3D Printing Tips and Tricks #1

Layer Height is Key to Good Prints

Over the last few years my Lulzbot AO-100 has been good to me, and has served as my workhorse. Unfortunately, as with every machine, heavy use equates to wear and tear. At just over 3-years old my AO-100 is starting to show its age, and its tolerances are not as tight as they once were. This morning I took about an hour to work on re-calibrating the printer with the main focus on proper Z-axis layer-height.  [node:read-more:link]

3D Printed Stand for 7" BB View and BeagleBone Black

While working on a series of projects for Element14 I found the need to mount a 7-inch BB View Touchscreen LCD to something that would easily allow for development around the screen. A quick search on Thingiverse yeilded me several BeagleBone Black cases, but only one stand for the 7-inch BB View Touchscreen LCD. Fortunately this mounting solution was exactly what I was looking for! It allowed me to mount the screen at an angle for better desktop viewing, as well as providing a mount behind the screen for the BeagleBone Black and the BB View Cape. I printed the entire mount in a plate on my Lulzbot AO-100. Total printing time was about an hour with a 0.35 layer height and an average print speed of 60mm/sec. Infill was set to 0.60 and support was turned on at default settings in Slic3r.  [node:read-more:link]

I knew that I would be doing a ton of recording and live broadcasting of prints on my Lulzbot AO-100, infact I purchased a second Microsoft LifeCam Studio to serve as a dedicated printer cam. At first I thought a simple mini tripod would get the job done, but quickly found that not to be the case. Prints that had decent head travel, and very few tight infil spaces did fine, but when the infil got tight and the head had to change directions repeadly very fast, the whole table shook. This caused the webcam to display a "wavy" video and even cause the top heavy mini tripod to walk off the table a few times. So I decided to design a solid mount that would secure the webcam to the printers base.  [node:read-more:link]