- How does it print?
- Where is the plastic coming from?
- What are you going to use it for?
All of the questions and comments have been positive but I have found the most intersting one to be "What are you going to use it for?" or "What will you print with it?" Hmm - I had the same question when we were first approached. As you think through it the question becomes "What can you not use it for?" As things come up during the day we begin to realize that a solution would be to design our own part for it. An example is the Raspberry Pi - we have been working on powering LED's and controlling them with it but now we can Print our own small houses, parts, letters and create holes to hold the LED's to make them light up. We can add parts to our LEGO robotics designs, we can build anything!
So now on the third day back at school I already have students who come in and say that they have downloaded something from Sketchup Warehouse and would like to print it. We are accommodating this for now because we want to make mistakes and have some things print well and others not. This is happening. Below is a picture of a Star Wars fighter that was downloaded from the Sketchup warehouse - it did not print properly. As we have already found with our own simple designs there seems to be a problem with the faces and unless there are all facing the right way the model will not print properly.
Lessons learned -
- It takes a long time to print - 4 hours + for many things
- It is difficult to remove the objects from the blue taped platen - we bought some plastic putty knives and they are doing the trick. We have to remove the platen then kind of chisel it.
- The platen needs to be leveled after several removals
The printers are amazing and have been in use at least 8 hours a day for the last 3 days.
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