Lessons by Mickey van Zeijl
Fusion 360 is complicated at fisrst sight, but if you learn some basics you can acomplish a lot.
I'll show you a simpel design:
This is your zero state screen. You get this screen when you start it for the first time. The top toolbar has many making tools for 3D shapes you want to make. An the left underneath the toolbar you see your layers. The little 3D cube on the right is the surface direction your on.
If you want to make a 3D shape you first have to make a sketch, which later will be formed into a 3D object.
You will get an option for which surface direction you want to place your sketch on:
I always place it on the bottom / ground.
Now you're in sketch mode. You can choose several 3D shapes you want to make in the top toolbar. I'll choose a simple round shape
Here you can see how I made the Sketch. I pushed on the shape I wanted it to have, gave it a size and finished my sketch.
Now I'll make a 3D object:
Now you have to extrude the surface up or down with the arrow. You can also give it several extra's with the menu that appears on the right.
I gave it a height of 3 cm.
Now I'll make a sketch on the surface of the round surface and make the new sketch 'Fall in' the 3D surface.
I’ll extrude the new sketch -10mm in the round 3D surface. This is how I made my 2D (3D) Mold, but I played with the surfaces to go up or in the 3D round surface. It’s the same principle for extrude, only you put a - for it or not.
Lessons by Mickey van Zeijl
Tip: Before you start spray the glass plate of the printer in with hairspray to make the plastic stick better to the ground (glass plate).
First you pick a nice PLA color you want to use and put it on the back of the printer.
You put ont the printer, wait a little while and then click on material. You’ll have to remove the old material that is still left in the printer. So you click on remove material. Then the machine starts to warm up that material and will remove it out with the same input hole you’ll use to put the new materials in. That’s why you can’t put the new material in yet.
If you think the material has been removed you can click on ready. You can now start to insert the PLA material you want to use. Push the button which is displayed on the picture to move the material up better.
Insert the material. Push a little at the start until the machine it self will suck it up.If there comes little plastic out of the 3D printer ‘pen’ you can click stop.
Insert your SD cart en select the right file.
Start printing if you don’t have to change any settings.
So the whole class was divided in 3 groups, each group had a 3D printer and printed the same file with different materials.
Each material is different. We had 2 pLA materials and one wood based material. The two PLA materials went pretty alright. Only the woody material didn’t survived the printing process.
It became messy and the design didn’t really attached to itself.
But I did a little eye measuring and the measurements didn’t really divert from each other. Maybe one mm.
5 - 11 March 2020
Lessons by Mickey van Zeijl
This week we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the 3D printer and additive manufacturing. The 3D printer was announced as a disruptive technology, but what does this mean and is this still the case? We will think and talk about our responsibilities as makers and the impact of making objects on people, society and the environment. Why and when should we use the 3D printer and for which types of products?
In pairs, you will design and print three different molds that can be used in the open material archive. The aim of these molds is to be able to reproduce material experiments with the same mold but different materials. These molds should create textual experiments for the casted material.
Assignment 0 - with the entire group
Produce a class zine on the RISO printer together, 2 people will be editors this week. Individual contributions in the form of zine spreads (minimum 150 words + original imagery).
Reflect on what your responsibilities are as a maker/designer for making objects and the impact they have on people, society and the environment. Create your own maker manifesto. Discuss how you used this in your making process this week, and how it’s (an aspect of) this week’s work.
Assignment 1 - individual
Document the in-class assignment on your gitbook documentation page, include the tips and tricks that helped you understand Fusion 360, Cura and the 3D-printer.
Write for each mold a tutorial with instructions. Include useful images with annotations to show each step of the design and print process. Another person should be able to follow your steps and reproduce your design.
Assignment 2 - in pairs
Design and print 3 different molds for the open material archive that can be used for casting material samples.
Requirements: all 4 parts should fit on the printing bed of the Ultimaker 2 (20 x 20 cm). So each part is about 8cm x 8cm, height can vary.
Mold 1 :
2.5D Metamold object, for flexible material texture. You will print the object itself and experiment with textures for the casted material. We will use the vacuum former to create mold of the mold.
Mold 2
2.5D Metamold for casting hard material texture. This metamold will be used to create a mold by casting flexible material to create the mold. This flexible mold will be used to cast a hard material.
Mold 3
3D mold (2 parts) of a (poly)spericon or other geometric object. The design should include an airhole and a pouring hole for casting. The design should include fixtures for exact part placement, or the two parts of the mold can be nested.
If you have never worked with these programmes before, please read my little tutorial:
I started with my design and I wanted it to be simple and playful, so I added different dimensions with heights and depths.
We had normal white PLA material so we didn’t needed to change a lot of settings in Cura.
I thought I might needed support because of the heights and depths I created with this design, but the other team which we shared the printer with deleted the support at the end, but the result was perfect so I didn’t needed it after all. But what I did do was changing the speed of the printing machine to print the plastic slower, so the heights could be attached better.
But by night the printer had a meltdown or something and it all went wrong.
So we had to start over. The second time worked out and they came out perfectly!
Anoush and I tried to design a 3D Mold but we couldn’t make it and because of the time shortage and everything failing we had to grab a nice file from the internet.
We chose a cute little robot with a letter M (maybe from Makers Lab) inside! How nice!
I uploaded the file in Fusion 360 and checked if the design made any sense and if there were any mistakes in it. But the design seemed fine.
We started looking for a nice PLA material to work with, but all the PLA materials were in use. So we took the PET material. The material has a really nice blue transparant color and is a little flexible if you have one line printed or a few lines printed.
We just uploaded the file with settings for PLA materials to the printer without any setting adjustments.
Well as you can guess it went completely wrong!
We asked some help from Kaj and another team who wanted to join us on the printer. We looked the material up on the internet and found out we had to change some settings for the PET material. In Cura you’ll have to set the settings for PLA (Because there are no PET settings) with a temperature advice of 200 to 230 degrees. And 30 to 70 degrees on the built plate. The ventilator has to be on for the fully 100% and the retraction has to be off. With a printing speed of 40 to 70 mm/s.
On the printer you’ll have to adjust some settings as well. We set the ground temperature around 60, print temperature around 215 degrees and a printing speed of 50 mm/s.
But here we had a problem with the printer as well.
It was the same night as the other mold and there was a power shortage and so the 3D printer crashed.
Now there was a huge time shortage and all the printers were taken... I had lost all my hope for finishing this assignment. My dear classmate Laura managed to get a printer and asked me if I wanted to print something! I was so happy with this opportunity! She took her own white PLA material to school and printed our last mold!
The end result is amazing! Everything fits perfectly into each other.
Lessons by Mickey van Zeijl
You open Cura and will get this zero state screen.
Upload a stl file of your 3D shape you made in Fusion360.
Your shapes will appear with the size you gave them while making them in Fusion 360.
On the left you can see a side menu with different options. With there are a lot of options, but the most important ones are these:
Move your design
Re-scale your design
Rotate your design
You also have different pre-installations for the 3D machine you can adjust. Often when you let the settings on standard PLA it will be alright, but if you have really high designs or complex designs you can adjust the print settings in this menu.
If you click on the button slice Cura will calculate the estimated time. This is often the truth. If it takes too long you can check the settings again and maybe change the thickness or the time it takes.
If you want to now how your design will be printed you can slide the slides
Now save the Gcode file for the printer.
This week we had to make a zine page with our personal design manifesto.
My responsibilities as a designer
As a designer I am responsible for the things I want to happen during the use of my design.
I am responsible for the materials that will be used during the design process and the damage it costs for the environment, society and the user.
The danger of being a designer is that your design might won’t be interpreted the way it should. This means that the design is used for a different purposes. These purposes don’t fit with the designers idea of what should happen during the use of the design. If this happens, I find that the designer is not responsible for the damage or the good that occurs to the environment, the society and the user it self.
The designer can prevent this change in behaviour from the user of the design from happening by testing the design with the user. The designer can improve his design by making changes in the design based on the results of the tests. So the design won’t be interpreted in a different way.
