Delivery No.1 - Build blog of the first V1.0 Peachy Printer in the Wild

[amoose136]

Re: the wet prints, if you're using makerjuice resin, I have some and had the same problem with the finish in my first tests of it. If its oxygen causing problem as Rylan suggested and as it may well be, here's something I'll be trying as soon as it's sunny here again: dissolve vitamin c in tub of water, submerge print in tub of water, place tub of water containing print in direct sun for 30 minutes. Vitamin C dissolved in water should form weak absorbic acid which is a reducing agent to remove any weakly bonded oxygen that may be at the surface layers (a few microns probably). The water also keeps it oxygen free so it can now cure in the sun. If this method doesn't fix it I suspect the problem is something else beside oxygen.

[rylangrayston]

wow cool great idea ... on this topic we once placed a glass plate over the bottom container and then filled the aria above the resin with propane... an wow The resin was many times more sensitive! ... yet when we placed pure oxygen gas above the resin we could hardly get it to cure at all.

[Builder1]

I did a talk today on 3D printing with a focus on the preachy printer. It went great!!

I did a small demo as well. In order to have it go well, I decided it was time to crazy glue the y-axis galvo. I used the tiniest amount in two spots. It should be easy to break it apart if required.
I didn't do a print job (too much stuff to drag around and setup/tear down) but I did run the test patterns on the glow paper.

Proof positive: This printer works !!

I will be doing some more prints, designing some new parts and exploring the design of an add-on.

As always... more to come ;-)

[CescoAiel]

wow cool great idea ... on this topic we once placed a glass plate over the bottom container and then filled the aria above the resin with propane... an wow The resin was many times more sensitive! ... yet when we placed pure oxygen gas above the resin we could hardly get it to cure at all.

You could also try to use a heavier than air (semi)inert gas like CO2, as that would remain in the container (assuming not too much draft/wind across the container) by itselft, and have less of a chance of explosions!

[Builder1]

I spent some time last night and today creating a couple 3D models with Cheetah 3D v7b16 using primitive shapes connected together (I'm a total nubie at 3D modelling).


From there, I exported them to an STL file and opened it in Cura.
I haven’t been impressed with having to fudge Cura with 10x scaling and tilting the model to get surfaces. Cura has proven to be a total pain in the @$$ !! The missing surfaces problem plus bugs in/poor design of the drawing path have forced me to find a new slicer. I’ll get to that in a bit.


I have my Peachy setup on it’s mount over glow paper. I’ll slice a file and open it in the Peachy software and “print” it to the glow paper. This is proving to be a fantastic way to test the printer quickly with no mess or fuss.


I had to do numerous iterations between my modeller and the sliced file in Cura. Cura kept doing weird stuff to certain parts of my model. I had one spot where I used a boolean subtraction using 3 cylinders to cut a hole through three overlapping parts (1 cylinder per part. There’s probably a better way to do this). When opened in Cura, this hole would be mangled. the inner surface would look like it was a badly scanned point cloud. Not much of a surface !


Back to the modeller. I replaced a primitive, a boolean & a cylinder, with a tube primitive. I then set the inner surface of the tube to be slightly smaller than the other cylinders used in the booleans. Opened that up in Cura and I now had a nice smooth inner surface :-)


I exported this gcode file from Cura and printed it out. All I got was overlapping shells of each part (in their appropriate places). I forgot to tilt it in Cura so the surfaces were dropped. I reopened it and tilted it. Back to Peachy software for the print. WOW !!! Totally mangled !!!! 2/3rds of my model DIDN’T EVEN PRINT !!!! …and the routing was redonk-ulous !! Successive adjustments and rotation changes did not make this any better. That was it. I was done with this crap…. Time for a new slicer. (Remember....this is a BRIEF recount!! I F$@&$D with this a LOT !!)


Slic3r
http://slic3r.org
I downloaded a couple slicer programs and tried them out quickly. I didn’t do a print with them as there were things I didn’t like and tried another programs…. until I found Slic3r. It is free and open source. It also runs on Mac, PC and Linux. It’s interface is straight forward like Cura's.


Now I didn’t explore Cura that much but there were a few things i didn’t see in Cura that I wanted. My list as such: No more tilting!, Intelligent path routing, no more over scaling, Infill and adjustable Rafts. I got all of this with Slic3r and a simple UI too. As a bonus, Slic3r finds and auto fixes geometry problems with your STLs. Opening my file in Slic3r showed 64 errors fixed! Sweet !


Using the setup instructions for Cura on the Peachy forum ( http://peachyprinter.ipbhost.com/ind...-printer-cura/ ) I configured Slic3r.


Once configured, I opened my STL in Slic3r and exported the gcode. Opening it in the Peachy software worked as expected. I reset the scale option in the Peachy software back 1.0 rather than 0.1 as it was compensating for Cura’s goofiness.


Print Success !!!
As far as test prints on glow paper are concerned, this was the best test i did all day !!! And what a HUGE DIFFERENCE too !!! I had a properly scaled model, surfaces that printed, infilled spaces, a small raft for anchoring to the print base and REALLY Intelligent path routing !!! The best quality test I had ever seen so far AND it only took 6 minutes to print !!! There may still be settings to adjust but it’s looking really good so far !!

I'll have some pics up when I get to it.
More to come…

[curious aardvark]

weird how different cad programs produce stls that behave differently with different slicers.

Got to say that so far openscad has just produced perfect solid models that work in all the slicers I've tried.

Mind you i can see how people can get the idea openscad is complicated.

Looked at a script on thingiverse this morning. Was very long made abslutely no sense at all to me and produced a model I can do in about six lines of script with nothing but simple arithmetic.

Does slic3r come with a proper 3d interface yet ?
have to admit the standard 2d layout didn't work for me and having to launch a seperate window every time I wanted the 3d view was really annoying.

[Builder1]

Slic3r's UI is quite simple and elegant and has "3D" , "2D", "Preview" and "Layers" tabs for viewing. I'll post pics very soon.
I found it VERY useful while trying to setup the "Print Settings". I could made a change or 2 and then click "Plater" and see exactly what changed. It made it super easy to explore the options for infill and rafts especially.

Slic3r_In_Action
https://s5.postimg.org/whh1mb0wj/Slic3r_In_Action.png


Filament_Settings
https://s5.postimg.org/pyo79dopf/Slic3r_Filament_Settings.png


Print_Settings
https://s5.postimg.org/b3zlv7f4j/Slic3r_Print_Settings.png


Printer_Settings1
https://s5.postimg.org/qqqv8kswj/Slic3r_Printer_Settings1.png


Printer_Settings2
https://s5.postimg.org/x5pw58zmb/Slic3r_Printer_Settings2_png.png

[amoose136]

Try giving Craftware a shot.

[quertz]

Hey guys
As far as I know Slic3r and Cura are the most used Slicers.
Slic3r is "the original" slicer that was developed with the first 3D printers and has just about every setting that exists => might be confusing
Cura should be simpler but with more hidden options.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USA29CuYOvk

This is a video from Maker's Muse comparing the most popular silcers, its very good!

quertz

[Builder1]

I added some more pics.
These are pictures of an actual model I made in Cheetah 3D, sliced in Slic3r and "printed" on glow paper with the Peachy.

Print 1

https://s5.postimg.org/osbxlujir/Print_1.jpg


Print 2

https://s5.postimg.org/hqilde5ar/Print_2.jpg


Print 3

https://s5.postimg.org/878wjxhsj/Print_3.jpg


Print 4

https://s5.postimg.org/8y1mppk5v/Print_4.jpg