3D scan and print a pair of lips
I chose a small project to become familiar with the Modela milling machine and the Ultimaker 3D printer. The Modela was fitted with a piezo-electric probe to scan a life size pair of lips. The accuracy was set to 0.5mm. The resulting file was in the format accepted by a pre-processor called slic3r. The output from this program is gcode which is accepted by a program called printrun which controls the Ultimaker. The file did not print.
I was helped by Nathan who showed me how to fix .stl files which will not generate good gcode (code that will run!) I uploaded my lips.stl file to http://cloud.netfabb.com and downloaded the fixed file and re-ran it through slic3r. This time printrun ran and generated a PLA plastic part.
According to Nathan the parameter to pull the plastic wire back from each print cycle was insufficient to stop the stringers evident where the lips should part. There is a discrepancy in extrusion temperature and ratio from the default values. PLA is listed at 185 degrees but I needed to go up to 215 in order to start plastic flow. The print time was 18 minutes. There are several parameters in the config.ini used by slic3r which are unknown to me and the help descriptions are sparse. I changed to a black colored PLA plastic wire and re-loaded printrun with new parameters.
This continuous coil appearance may be the extrusion ratio which I changed from 1 to 2 in the config.ini. I attempted another print without success. I believe the feed mechanism on the Ultimaker is hanging up and I will examine its construction at my next visit 26/1/12.
