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Week 12: 3/19/2017

A project log for 2017: A Year of Hacking

Daily log of the my projects, ideas, tips, failures, etc.

eric-moyerEric Moyer 03/20/2017 at 03:320 Comments

Work has been my life for the last few weeks and my days have been reduced to 1)work and 2)sleep. Today I have "almost" a full day off and thus decided to get creative and knock out a quick project start to finish in one day.

I have not be completely stagnate since the last post and I have been spending my rare free moments with my wife, catching up on a little TV and finally getting all of my Digistump Oak development boards connected to the cloud. It took much longer than expect but I now have all five(5) development boards connected.

Now back to what I completed today. I have been 3D printing up this great bottle opener for a couple years now. I have printed up dozens maybe hundreds of these since people seem to love them and they are a easy file to print up. I also have used these to benchmark changes to my 3D printer since if I had made a wrong decision I quickly know it. A friend I gave one to glued a small magnet on the bottle opener so he could attach it to his fridge, which I always thought was a great idea.

I recent saw a post on my Google Plus feed where someone printed a mesh Easter bunny and add small plastic eggs towards the end of the print. I have been unable to find the original post but I am pretty sure this was the 3D printer files. I have seen captive 3D printing before but this time around I instantly thought about inserting a magnet into the 3D printed bottle opener.

First was to update the design and thankfully Zach Hoeken posted some .dxf files with the profile curves for his bottle opener design. Next, was to fire up Fusion 360 to import the .dxf information and create my new design with a cavity for the magnet.

Since I needed to stop the my printer mid-print I had to create a small "ear" on the cavity to give a visual indication on when to insert the magnet. After I had a complete 3D model it was time to export an .stl which is surprisingly simple with Fusion 360.

Post processing the .stl using Repetier/Slic3r was pretty straight forward since I pretty much had the settings figured out using my Monoprice Select Mini (MPSM). The hardest thing about this print was keeping constant tabs on the progress since I had to manually pause the print. I have yet to learn how to program a pause in the G-code and then re-start on my MPSM.

In the end everything turned out great. I will create a Thingiverse project for this "remix" design and I plan on making a quick video to show it in use. There is one additional function that the magnet has and I will leave you guessing until the video is posted.

Thanks for reading my update and hopefully my next post will be much sooner.

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