Made some things yesterday for the upcoming EMF camp:
This is a sign to go outside our tent. My kid’s imaginary land is Line of the Ul, where all sorts of fantastical dragons reside. It rivals Middle Earth for it’s complexity! I purchased the SVG off Etsy, then foolishly stayed up till 2am tinkering away at it in inskape to replace the heart it was holding with the text (only just realised a hex would have fit EMF more!), as well as tidying it up for the laser (there were a lot of overlapping white filled areas, with colour beneath them, I wasn’t sure how Ruby would handle that so I spent ages with the shape intersection tools to fix it). Then I just added some triangles to the outlines to stick in the grass.
I’m happy with the results, but the process was my first (hopefully last) utter disaster in the space.
Things learned:
- I’m getting more and more comfortable with Inksape.
- I still have an awful lot more to learn about the laser.
- Ruby engraving times don’t scale linearly! I’ve only ever done tiny cuts on the laser before. I ran into some issues and arrived at my slot late. I tried estimating the time I’d need, and thought I could recover and make it, but I was way off. I ran into the next user’s slot when it had barely begun. Luckily they were kind enough to let me continue. I was also late for work. And boxed someone in with my car. I will not repeat that mistake.
- Don’t plan your day around NHS schedules.
- Clean the laser half way through big jobs. The laser nozzle cap jammed later on in the day, and I’m fairly certain it was my fault. I used the ply stored in the space, but the nozzle was sticky to touch when I cleaned it. I thought I got it all off, but evidentially not. I will take more care in the future.
Dragon wings hexpansion.
EMF have a badge this year that’s designed to be extendable and reusable. There are 6 expansion ports around the side, mostly intended for circuit boards, but they can slot decorative ones too. I made these dragon wings for it. This is my first attempt at designing something myself instead of just downloading stls and clicking ‘print’.
I started with the supplied svg with the technical dimensions, removed all the text and outlines , then trimmed a bit off the end in inkscape, imported into blender, extruded into a shape, then mostly followed a dragon wing tutorial with slight deviations to keep the bottom flat and suitable for printing, stapled everything together and exported to Bambu Studio.
Things learned:
- Blender is hard when you have the artistic skills of a muppet.
- But the results are great, and its worth giving it a try.
- But it’s not great of precision. I struggled keeping the bit that goes in the expansion slot scaled right.
- The Bambus however have fanatic accuracy. I measured it with the callipers, and it came out at exactly 1.000mm
- When you try ‘flush into print’ when multimaterial printing something this small, it glitches out.
- @nhjansen has amazing patience for helping people out
