The Bathtub U-Boat,
An Experiment in Large Scale Makerbot Printing.

Along with Westerns, Submarine movies are clinically proven to be universally enjoyed by the male population. Admit it, at some point you have walked around wanting to shout 'FIRE TORPEDOES' at the top of you lungs.

Well now you can, and look marginally less crazy while doing it.

5-16-2011 I have updated the files so that the parts are 3mm thick. This makes a more stable Dino. Please Enjoy.


Well I've been hopeing that someone would make one of these. Seeing that no one did, I decided to get off my butt and make one myself. I hope others will have some fun with it as well.

I used this dino as my insperation, and then traced the plans in Sketchup. epiloglaser.com/sc_dino.htm I don't Know who the creater is, but I would like to say thanks for the plans.

A (parametric) buckle that you can attach to your camera strap, which lets you (hopefully) stop losing your lens cap.

The STL is sized for a 58mm lens cap, and a ~40mm strap width.

The printing layers make for a great friction catch for the lens cap. But there's a designed-in lip overhang to make it a little more aggressive.

Celebrate Movember all year long with this festive mustache ring!

Compatible with standard wooden railroad sets- Brio, Ikea, Thomas & Friends, etc.

Update- added a 90mm clearance support. Total height is 102mm; should fit on a Thing-o-Matic.

Some other turret models have been posted and people have been asking for the model for this one on the flickr set ( flickr.com/photos/7820200@N05/sets/72157626476156514/with/5614051491/ ), so I thought I'd post my progress. There's a lot left to be done, but the white shell parts are pretty much finalized. It's a complex model, and rendering will take a while, this is normal. You can change the $fn variable at the beginning to make smoother curves with smaller facets, but the larger the variable, the longer it will take to render. I've been working on other projects, but if/when I finish this, I'll update this space.

This model is based on careful measurement of images from screenshots from Portal, Portal 2, and Portal 2 promotional materials. It is actual size, as measured by taking screenshots in which Chell can be seen standing next to the turret, and assuming her to be average height for an adult female. This resulted in an estimate that the standing turret is 1.5m tall including the antenna, and the spheroid portion is 1m tall when folded.

Update: thanks to eric1000 for the pics of a 1/10 scale shapeways print!

Update 2: The design now has parameters for size (height of the complete spheroid, "full size" is 1000mm) and thickness of the shell in mm. This should make it easier to produce printable STL files. Also, the different parts are now modules that can be easily disabled at the beginning of the file.

Update 3: I've successfully printed all of the shell parts on my Makerbot with supports at 1/5 scale. Pictures have been added, and I've posted the STLs I used.

Update 4: I've added the black feet and updated the legs with small recesses to insert them into. The scad file is also updated, and includes the code for generating the printable plates.

Not everyone has unlimited access to the US nickel, and as an exercise to myself I made this fully parametric coin calibrator in OpenSCAD.

Modeled to be virtually identical to its ancestor, you can now measure your favorite nickel alternative coin in your country of choice, and print your local flavor calibrator, ready for the coins in your pocket right now.

To limit confusion I added labels to the axis courtesy of tbuser's bitmap fonts. thingiverse.com/thing:2054
(place the bitmap.scad file in the same folder to make it work)

We bought lots of white ABS with our shapercube.. Lots. But who wants
to print everything in white? After a while that got a
bit.. samey. So, an experiment, jam a coloured marker in the feedstock
inlet and see what happens. What happened was, coloured prints came
out. So the idea for the marker organ was born, a way to attached
several coloured markers to the feedstock, and pick which one, or
combination, is colouring the plastic.

This is the first attempt, a simple clamp over the feedstock which
holds a single marker against it.

A simple pencil case for exactly 10-pencils.

***

Here's my set up:
* Thing-O-Matic ( store.makerbot.com/makerbot-thing-o-matic.html )
* Stock Teflon coated 0.5mm nozzle ( store.makerbot.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=nozzle+teflon )
* MakerBot PLA, 3mm ( store.makerbot.com/pla-4043d-1kg-spool-3mm.html )
* Automated Build Platform ( store.makerbot.com/automated-build-platform.html )
* Settings from my ProfileMaker ( makerblock.com/profilemaker/ )

Extruder at 188C, ABP heated to 80C, a 40mm ducted extruder fan ( thingiverse.com/thing:8955 ), 0.36mm layer height, and the sides of my 'bot enclosed with white paper to reduce drafts

An object with holes that should come out the correct size on all printers. See hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2011/02/polyholes.html.

Thank you, all of you who've made cube gears and posted pictures. Since tbuser made these lovely pin connectors, thingiverse.com/thing:10288, I figured it was high time to make a fully printable cube gear set. Now you needn't bother buying any more screws: this one snaps together.

UPDATE: For anyone without access to a 3D printer, you can now buy these from caesia on her Etsy store: etsy.com/shop/PlasticFusion

UPDATE: New version uses tbuser's new pin connectors V2: thingiverse.com/thing:10541, is much stronger, and prints right-side-up. This is practice for making a heart-gear version.

This design also incorporates a couple of tricks that others may find useful. The center block has two very narrow slices through it, which cause interior walls to form, which help keep the tops of the holes from sagging during printing. Likewise, a cylinder is cut out of the interior of the gears, which serves two purposes. First, it makes a strong internal support for the pin. Second, it makes for less stringing between parts when you print four gears at once, because Skeinforge makes the head go from the center of one to the center of the other, so that the perimeters wipe off the nozzle.

UPDATE: By popular demand, a new version of the center block has been uploaded (BcenterFlat.stl), which doesn't have any internal slits and is oriented to print on a large face. This one is significantly easier to print, though the top and bottom holes do end up a touch tighter than the rest.

The pins in this version are a little stronger and their slightly different shape makes them easier to insert and less likely to break. It also lets you make pegs which are printed horizontally so they are much stronger. Pegs can be used to join two parts that have holes in them. The pinholes also now have a small bevel in them to help make it easier to insert.

The syntax is totally different as well. It was kind of dumb to use global variables in the last version, now you pass the variables to each method so it's easier to have pins of various sizes in one project.

This is a castle block set. There are now 11 different pieces:
wall, corner turret, open gate, closed gate, castle end, castle door, roof end and roof center, added 135 degree corner, short wall and pointed round roof.

A standard parts list is provided as file: castle_playset_standard_pieces.pdf

all the .stl files are zipped into two files:
(1) castle_playset_stl_110830.zip
(2) castle_play_set_more_stuff.zip

File: assembly_2_110905g_labeled.skp contains all pieces. However, some of the other .skp files may be more convenient.

This set can make a 3X larger version of "miniature castle" thing:7013
The little alien is Zomboe's thing 1: thing:2958

Post with working links on my blog: eclecti.cc/bytes/reprap-controlled-time-lapse-photography

YouTube example videos:
youtube.com/watch?v=T3j5oXpqWCk
youtube.com/watch?v=GFZXgxcfdHQ

While capturing the time-lapse last week, John and I ran into two irritating issues. The first is that the moving platform causes the object being printed to come in and out of the focal plane of the camera and makes for a jarring video. The second is that because the interval between photos is constant, some large and slow layers will have multiple shots taken while several consecutive quick layers can be skipped entirely. The solution to both of these is to dynamically remote trigger the camera from the printer.

I wrote a Skeinforge photograph plugin that inserts a new G-code command, M240, which tells the printer to trigger a photograph. The module offers three modes. End of Layer, as demonstrated by Yoda below, is the simplest. It takes one picture at the start of the first layer and then another at the end of each layer of the print, resolving only the second of the aforementioned issues. Corner of Layer takes a picture at the minimum Y,X of each layer. Least Change between Layers tries to take shots that are as close as possible to each other from layer to layer. I had the most visually interesting results with the last setting, as shown in the Flower print above. The module can be downloaded from github, and installation instructions are included within its text.

The other half of the control scheme is triggering the camera from the RepRap. Since I didn’t want to risk coupling my T2i directly to the printer, I went for emulating a Canon RC-1 Remote, which has been thoroughly reverse engineered. The hardware is simply an 850nm infrared LED in series with a 180 ohm resistor connected to one of the I/O pins on the Arduino Mega. I chose pin 23 because I could solder to it without pulling my RAMPS board off. The software side is equally simple. For this, I forked the excellent Sprinter firmware to respond to M240 and send the correct pulse over the IR LED. My fork is on github, but the diff that adds M240 support is the interesting bit.