Hello community, I’ll try to be brief. My 13 year old son got a 3d printer as a gift, and I’d like to learn alongside him. We have 0 experience. However, I am a data scientist, so lots of professional Python experience, if that helps. We’re a foss/Linux family so my questions are:

What tools are the best to learn for 3d printing for me? I am ready to learn CAD programming. Can you all recommend a tech stack and resources to learn it?

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    For me, I design with Fusion360 and I slice with Cura (I have a Creality Ender 3 Pro v1). Honestly, I think the biggest learning curve for me was learning all the little changes and optimizations that you have to make to get the printer to print well. So I’ll just collect a bunch of the little tips that I’ll learned:

    • When designing, try to think about the orientation of the thing you’re printing. ie, do you plan to print it standing up or laying on its side? This will influence its strength (if you plan to use it for engineering projects), since 3d prints are generally pretty good at handling compressive forces but are weaker at handling shear forces along the z-axis of the print (ie, across different layers).
    • Printers are generally able to print up to 45 degrees for overhangs without needing supports, so you can try to orient your part around to minimize the need for supports
    • The times when a print is most likely to fail are when the printer is printing the first couple of layers. If you see a print successfully complete the first, say, 3 layers without mistakes or detaching, you can generally be pretty assured that the rest of the print will be fine.
    • Bed adhesion can be an issue until you optimize settings for it (ie, the print detaches from the bed during the print). First, check for dust on the bed. Second, I find that it really helps if you use 2 different bed temperatures during the print. You may have to dig around in your slicer’s settings, but there should be an option for “initial layer temperature.” I find that for PLA, a good temperature is 200C for the nozzle, 65C for the initial bed temperature, and then 50C for the regular bed temperature (ie, the bed starts off at 65C, and after the printer finishes the first layer, the bed drops down to 50C for the remainder of the print).
    • Additionally, it can also be good to slow down the print speed for the first 1-2 layers. Again, you’ll have to dig through your settings, but what I prefer is 80 mm/s travel speed, 25 mm/s print speed for the initial layers. With these settings, I find that I basically never need a brim or an adhesion support - the print itself actually sticks onto the bed a bit too well, making it somewhat hard to remove after the print is finished, which is a good problem to have when it comes to 3d printing
    • The auto-bed leveling on your 3D printer is nice, but it’s not a replacement for manually leveling the bed. Manually level the bed before every print, since taking off your last print from the bed has the tendency to make your bed not level. Then, after manual leveling, do an auto-bed leveling to remove the remaining tiny variations in the bed level
    • Use gyroid for your infill pattern. It’s just better than the default.
    • Enable filament retraction during hops - it helps remove a lot of the strings left behind when the nozzle moves to a different location of the print. I also like to have a z-hop height of around 0.4 mm just to make sure there’s no strings
    • When I got my printer, my bed was wobbly. I think you got the same printer as me, so it could be worth checking for that. For the longest time I assumed that that was just how it was, and then wondered why my prints were coming out so strange. If you see bed wobbling on your printer, you should tighten the wheels (not the leveling knobs) under the bed. There should be instructions on ifixit for how to do that
    • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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      11 months ago

      The auto-bed leveling on your 3D printer is nice, but it’s not a replacement for manually leveling the bed. Manually level the bed before every print, since taking off your last print from the bed has the tendency to make your bed not level. Then, after manual leveling, do an auto-bed leveling to remove the remaining tiny variations in the bed level

      Depends on your printer, I think. Mine is quite happy being leveled only after nozzle changes, and the autolevel is Good Enough.