3D Printing my NFT Collection

In my previous post I detailed my first efforts creating a 3D printable NFT collection. At that stage I had created all the 3D models and shared them on the OpenSea platform, but I hadn’t 3D printed any of them.

Well, now I have!

Having created and 3D printed countless voronoi and lattice structures, I knew this wouldn’t be a problem, however, I can certainly breathe a little easier knowing that the models are robust and suitable for even a basic FDM 3D printer. I used my old Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus for the 2 models pictured above, and while the PLA filament was a little stringy (has not been stored well), the result was good enough for a proof of concept. No support material was used, and the total print time was about 1.5 hours.

What’s most fascinating about this to me is that now these NFTs exist in both the virtual and physical worlds at the same time. I currently own the virtual models, confirmed on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, while also owning physical prints of this virtual information. For 0.05 ETH you can buy these 3D models, yet I still own a physical copy. This is where some people have a problem with NFTs, however, for me I think this is the same as what happens with art, music, movies etc. every day; ownership of the original might change, but people still own/trade/share copies. What’s important is that ownership of the original is clearly recorded as a contract (in this case on a blockchain), and can be tracked through time, with royalties paid to the creator each time it is sold.

Anyway, back to the 3D printing. I’m actually offering to send anyone who buys 4 or more of my NFTs 3D printed versions for FREE, anywhere in the world. However, I’m going to improve upon rough FDM prints and get them printed using selective laser sintering (SLS). All you need to do once you buy them is contact me via Twitter (@edditive) or directly here on my blog, show proof of purchase, provide your shipping address, and wait by your mailbox until they turn up. That way you don’t even need a 3D printer to enjoy your NFTs in the real world!

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Mounting Brackets

Brackets are pretty boring, I know, but being able to 3D print exactly what you need, for just a few cents, just makes good sense (see what I did there?).

I wanted to mount a LED strip underneath my kitchen bench top, but also wanted it to run off batteries so I didn’t have chunky cords to plug in for power. The set that I ended up buying had a battery pack which needed to be mounted along with the strip, as well as a remote. One option would be to use double sided tape, however, this would make accessing and changing the batteries painful. So, a simple bracket was needed. While doing this, I also decided to mount the remote so it wouldn’t get lost.

Like many of the projects on this blog, the entire process from CAD to finished 3D printed parts only took a few hours. Solidworks was used for the CAD modelling, while the brackets were printed on a Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus in PLA. A couple of screws up into the bench top and job done. Secure and out of the way, but easy to remove the remote and battery pack when needed.

If you’re interested in more quick projects like this, check out my special friction hooks or hex business card holder tiles.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Oahu, Hawaii

Sometimes you see a design online and just have to 3D print it!

This is an amazing 3D topographic map of the Hawaiian island Oahu, and for anyone that’s been there you should be able to make out the airport, Pearl Harbour and Waikiki areas. Thanks to Eric Pavey who created this model and detailed the process of using a tool called Terrain2STL on his blog. It’s also available on Thingiverse. The detail is amazing!

For something a bit different, I wanted to do a two-tone print to separate the water and land. Using the Pause at Height feature in Cura, I was able to swap out filament after the first handful of layers, going from eSun white PLA, to eSun bamboo filament. I must admit, the pause feature didn’t quite work how I’d like it to on my Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus, not actually pausing the print and allowing me to resume it again when I was ready, but I was able to time my prints and catch the feature in time to quickly do a swap during the 30 seconds or so that the Pause at Height feature ran. All it did was move the extruder to the home position and extruded a bunch of material, and then resumed automatically. I might need to create some better G-code for this next time.

However, I’m very pleased with the effect, especially when you move a light around the model!

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Flexible Lens Cover

I’ve said it countless times before, and I’ll say it again – some of my favourite 3D printing projects are the ones which are quick, easy, and either add value to an existing product (e.g. see my 3D printed webcam mount or lucky bamboo holder), replace something broken or lost (e.g. my SUP paddle lock),  or in this case, something missing.

I recently bought an old pair of binoculars (or is it just a binocular?) from an antique store. They came in a pretty beaten up case, and were missing two of the protective lens covers, but overall worked nicely with lenses that weren’t scratched. The lens covers that did come with the binocular were cracking and didn’t really stay in place any more, so it was 3D printing to the rescue.

Planning to use some PolyFlex TPU95 filament from Polymaker to create a soft, rubber-like lens cover, I ended up designing the lens covers to be just slightly smaller than the measured diameter of each lens, 0.25mm smaller to be specific, with the intent of creating a secure friction fit, but not so tight they had to be stretched over the lenses. The design is very simple, a couple of extrudes in Fusion 360, before adding the circular pattern detail around the outside (which was not part of the original lens caps!) to add a personal touch. Now that they’re printed they remind me of beer bottle caps, but the intent was just something a bit rugged and easy to grip without spending a long time trying to be too clever in CAD.

These were 3D printed on a Wanaho Duplicator i3 Plus with an upgraded Flexion Extruder. What’s a Flexion Extruder? Well, you can read my whole series documenting early experiments trying to 3D print flexible materials here, but long story short, a Flexion Extruder is the ultimate upgrade for cheap desktop FDM machines that allows you to successfully and reliably 3D print with soft TPU materials. If you don’t have a Flexion, or a good quality system like the Prusa MK3S which has been designed to print a whole range of materials including TPU, chances are you will end up with a tangled mess of filament coming out the side of your extruder, or worse! They’re just too soft to be forced down into the hotend and come out of a tiny nozzle.

The other trick is getting the right settings to print with – you will find loads of different theories and recommendations online, 3D printing TPU is a bit of a dark art and there are many different types of flexible TPU that require different settings. So getting things right will take some time. This is a good general guide to follow, and I’d reiterate that you MUST print extremely slow – I used 20mm/s for the lens caps. Also, follow the recommendations from your filament supplier, this material from Polymaker was printed at 220°C with the build plate at 50°C. Seemed to be about perfect.

Above you can see just how flexible the end result is, the lens caps easily bend and squash without permanent deformation. If you’ve got any settings you’ve found are reliable, or just general tips and tricks for 3D printing TPU, please comment below to build up some resources for others to find.

Happy 3D printing.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Scanning Natural Forms

This is a post about my new favourite toy – the EinScan Pro 2X Plus 3D scanner from Shining 3D. Why? Because it allows you to turn any object into a 3D model! And I can tell you upfront, it works REALLY well!

This is not the first 3D scanner from Shining 3D, which is a good sign that both their hardware and software has had time to mature. The EinScan Pro 2X Plus is brand new to the market, which means there are not many reviews at the time I’m writing, although you can find a brief overview from 3D Scan Expert and will no doubt see a full review from him in the near future. I’m not a 3D scanning expert, so am not going to dive into all the details here. I have used several scanners in the past and written a few posts, but this is the first that I have full access and control over and am currently using on a daily basis.

Enough with the introductions. One of my first experiments has been to 3D scan some challenging organic forms, including some shells which I picked up from the beach. The top photo shows one of these shells being scanned (we have the “Industrial Pack” turntable and “Colour Pack” upgrades for the scanner). The process is straight forward in the accompanying EXScan Pro software – a few basic settings about the detail you’d like to capture and press go. The turntable and scanner do the rest, and you can see the points being captured in real-time on screen. There is a bit of cleanup after the first scan to remove any points that aren’t needed (e.g. you can see in the photo some points around the perimeter where the scanner picked up an edge of the turntable), at which point you have your first scan.

This could be all the detail you need depending on your application; however, all you have is an outside collection of points, with no detail about the inside of the shell. So I then flipped the shell over and performed a second scan. The only difference from the previous step is that now there are 2 scans. Amazingly the software is proving quite intelligent at automatically aligning multiple scans, finding common points and bringing them all together. This doesn’t always work, and there is an option to manually align 2 scans by selecting 3 common points in each. I must admit the interface for this process is quite painful to use at the moment, so it’s always great when the software automatically does this. Overall the software is very basic, you really don’t have a lot of control – which can be both a blessing and a curse. You certainly can’t perform any sort of editing actions other than selecting and deleting points.

The final step is to turn all of the points (aka. point cloud) into a mesh suitable for 3D CAD software, or 3D printing. There is an option to create a watertight mesh, letting the software automatically fill any holes in the model. For this shell scan I only had very minor gaps which were nicely cleaned up and blended into the mesh. However, I have found with some other scans that if holes are quite large, or there are some messy overlaps in scan data, the software will produce some weird results – best to keep scanning to capture as much data as possible before creating a mesh, once you get to this step there is no turning back.

Best of all, being a watertight mesh, the file can be immediately used for 3D printing. But why simply replicate a shell? I always see large shells as decorator items in stores retailing for hundreds of dollars – and now I can 3D print them for a fraction of the price. This one was scaled up 500% and printed on a Wanhao Duplicator D9/500 – which is still working somewhat consistently after my previous post and firmware upgrades. I decided to print it in an upright orientation so that the 0.5mm layers are similar to the layers naturally occurring in the shell. Even though the print quality is still quite rough, I think this only adds to the natural effect.

Scallop Shell Half by edditive on Sketchfab

The shell has been saved as a .obj file, meaning that it has all the colour information along with the geometry that would normally be a .stl file. I have shared this on Sketchfab so that you can have a closer look at the mesh in 3D using the above viewer. I think it’s a really great result, and hopefully you can see why I have called this my new favourite toy. It really does open up new opportunities (perhaps you’ve already seen some new experiments if you follow me on Instagram). Stay tuned, I’m sure there’ll be plenty more posts that involve 3D scanning and 3D printing in the future.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Chainmail: Size XL

If you’re into 3D printing like me, chances are you’ve already 3D printed chainmail and been excited by the ability to produce something that is made of multiple parts already assembled and ready to go. If you’re new to 3D printing, what you might not realise is that because you are printing objects in small layer increments, you can print these layers in such a way that different pieces become trapped within each other as the print progresses, permanently assembling them together. This means that something like chainmail, which has been hand assembled for thousands of years one link at a time, can now be printed with all the links in place.

One of the most popular examples in recent years has been from well known designer Agustin Flowalistik, whose unique design of chainmail has been downloaded over 100k times already on Thingiverse! Click here to download the file for yourself and add to this growing number. After one of my previous posts about the new Wanhao Duplicator D9/500 printer, I wanted to see how it would handle the intricate geometry, however, at 200% the scale. Go big or go home!

Well, as you can see from the photos it worked quite nicely. With the large 0.8mm nozzle the layers certainly look rough and messy – this print isn’t going to win any awards for being pretty. But it worked, and on this sketchy 3D printer that’s the most important thing at the moment. One of the nicest things was peeling it off the magnetic flexible build plate of the D9, which you can see in the first picture above – no hacking away with a spatula which is one of the positives of the printer. The links freely move and because of the large size, the chainmail has quite an industrial feel about it. Very satisfying.

So I think I can chalk this one up as a win on the Wanhao D9, which I think brings my score up to about 2 wins, and too many failures to count… Not great but after a firmware update I hope there will be some more wins to come.

– Posted by James Novak

Using Every Last Drop

Perhaps it’s the result of spending 10 years as a poor uni student, but I really like to use every last drop of liquids: sauce, toothpaste, shampoo and yes, deodorant. Many of the roll-on style deodorants, such as those from Nivea, have a domed lid, meaning it’s impossible to tip them upside down as liquid is running low and store them so gravity can do its thing. In my mind, this is a design flaw in the packaging (although from Nivea’s point of view, this is a great way to keep people buying more products more often).

I had originally planned to create my own design to solve this problem, however, after a quick search on Thingiverse I was pleasantly surprised to see many people had already beat me to it! There are plenty of designs to choose from, and I decided on this helix design for its interesting form. Click here to download the file for yourself from Thingiverse.

The print took just over an hour to complete, and as you can see from the pictures, it does exactly what it promises. I also streamed the 3D print on my YouTube channel, so if you like watching the grass grow, here is an hour of entertainment just for you! Make sure you subscribe if you want to be alerted of the next live 3D print 🙂

– Posted by James Novak

First 3D Print with the Wanhao Duplicator D9/500

If you have followed my blog for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed I’m quite a big fan of the Wanhao 3D printers – they’re cheap, reliable, upgradable, and just good value for money. Even my Cocoon Create from Aldi is actually just a Wanhao in disguise! Recently Wanhao released the Duplicator D9/500, which has an incredible 500x500x500mm build volume. Yes, you read that right, those numbers are not a typo! The picture above doesn’t do it justice, this is a big unit that currently we can only store and run on the floor until we can free up a large desk. Manoeuvring this thing is definitely a 2 person job!

Before I get into the details of the machine and my first experiences, the printed vase pictured above is the first successful print, which is the Curved Honeycomb Vase (free on Thingiverse) printed at 200% scale. Printed in vase mode (aka “spiralise” in Cura) with a 0.8mm nozzle, this print took approximately 6 hours to complete. A great design in itself, and very cool at this large size.

However, it certainly hasn’t all been smooth sailing with this printer. First, there were some lengthy delays from Wanhao between when we placed the order and finally received the machine – apparently some manufacturing and quality control issues, and Wanhao may have released the machine a bit too early to market. In total we waited several months, however, they may be much faster now that issues seem to be resolved. The second big issue we faced was assembly – the supplied instructions weren’t particularly useful or even relevant, with some of the components no longer supplied with the printer – it seems that the initial release included large brackets to help stabilise the frame and some other details in the instructions, so we were left feeling like we were missing some parts. Apparently we are not, although we still haven’t figured out some of the cable management issues and have had to hack together a temporary solution for now.

Another challenge with assembly was in constructing the frame; obviously at such a large size the frame wasn’t pre-assembled like the smaller Duplicator 3, and the frame also uses extruded aluminium rather than folded sheet metal. Squaring all of these extrusions is not simple, and some initial issues when running the machine were related to having one of the vertical frame pieces lightly twisted. Some better alignment details are definitely needed.

The final issue that we’ve been experiencing is in the auto-levelling sensor, which was not installed at the correct height in the factory and required a lot of manual adjustment (we had the nozzle collide with the bed several times when first running it). However, even with this, the machine doesn’t really seem to adjust the prints for any levelling issues; our first prints across the bed revealed a number of areas where the bed was slightly warped, which were not being corrected by the auto-level feature, so we are currently manually doing adjustments for now. And we have found the central area of the bed is OK, so the vase printed really well.

So overall I would have to recommend that anyone considering this printer hold off for at least a few more months, there are just too many issues for anyone without a lot of experience calibrating 3D printers, and without the time to really get in and troubleshoot issues. Last time I searched on YouTube it seems others have also come to a similar conclusion. I think with time this will be a great 3D printer, we’re certainly going to keep learning more about it, but this seems like a case of a manufacturer rushing to market without properly testing and perfecting their equipment. Unfortunately, an all too common story in the 3D printing world.

Make sure you follow my blog and social media accounts to keep up to date with ongoing test prints and posts about the Wanhao Duplicator D9/500. And please share your own experiences in the comments section so we can all learn from each other 🙂

– Posted by James Novak

*UPDATE 14/1/2019 Recently I have updated the firmware of the printer to see if that would improve performance of the machine. I recommend this as a priority for anyone with a D9, it could fix some of the issues you may be experiencing as there are probably several different versions of firmware out there now depending when you purchased your printer. While I haven’t noticed a difference with the levelling issues, it’s always worth running the latest firmware to fix any other potential issues. This video tutorial is excellent, I followed it exactly and managed to update both the LCD display and motherboard to version 0.164(B).

For now I’ve manually adjusted the levelling sensor so that in some areas the nozzle is lower than it should be, pushing into the print surface. This makes other areas of the warped plate the correct height, and after a few layers seems to level things off and be printing OK. Not great, but working for now.

3D Printed Webcam Mount

Whenever I travel I always have a small Guerrilla tripod to easily mount my cameras just about anywhere – the flexible arms make it perfect for wrapping around handrails or quickly levelling on uneven surfaces. Which made it my first choice when it came to mounting an old webcam so I can begin streaming my 3D prints to Youtube!

I’m seeing a lot of people like @wildrosebuilds posting awesome time-lapse videos of their 3D prints, and plenty of tutorials online showing how to build quite elaborate rigs to do so. I don’t really have time to deal with all of the video editing for each print, but the opportunity to live-stream prints directly to Youtube seems like a great way to share what I’m working on in real-time, and also allow me to monitor prints without having to physically be with the printer. However, webcams aren’t designed to mount to the typical screw mechanism used by tripods/cameras, so I had to design my own bracket to allow me to mount an old Logitech C270 HD webcam to the tripod.

The top right image shows the small slide-in clip that screws to the underside of a camera, and locks into the tripod. My first step was to reverse engineer this part with a set of calipers, modelling the geometry in Solidworks. I then added a vertical element to attach to the webcam, which has a hole on the back normally used by a bracket attaching the webcam to a computer screen. An extra lip on the front to hold the webcam in a vertical orientation, and voilà!

The blue bracket has been printed on my Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus in PLA, and a screw I had lying around holds the webcam to the bracket. A nice little solution that should see some action very soon. Subscribe to my Youtube channel or follow me on Twitter to be alerted when I begin streaming prints, I know it can be a bit like grass growing but watching 3D prints is still addictive to me. If you’d like to download this design for yourself, you can find it on Thingiverse, Pinshape and Cults – feel free to make your own modifications as needed and share, I know the C270 is quite a popular webcam.

– Posted by James Novak

UPDATE: If you want to see my first live-stream using this webcam mount, here it is:

Check out my channel to see more, and subscribe to be alerted when I go live.

Ninjaflex Part 3 – Flexion Extruder Upgrade

This is the third post in a series about 3D printing with Ninjaflex, which initially began using the stock standard extruder on a Wanhao Duplicator i3 (click here to start at the beginning), before a 3D printed modification was trialled (click here for post 2), and now here we are with a completely upgraded extruder specifically for printing with soft materials.

Pictured above you can see some fancy red anodised components and exposed gears – this is the Flexion HT Extruder, a relatively expensive upgrade (US$179) which is about half the cost of the entire printer itself. It replaces the entire core of a standard single extruder; all that remains from the original is the stepper motor and cooling fans. So why upgrade?

Well as the previous posts discovered, the highly flexible nature of Ninjaflex (shore hardness of 85A) meant that it was difficult for the standard extruder to force down through the hotend and out the nozzle. Imagine taking a length of soft liquorice and trying to push it through a hole that is smaller than the liquorice diameter! As a result, after a few minutes of printing, it was common for the filament to begin looping out the back of the extruder. The Flexion extruder has much tighter tolerances around the filament the entire length it travels, so there is nowhere for the filament to go except down. Also, it has adjustable pressure using the round dial you can see with the knurled detail in the photo above – this means you can apply more force on the soft filament to maintain a strong grip against the stepper motor gear. By rotating the dial, you can quickly scale the pressure back when you change to a rigid filament like PLA, with 4 levels of variation possible and a grub screw to really dial in each setting. The design is completely open, (when it was assembled I initially thought something was missing!), which means you can see the filament and gears, which is great for maintenance and adjustment. And while I haven’t tried yet, according to the Flexion website the nozzle can handle higher temperatures than a standard extruder, up to 290°C, which is great for plastics like nylon and polycarbonate.

The photo at the top right is one of the first 3D prints done to test the abilities of the extruder, taking approximately 4 hours. It looks good from a distance, although there are some small gaps where we started with too much retraction and not enough flow – at this point we are still experimenting with settings to get the best results, currently trying 107% flow, 40mm/s print speed and 1mm retraction. If you are using a Flexion for Ninjaflex and have some reliable settings, I’d love you to post a comment and share them!

– Posted by James Novak