Martz Blog 15

Today is the last day. While I’m excited for school to be finishing up, I’m quite sad to have to leave the printers and my colleagues that have been so close to me for the last six weeks. I’m going to miss Chris and his antics, giving me crap every day for nothing in particular. Not getting to hear Austin’s super smooth voice on a daily basis will be sad. No more mid-day games of Walder-Ball are going to make every day seem bland and boring. I don’t know what I’m going to do without Chrissy stopping by on a block by block basis and illuminating our days with her cheery attitude. I’m sad to see it all come to an end. It’s been a really fun project, and I wish I could keep doing it. I’ve learned a lot, I had a great time, and I enjoyed every aspect of the entire process. When I was first stuck with this project I was expecting it to be pretty boring. With five AP classes and sailing after school every day my options were slim when it came to picking a SCORE project that I would enjoy and would fit my schedule. When Mr. Logsdon suggested this project for me and Chris and Austin, I thought it was going to be a waste of time. Boy was I wrong. I can’t think of a better way I could have spent my time on SCORE, and I was going to do it again I wouldn’t change a thing.

Martz Blog 14

Today has been by far the longest day of the entire project. I arrived at the printer room at 8:30 am with my GoPro camera to record a video of an entire printing process to be used in my final presentation and tutorial video I plan to complete by the end of the week. After spending most of the day yesterday exporting the build code for an owl using the skeinforge program, we set up the camera and started printing. The software estimated the entire process to take, at the least, five and a half hours total, giving us plenty of time to work on other projects during the day. Someone has stolen our doorstops again, so the second printer is printing more of those so we can keep the door open and air out the room. My plan is to let the camera record the entire five plus hour print of the owl and then speed up the video to condense the process into a short clip to illustrate to outsiders how the printer functions. In the meantime though, Chris, Austen, Kevin, and I ventured out to the field once again for a game of Walder-Ball using Kevin’s new glow in the dark Frisbee. Being stuck in the printer room all day is uncomfortable and at times exhausting, so being able to get out and run around is a nice change of pace. It’s just about five o’clock in the evening now, and Chris and I are still here in the room watching the owl finish up. It’s by far our biggest and coolest object to date.

Martz Blog 13

In this last week we are going crazy with big designs. The third printer has code issues and has been rendered unusable. On the first and second printers we have two large projects going. On one printer we have a rearing grizzly bear that Kevin wanted to print because it resembles the Cornell mascot, and on the other printer we have a very intricately designed Buddha statue. Both of these are really long printing processes, so in our free time we have been roaming the halls, hitting up Dunk’s for lunch, and tossing a disc on the field. When we aren’t out and about, staying in the printer room and watching the bear and Buddha being constructed is actually quite amazing. The printer is incredibly precise with all its movements and can handle the most intricate of designs. For example, the Buddha’s robe has a curvy design etched into it, and the printer handled it flawlessly. Every curl in the robe and every detail of his hands or face are nearly perfect. The more we’ve used these printers and fine tune the process, the more complex the designs can be. It’s gotten to the point where my lacking modeling skills in Google Sketchup have actually made even my cool race car look very boring and unoriginal. While just a few weeks ago we were amazed by the pawn chess piece that was a mere two centimeters tall, now we are busting out ten centimeter tall angels and bears and Buddha statues.

Martz Blog 12

No we’re moving into some of the big projects. This morning I showed up to see Kevin, who has now joined the project, working with Austin on printing a Weeping Angel statue from the British Sci-Fi show Doctor Who. The whole print is estimated by the printing program software to take upwards of five hours and take up all the available space on the printer. On the other printer, we’ve started printing another door stop because someone has been steeling them! We don’t know who, but we are pretty upset. While these two projects are working away, we are going to take a break from all this hard work and leave behind the hot, stuffy, plastic fume filled room to go play some disc on the turf field. Now that all AP tests are completed, everything has relaxed a little more. The last few weeks have been incredibly stressful with preparation for my five different tests during the two different testing weeks. I haven’t had a lot of time to be in the printer room, but now that APs are done I’ve got a lot more time during the day to be in here. And now that we’re running larger scale projects the available time we have has grown immensely. For example, when we have one printer working on the Weeping Angel for five hours and the other making door stops two hours at a time we are only getting one or two projects done each day, leaving us more free time. We are going to play some disc on the field while we wait for the angel to finish.

Martz Blog 11

Today was probably the most productive day when it comes to proving the conceptual use of the 3D printers for effective use in the classroom setting. Yesterday I designed a 100 millimeter by 100 millimeter open topped box in Google Sketchup to be used for storing all the little trinkets we’ve built in the last couple weeks. With that beginning to print I shifted focus towards exploring the more artistic and architectural side of using the 3D printers. Chris and Austin have been downloading cool spheres and modern art designs from Thingiverse.com, but I want to begin designing my own stuff. During the long printing process of the box, I designed another cone, a pyramid, a simple house, and a sphere. Today I printed out the pyramid and sphere and during those prints I designed a basic looking ancient Greek monument. When that completed printing, I noticed there was a major flaw in the design. The base of the triangular roof above the columns was horizontal with no support, and the bottom layers of the roof drooped really badly. When there are large overhangs, the plastic doesn’t cool quickly enough, so we need to avoid overhangs. I fixed this issue in my second edition of the acropolis monument by eliminating the flat bottom to the roof and replacing it with an angled inside. Angles allow for the layers to build on each other and there is no more overhang, and therefore no more drooping. We’ve made immense progress since day one.

Martz Blog 10

We finally figured it out! After spending a solid three quarters of an hour comparing the skeinforge settings on both computers one and two to find out what the difference was and why one printer had a lined base layer and one didn’t, we found the source of our troubles. It turns out under the raft window there was a check box at the bottom that we had overlooked. The base layer is called the raft, and on one computer it was applied and one the other it was not. Now we have decided to apply the raft on both skeinforge settings because the printer that had been using the raft was much better than the other. Both printers are working exceptionally well now that the raft is applied to both. We have no more issues with the bases sliding, and now that we’ve increased the temperature on the heat bed there isn’t any curling on the base layers any more. With both printers running well we are busting out 3D printed objects like nobody’s business. We’ve made another TARDIS, two door stops to keep the door open, some more rocket bases, a surfboard wax comb, some coins with sloths on them, a twisted cylinder, and a three piece puzzle. Tomorrow we are going to spend the day working with Dustin and Brady again to print original designs only instead of downloaded designs. Brady is using Google Sketchup to design houses as a part of his SCORE project, so he has a couple of designs ready to print.