-
EZR struder teardown
08/26/2021 at 18:14 • 0 commentsIt's surprising how little 3D printer owners document how their overpriced addons work. The 3D printing industry is like the mafia where everyone wants to sell an addon, but no-one wants to reveal what's inside & it's priced like it's made of gold. It might be like that because 3D printer owners can print their own copy of whatever is being sold, so sellers have to be extra cautious about revealing anything.
The lion kingdom's EZR struder gave no material improvement in printing TPU. Its only advantage was a knob for manually turning the extruder, which always falls off. It didn't work with the softest TPU which was 1.7mm. It only worked with a harder TPU which was 1.8mm:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08KT5RZMP/
The more constrained path isn't all that constrained & similar results can be obtained by printing an extruder. The best results may come from a bondtech extruder.
Before the EZR, the lion kingdom printed some constrained extruder paths.
There was using a piece of PTFE to extend the constrained path.
There was also printing a complete constrained path & grinding it down to fit between the idler pulley.
The lion kingdom has found a similar lack of teardowns when embarking on automatic bed leveling. The BLtouch/3Dtouch is similarly overpriced.
-
OpenSCAD
02/21/2021 at 02:31 • 0 commentsLions started making procedural models using FreeCAD's own python bindings, but OpenSCAD has emerged as the tool of choice for making procedural models. This is after phases where it was sketchup, tinkercad, & fusion 360. The reason might be fusion 360 being on a path to becoming more & more crippled for unpaying users, google abandoning sketchup right after acquiring it, & tinkercad not being functional enough. When the lion kingdom was getting started with CAD modeling in 2018, the Freecad GUI was like a brick wall while it was much easier to make models programatically. In older age & with more complicated models, a GUI has proven easier, though.
A purely programmatic CAD modeler would be good for very simple models with 3D printable dimensions, Z lengths in multiples of layer height, overhangs at 45 degrees. It would have been the way to go, 40 years ago when confusers weren't fast enough to have an interactive 3D model. There were libraries for drawing 3D graphics in BASIC, which would be equivalent to OpenSCAD. Most modern programming languages are what used to be libraries. Why we switched from creating libraries to inventing a new programming language for every set of functions is another phenomenon.
Lions evolved to using 2 methods for procedural models: python bindings for FreeCAD & generating 1 face at a time in native C. Complicated models like an isogrid cylinder
could only be modeled by creating individual faces in C. It was too slow to do with Freecad python bindings or even native python. Unfortunately, Freecad can't do any booleans with these models so there's still a desire to optimize the output of Freecad python.
-
Filament stash
12/30/2020 at 19:46 • 0 commentsDespite every attempt, the lion kingdom ended up with a growing filament stash. Some filament ends up unprintable, like Matterhackers PRO TPU. It all takes so long to order, every filament type needs 2 rolls. Lions have spent $160 on filament since the journey began, with $120 accounted for here.