first ordered the printer) sold only a few, more consumable, parts--and not the parts that students might destroy. 

Luckily, Ultimaker support eventually clued us in to the fbrc8 Ultimaker warranty site. This was VERY helpful! We found a heater cartridge and ordered one.  

Back in the classroom, we replaced the broken temperature sensor with the one from the "Hot end pack" and the heater cartridge from the fbrc8 warranty site using this fbrc8 resource: Changing Heater Cartridge And Temp Sensor (2GO).  We had to open the bottom of the Ultimaker to plug the heater cartridge back in. It was good practice in reading the instructions very carefully!

Finally, for reassembly, we followed the Changing Parts In The Print Head steps for disassembly and reassembly, even though most of our parts were already... ahem... disassembled. We also used the instructions: hot end assembly | hot end disassembly

Eventually we reassembled everything and were proud of our efforts when it printed flawlessly once again!

- Reuben (8th grade)

From After School Making to School Maker Faire

On May 26th, BPC had its first official School Maker Faire. (We've done unofficial "micro-maker faires" in the past.) What started as something we did in an after school club three years ago (making) has now fully infiltrated seventh grade science!

The kids made bath bombs and henna, build a giant cardboard tank and a very tiny metal foundry, constructed a duct tape hammock, figured out dual extrusion, and even turned old tires into seats! For a list of all the student projects, visit our school STEAM blog. 

Screen Printing for Awareness

I Screen Printed onto old shirts to raise awareness for the LGBTQ+ and mental illness communities. I noticed that representation in the media of the LGBTQ+ community is sparse, and there is almost no representation of people who fight with mental illnesses. Seeing yourself represented in the media can change someone's outlook, make them feel hopeful, and can show them that they are not alone. Lack of representation can isolate groups of people and I wanted to combat this problem with creativity. At first I wanted to make a clothing line, however time and material constraints proved that to be unfeasible so I decided to try screen printing. I had never screen printed before, so I had to learn from Wikihow. I started out by coming up with phrases to ink onto the shirts, for instance “Dear Homophobes; Boo!”.

(Image from the school Maker Faire taken by Ms.Mytko)

I tried cutting out the phrases, however this was challenging to do with scissors. I decided to try printing it out first, then using an exacto knife to trace the lines. This worked well but it still wasn't time efficient. I finally attempted to laser cut my design, this was not only time efficient but it was also a great learning experience. I cut old undershirts and screen printed my phrases onto them. This project costs around 45 dollars for the baseline materials but it can fluctuate significantly for the unnecessary materials.

I learned that it's okay for there to be small mistakes and sometimes those mistakes can improve the style of the shirt. I would enjoy marketing this into a business on Etsy, I will continue to screen print at home and I will possibly sell some shirts. If you are interested in this project make sure you set the ink into the shirt before you take off the screen, this will ensure better quality prints. Don’t give up when the ink smears, or doesn't come off, you can always go over your design with an ink dipped pencil. If you don't focus  on the mistakes, but rather on the quality parts of your print, you will end up a lot happier!

This is the Wikihow site that was incredibly helpful in teaching me how to screen print: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Screen-Print#With_an_Embroidery_Hoop_sub

3D Printed Gears Using Dual Extrusion

For our school maker project (in science class), we wanted to create something that kids everywhere would be interested in using, and we also brainstormed different ways to spread our creations beyond the school to reach a wider audience.  We wanted to use our knowledge of 3D printing.  As we saw the rise of fidget products all over our school and all over the country, we realized that we had found our project: we decided to 3D print some fidget spinners that we designed ourselves out of recyclable filament.  There were some technical challenges that we experienced: for instance, the design we created ended up with some overhangs, which you can see in the image above.  To deal with this, we decided to use dissolvable support material to hold them up. We also had to make a decision about what printer to use of the ones available to us at school.  We chose to use a Replicator 1st Gen because of its dual extrusion capabilities, and this served us pretty well.


At first we were just making very colorful objects with two different colors of filament. We made this two color frog, along with some other things. After making a few multi-color prints, we quickly realized that this printer wasn't made just for printing with different colors. There must be some other reason that they made a dual extrusion printer. After doing some research, we found out about dissolvable filament. With dissolvable filament we would be able to make very complicated prints and dissolve the support material in limonene. One of the biggest problems with 3D printing is that you can't get support material out of very small places. With dissolvable filament, it was also possible to make moving parts in one print. Our first test was to make this gear thingy. We then decided we wanted to make more, and designed a different two geared fidget. However, we had a problem, the sides were not fully connected and the model often broke. We redesigned it, and it look something like this:

2.0 coming out of a tub of water after getting soaked in Lemonine

We used TinkerCAD because of its very straightforward design software that all of our group members knew how to use and the fact that we could use geometric shapes very easily along with the community shape generators.

To get started with our project, we started out with a simple dual geared fidget because we had no experience making this type of project before. Starting simple was helpful, and we later were able to get more complicated and make things like triple gears and quad gears.

One of our greatest challenges was when one part of the 3D printer we were using broke. We were able to re-3D print this part but it was a bit of a hold up. We also had to come up with a way to fix the windows for our 3D printer because our print’s kept peeling and we needed to stop drafts from reaching the heated build plate.

Elan fixing The Replicator

Throughout this process we learned not to rely on machines because machine failure is common. We also learned that even if you are using a very baseline software, you can still make amazing creations with it, it just may require more work.

If we wanted to continue this project, we could create more gear designs using ball bearings. This would be hard though because we might have to not print the gears as one piece so we could insert them, or we would have to put them in mid print.

Our advice for other people who do this project is to start early and use a web based software (like tinkercad.com) so that they will be able to access and change their project from different places.

An estimated cost of materials in this project (not including the 3D printer) is about $40 because of the fact that the slicer and the design program (Tinkercad) were both free, so the only costs we had to cover were filament (ABS and HIPS) and electricity. This $40 could cover many, many gears, because they are almost hollow and therefore very efficient with the material.

Rolls of ABS and HIPS

To learn more about dissolvable filament check out this on MakerBot’s website.

One day while we were waiting for a set of gears to print we chose to make a website at www.thegearmakers.wixsite.com/gearmakers. Through our project we had to fix the Replicator about six times and replace some parts. By the end we had created four production lines. And already finished two of them (dual geared basic and dual geared +). We thought that with four different products to choose from we had finally done what we had meant to the whole time, we had finished with our fidget production.

Our 3D Data From the Advanced Light Source - an Update and VR!

Data Visualization Animation of Student Scanned Sample - a Claw!

The Advanced Light Source is a synchrotron, a facility that speeds up and then bends an electron beam to produce high energy x-rays. The x-rays are used by scientists to image different samples. The 8th and 7th graders at our school have gone to the ALS for the past two years and participated in different projects, including x-ray tomography and crystallography.

Data Visualization - a Feather

Based on these experiences, I wanted to delve more deeply into 3D data visualization.  In particular, I have sought to learn how to use Avizo, which allows much more advanced image processing than FIJI (the open source alternative).  One big obstacle was cost: an Avizo license sells for $5000 -- with the education discount.  I emailed Avizo and requested -- and received -- a free trial.  When I looked online for video tutorials on how to use Avizo, I could only find one or two videos. During the trial, I made several tutorial videos of my own.  I then asked Avizo to extend my trial for as long as I continue producing high-quality tutorials. They agreed and it has been a great partnership. I have now made 15 videos, which are hosted on my YouTube channel.  Currently, my tutorials have over 3,500 views and 9,450 minutes watched. 

Our School Director Trying Google Cardboard

Working our booth at the 2015 San Mateo Maker Faire, I was able to explore other makers' work and became interested in Google Cardboard, a virtual reality viewer that uses cardboard, a few lenses, and a cell phone (and app) for viewing. I saw an opportunity to use the Cardboard to display the 3D models of our class data from the Advanced Light Source in a way that would foster a compelling learning experience. I asked the people at Google’s booth if I could have the extra Google Cardboards at the end of the Faire. They agreed. When I returned home with the Cardboards, I did some research and found an app called InsiteVR, which I have used to display the models. I started off sharing the project with my teachers and fellow students.

Meeting with Scientists at the ALS

Soon after, I contacted Dula Parkinson, a beamline scientist at ALS who has been a critical supporter of both our school's work and my independent projects.  We met and talked and he is now planning to put Google Cardboards in the lobby of the Advanced Light Source to showcase for the public the amazing imaging work that is done at the ALS!

I also played around with OpenDive, "free DIY 3D VR glasses by using your 3D printer, a non-commercial project by Stefan Welker" and was able to print out my own set on our school's Makerbot!

Dive printed and ready to be assembled - just add cell phone!

I plan to continue my data visualization work and since its announcement in May 2015, have been interested in learning more about working with Google's Jump! 

- Sam S (9th grader in the fall, BPC Maker Club intern)

Our New Cube Take #4

Our new cube recently started malfunctioning again. We saw that filament was coming out at 1.52mm instead of something closer to .4mm. Luckily we still had our old Cube that we have yet to return (oops) - that one has a malfunctioning control board. Since the extruder on that old Cube still worked we thought why don't we try to replace our new cube's extruder.

We took this project to our after school 6th grade 3D printing club. Where we started, trying to figure out how to get the extruders off. As it turns out the extruder is only attached by 2 screws that we could easily take off. We took off both extruders 1 from each cube 2 and swapped them to create a FrankenCube. We tested it out and it worked.

6th grader's Blinky Badge on Instructables! (ready to check)

I love Star Trek so I decided to make a Star Trek communicator badge. I started by cutting the shape out of cardboard and putting an LED on it. but it kept falling off so I tried some other things. When I made a version that worked, I wrote some instructions for it on Instructables.
My Instructable

BPC Maker Club Shares our Makerspace at Cool Tools 2015!

Today, BPC Maker Club embarked on a different kind of presentation.  Different than the Maker Faire or Bay Area Science Festival, where we met with people of all ages, and different than the 3DPW Expo, where we were networking with companies, CUE Cool Tools 2015 was a workshop for teachers.

We highlighted a few of our maker projects in school.  You can see our presentation here:

Then allowed for lots of small-group, hands-on time for teachers to learn more about MaKey MaKeys, Scratch, Lilypad sewable electronics and 3D printing. 

(Students, add your reflections here)

"I agree!" - Ms. Mytko

Science Fair with 3D Printing and Augmented Reality!

It's about that time again.  This Thursday will be our school science fair.  Last year, I was so pleased to see 3D printing used as a tool in a number of the projects. Not because it was required, or a special 3D printing class, but because it was there and allowed students to create the objects they needed for a specific purpose.  This year is no different.

This year features:

1) Another 3D printed drone body.  Although, unlike last year's downloaded files, these parts were designed by 7th graders using TinkerCAD.  As an added bonus, the kids took advantage of their classmate's recent headway with ditto printing to speed the process along.

Perhaps equally impressive are the clamps one girl downloaded, printed and assembled for her use while building the drone.

making clamps

2) Pinhole camera (pic on its way!)

3) Hair straighteners - this was one of the more disturbing projects (visually!)  Using supposedly "real human hair" (from Amazon) this group was studying the effect of different straightening techniques on the strength of hair. They used heat, but also wanted to use magnetism and dry ice (hey, it's 7th grade), so they needed to custom design their own handles to hold the magnets and dry ice. For these ladies, it was their first time using TinkerCAD and the 3D printer.



4) Gliders - This group began by downloading files on Thingiverse to do some preliminary background research, but quickly moved to designing their own wings.  Starting off in TinkerCAD, they eventually decided to move to Fusion360.  The best part?  ONe boy taught HIMSELF how to use the 3D printer.  Because he could. :)



5) Insect maze (pic on its way!)

This year, we intend to include augmented reality into our traditional trifold boards, like last year. Unlike last year (when we had only heard of AR for the first time 10 days before the fair), we've had time to learn more about Aurasma in general and will be using Aurasma Studio, rather than the more expedient, but less flexible app method.

While we had hoped to master the process of creating 3D models (ex) using Maya to incorporate into Aurasma (therefore allowing students to display v1 and v2, etc of their projects) we are happy to simply include student videos again.

We'll keep you posted!

BPC at the 3D Printer World Expo

Here is a brief overview of our experience at 3DPW - more to be added soon, but homework and science fair is taking up most of our time right now!

This past weekend, the BPC Maker Club was excited to be part of 3D Printer World Expo in Burbank, CA.  3DPW is currently the only 3D printing conference in the country (world?) that allows kids under the age of 18.  

Last year, we were attendees (post 1, post 2) and realized that there was a lot of talk about how 3D printing was being used with students... without the voices of any actual kids!  This summer we contacted Bob Tisch, one of the organizers of the conference, and he agreed to find space for our kids to share their work.  We were told that a seminar space would not work, since "one of the vendors" already had that claimed (more** on this later) so we were generously offered a booth space on the Expo floor - right next to many companies we know and admire.  It may have been way in the corner, but we were thrilled to even be on the map!  (See us there, in the upper left hand corner of the map?!)

BPC Maker Club at our 3DPW booth!

We left after lunch on Thursday and flew down to Burbank just in time for the opening reception. The 8th grade boys did enjoy the fancy, open buffet!

Friday morning, we were in the elevator, heading down to the Expo floor, when we ran into John Westrum, from Afinia**.  He was the vendor that was speaking at the seminar "Enhancing Education Curriculum Through 3D Printing."  John is somewhat familiar with our work, having run into Ms. Mytko at a number of previous conferences, and was very excited to see up there.  Then he very generously offered to shorten his presentation and give us half his time slot to speak at the seminar.  We were happy to oblige.

Jane during the Q & A at "Enhancing Education Curriculum Through 3D Printing"

Ms. Mytko describes our 8th grade 3D printing project

That afternoon, we also met a number of folks from 3DSystems / Gentle Giants Studio, located nearby in Burbank.  They called the studio and arranged a tour for us!

Action figures at Gentle Giants Studio

BPC kids hanging out with Jabba the Hutt at Gentle Giant Studio

The EPIC scanning studio - sweet!

(We were not allowed to take photos in the 3D printing room, but it was incredible.)

Chillin in the conference room at Gentle Giant Studio

We also met a teacher and STEAM coordinator, Markos, that offered to give us a tour of his makerspace.  He heard us speak at the seminar and said we are "where he was two years ago."  From the looks of his awesome space, we will take that as a compliment!

Some of us went to seminars occasionally, but mostly we hung out at our booth and talked... and talked.  And networked with big companies.  We will write more about our Expo floor adventures soon!