Week 4 - Prototype Week

Week 4, Prototype week, is about to end.
Here is what I contributed to my team.

I have a simple routine now: check if the printers are malfunctioning, then print parts for our subteam (and other subteams as well).

2018-07-16

On this day, the Prusa got jammed: at first, I thought the extruder was clogged, but the situation was much easier to fix than expected. How the Prusa puts filament into the extruder is simple: the filament enters a hole on the top and clamped into place by a small gear and a ball bearing. The filament passes through a small tube in the bottom towards the extruder, where it is heated up and extruded onto the build plate. This information is important because filament got jammed between the gear-and-ball-bearing system and the extruder itself. Once I replaced the new filament, I stuck a small allen wrench / allen key into the tube and forced the remaining stuck filament out of the extruder. After performing a test print, the Prusa was ready to go once more.

2018-07-17

On this day, the Lulzbot needed to be recalibrated, which is a tedious process involving going back and forth between computer and print bed, making sure the bed is level to the nozzle. In order to make sure that the bed was truly level, I made a couple more one-layer test prints on the first layer to check.

2018-07-18

On this day, the Prusa printer needed recalibration - the P.I.N.D.A. (Prusa INDuctive Autoleveling) sensor was way too far from the print bed, which caused the distance between the bed and nozzle to be at least 1 mm apart. In order to fix this, Eric and I slowly adjusted the sensor until the distance could be fixed easier. Once the printing bed is close enough to the nozzle, the Live Z Adjust feature on the Prusa can be used for sub-1mm adjustments. This is what we use for quick recalibration for special specific filament settings.

While my team performed the simulated drop test and added windows to our functional model, I printed more parts for the showcase model: the middle-top shell part as well as all of the internal furniture that we designed in the first couple of weeks.

2018-07-19

On this day, my team and I started working on the final presentation. While that was going on, I printed the middle-bottom shell. We ran out of screws for this project: fortunately, in the shops, there were screws of similar size and shape that we could use temporarily (or in the showcase model instead).