Bat House Project

[reality_boy]

While waiting on the new temperature sensors I thought I would do a little bit of a design sanity check. I modeled the house in one piece as 3-4 cylinders at the final height with no internal bracing, no textures on the walls, and no seams at the interface. The idea being to measure how much cost is involved in my design work, vs just the cost of printing anything of this relative size.

To analyze the results I created a fake printer with a 800 mm cubed build volume, big enough to print all the parts out. The numbers below are what cura reported for this virtual printer to print the design. The times are all quite long because I used a much slowed down profile that I'm currently using with my ender3, a better tuned printer could take less time. However what matters is the relative change not the total time taken.

Here are my results for both the 2 chamber and 3 chamber houses:

3 chamber
- Simple 4 walls, slow speed
315 hour print time
3633g / 1218m material
$70

- Full model 4 walls, slow speed
412 hour print time
4044g / 1356m material
$77

- Increase by
31% more time
11% more material

2 chamber
- Simple 3 walls, slow speed
136 hour print time
1569g / 526m material
$30

- Full model 3 walls, slow speed
183 hour print time
1801g / 604m material
$34

- Increase by
35% more time
15% more material

Basically the cost of finishing the design is not a big deal, it is the overall size and shape that dictates the cost and print speeds. This was all done with 4.5 mm thick walls. I could go down to 2.4 mm thick walls to see if that speeds things up any. With a 3 shell thickness that essentially results in solid walls with no infill. Infill is set to 20%, so the savings can't be too great, but it may speed things up by a larger amount.

---

Edit, I ran a quick test and reducing the walls to 2.4 mm reduces both the material cost and print time by about 20%, basically the amount of infill in the walls. I will do some strength tests to see if reducing infill has a significant impact, a 20% savings is not amazing but definitely worth something.