Pepsi Can Button
Pepsi Can Button
For a project we came up with the idea to use a button, on top of a can, as an advertising medium.
In this project we want to use the button on a can to communicate our Pepsi Summer Day event where the button can also be used as a button you put on your jacket or bag.
To realize our product we first set out and measured the size of the button using a ruler. After we had measured all the dimensions of the can, which were the top, we set out and used illustrator to make a construction drawing before we started using 3D software.
Add Fablab they use Rhino3D to make 3D drawings but any 3D program which can save as '.stl' can be used. Thanks to some help we set up the 3D drawing and exported it as '.stl'. But beware, Rhino3D crashes a lot so always save while you are working, we had the software almost crash but luckily we could retrieve everything without starting over.
Next step was to download the program which communicates with the 3D printer. You can find it on this website http://software.ultimaker.com/ .
After downloading the program we asked how to set up the 3D printer and the people at FabLab kindly showed us how to operate the software. With help from this guide http://wiki.ultimaker.com/Newcomer_guide_to_your_first_3D_print we set up the software and could start printing.
It takes some time for the printer to warm up, be careful with your hand close to the unit where the liquid drops from because it heats up to 290 degree Celsius which gives quite a nasty burn.
When it started swirling in coordinated motion watch out for any excess liquid material because it solifies really quickly and will be hard to remove. If you do leave any excess secretion from the material it could jam the printer and ruin your print. Always have a spatel handy in case this happens, the first layer is the most important and hardest to print, but if you've done that it is a piece of a cake and prints almost effertlosly without any jam ups.
The above picture shows a bit of how the printer operates, you can see the line work which is the movement the head makes when printing. It takes some time, our print was only about 2cm high and took about 23 minutes to make.
After the printer is finished you can take out your print. Be careful with taking it out, in our case the button was stuck on the blue layer of tape on top of the glass and took some effort to take out. The print could break easily because the sides were rather fragile so be careful when printing small or thin objects.
After we took the button out we tried to fit it on top of the can. sadly it couldn't fit because we added an extra layer on the inside of the button to secure it on the can. But because the material we used to print isn't flexible we couldn't fit in on. We used a knife to cut out the extra layer to see if it would work without it. So for printing something which you need to fit on top of for example a can you should consider which material you are going to need. We needed something more flexible, almost rubber like but they didn't have that at the time when we were printing.
When we tried to cut out the extra layer some part of the sides came loose because the material was really thin, only about a mm. So handle it with care if you need to cut something out after printing. After that we tried to fit it on the can and it almost fit, we weren't able to cut out all the excess material to make it fit more easily because we almost broke the print. So we do have proof of concept and now know exactly what we should do to make a perfect print in our next visit to FabLab.
