Kossel Clear Assembly

The Kossel Clear from Blue Eagle Labs (ABS Kit)

For the assembly of the Kossel Clear we took pictures and logged all the bags inside the box and the assembly of the printer began.

One thing we were concerned about was over tightening the screws which could very easily make the nice acrylic crack.

– Construction of 2 of the 3 bottom corners2/3 Sides of the Bottom Bracket

-Completed base

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-Mounted power supply unit

 

Power Supply-Mounted Arduino

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Problems we encountered

-On the last bar of the base it was a bit difficult to line up the nuts. We found that it helped to have two people and have each person on a nut to do both sides at the same time.

Put the three vertical beam on, mounted the sensor and assembled the top bracket.

-Attached the three vertical beams

-Mounted the sensor

-Assembled the top bracket

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Note: We used m3 10mm for ball joints of arm

 

-The video told us to mount the sensor on one way but the google groups suggested mounting it on the other way so we did.

We have soldered the wires to the sensors, built the belt holder, put the top bracket on, and attached the three arms. We have also  assembled the extruder. Also, we have attached the wires to the board.

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IMG_1796IMG_1807After a couple of weeks of construction,this was the final result.

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Tiny Home Design

For Science and Tech we had the task of researching and designing a tiny home. A tiny home is a really small house, usually for one or two people to live in. The main benefits of a tiny home is the low price in comparison to a regular house, because they are smaller. They can vary in price depending on their size, but from what we have seen in our research they tend to be quite cheap.

Before we designed our tiny home, our group (the two of us) decided that we would print out our tiny home. In order to make this happen, we did the research on CADs (Computer Aided Design) and planned it out on paper. We then went on to populate it with furniture and estimate the costs. First we designed the general structure of our building, then put in the furniture (which looks like a bunch of rectangular prisms).  We made sure that when we designed it digitally, we used a CAD that we knew we would save in a file type that would be compatible with our slicer.

The CAD we decided to use was FreeCAD, because it was free and open source, but mainly because it was free.  Since we aren’t exactly CAD experts our design was pretty basic.  As you can see in the picture below (If you use your imagination you might be able to see the fridge and some cabinets).

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After a few hours of work between each of us, we finished our design. Once that was taken care of we saved it as a mesh file so that we could slice it. After slicing our design and scaling it down to a reasonable size so that it would fit on the print bed, we ended up printing it in PLA on the Ditto+. It took somewhere between 30mintues to an hour to print and turned out pretty well.

After inspecting the print, I was surprised to see how well the arch above the doorway worked out. Neither of us had even thought about the possibility of it being a problem until we saw that it had worked. That’s a quick summary of our process for our tiny home design.

3D Printer Nozzle Problem

A few days ago while we were changing the filament on one of the printer at for an open house, we realized that the nozzle was clogged with filament that had broken inside the nozzle. Upon realizing this, we tried a simple nozzle clearing technique.

This technique requires binging the printer to temperature so that the filament inside the nozzle would melt. When the printer gets to temperature, you use some filament to push the rest remaining filament out of the nozzle clearing the path for the new filament. The entire process should be repeated a few times to ensure that the nozzle is clear.

To our dismay, this did not work. The filament inside the nozzle did not even budge. Since it didn’t work the first time, we tried a second time except with some tip cleaning tools, which still did nothing. So at this point we are unsure what to do, we plan on getting a new nozzle because that is all we can think of.