Today, I thought I do a couple of larger projects to see how the printer handles them. I thought I’d tackle something at least somewhat useful. I don’t know about you, but I always have a phone that needs to be charged, but I want it to be out of the way! I came up with two designs that are fairly innocuous.
My Motorola phone has a fairly good-sized power brick. It does a great job of fast charging, getting my phone 50% full in about 5 minutes. I thought I try hanging the phone below the outlet. I did most of this design in Microsoft 3D builder.
The power brick fits in the square box above the ‘shelf’ and the phone sits in the shelf, relatively flush to the wall. That actually printed out fairly well, though it was a bit weak at the bottom joints, since I used 20% fill.
Then I realized that sometimes I need to have something plugged into that lower outlet. What if I redesigned the solution so phone sat above the outlet and charged the phone. That version ended up looking like:
My old printer had no capability of printing out something this large.
My new printer is running effectively enough that I’ve been able to print out a prototype of each with no problems, other than a slight over driving of the extruder on the first level, causing it to ‘click’ every once in a while. I need to look into the calibration process and also ensure that I am using the size nozzle I’m expecting. I think my printer came with 5 different size nozzles. I am not used to having that abundance of options.
I also need to get back to my CNC experiments. I am giving an intro class on the topic to our Woodshop/maker center next month and need to have some interesting examples to share. Hopefully, I’ll have some posts on that effort too.
Beyond the intersection of technology and life 