Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Review: 3D System's Cube 3D Printer

For a little over 7 months now I have had access to and been using a Cube 3D printer from 3D Systems, a South Carolina based company. This machine does not belong to me personally; it belongs to a colleague of mine who has more or less given me free reign over using it. In the time that I've worked with the machine I've found a lot of things I do and do not like about it.


3D printed pieces for Ultron 5, still on the print bed

For the uninitiated, the Cube 3D printer is a ready-to-use PLA and ABS printer that retails for around $1300 USD. What you get for this is the complete machine, a cartridge of material (more or this later), and all of the doodads and whatsits you need to get the thing up and running. It's marketed as a 3D printer for people who just want to press print and not worry about settings, calibrations, or building the actual machine.

On that front, it absolutely delivers. In my experience, leveling the build platform every few prints will produce the best results, but that is the most sort of upkeep I've had to perform on the machine. The menu on the front of the machine also makes leveling the platform and setting the Z height of the extruder very simple.

My biggest problem, however, is that everything about the machine and it's software is closed source and locked down. In order to generate the equivalent of G-code, you have to use their proprietary program, inside of which you have very minimal access to settings.

Worse, though, is that they require you to use their proprietary filament cartridges. A filament cartridge contains 0.7lbs of material at $50USD - approximately a 300% markup of generic spooled ABS. The printer requires that you have one of their cartridges installed otherwise it will not allow you to print at all. This is the #1 complaint of Cube owners and you can read all about it when doing your research on the printer. A few ingenious hackers have found a way of tricking the printer's firmware in to printing even with an empty printer and using a custom spool stand to print from. Myself and the owner of the machine have done this and it turned a fairly poor printer in to something that is at least worth the money.


3D printed master and resin cast copy of Gravity Gun parts

But, frankly, if I were to spend $1300 on a tool, I feel like I shouldn't have to trick or hack it to do something that literally every other 3D printer available can do on it's own. I understand the desire for a cartridge based system for the people who, again, just want to press "go". But the fact that 3D Systems have locked out using other methods - and by all accounts, updated their firmware to "fix" the exploit that was being used - is just another big red flag against these systems.

(By the way, you can still use the same hack, but there are a couple other hoops to jump through to do it. But in fear of 3D Systems reading this and patching yet another "exploit", I don't want to post it online. Sorry.)

For anyone who plans to print in ABS on this machine: I strongly recommend you buy a heated platform, which does not come included with the printer. ABS has a much higher tendency to lift than PLA does, and is much more fickle about ambient temperatures. 3D Systems' solution is a (you guessed it) proprietary glue that you put down to bond the bottom layers to the build surface. It works like a dream, if only it weren't so expensive.

On the subject of ABS being prone to temperature differences, you may want to consider building an enclosure for the printer. This is something we are planning on doing but have not yet had the chance to get done.

At this point nothing has gone wrong with the printer itself - yet. I fear the day that something catastrophic does happen, since I've heard less than pleasant things about 3D Systems' customer support. That is to say, they are fast to respond, but the responses they give you aren't satisfactory. Their platform is closed and locked down and proprietary, and that's just the way they like it.


Parts from a 15 piece Pip-Boy 3000 print in various stages of cleanup and finishing

In short, I'm not entirely sure to who this printer is marked towards. Hobbyists who want to build and tweak won't get much out of it aside from a relatively easy to use, if extremely limited printer. I don't know how many Average Joe's out there who are kinda-sorta interested in 3D printing and also have $1300 to throw away on something they may not use a lot.

I have to applaud 3D Systems for trying to get in to the home 3D printing market and making it user friendly. But they take just as many steps backwards by only allowing their proprietary software and requiring the use of over priced filament cartridges.

If you're a hobbyist and happen to own one of these, my best suggestion is to use it to print out the parts for your choice of RepRap printers and start building one of those. That's what I'm doing.
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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Atlanta Mini Maker Faire

I am really excited to announce that Overworld Designs will be presenting at Atlanta Mini Maker Faire on October 26th! I don't have specific details just yet on where our booth will be, but you can expect that info to be posted up very soon. Come check out the booth where I'll be showing off parts of the costume making process, some of my completed props, a few in progress items, as well as a live demonstration of casting in resin!

You can find more information at the Atlanta Mini Maker Faire website.

Hope to see you there!
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Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Ultron 5 (Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes)

Now that Dragon*Con 2013 has come and gone, it's time to update the ole blog with what I've been up to since March!

Some months ago, while watching the animated series Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, a friend of mine requested that I make an Ultron 5 costume for him. Since I've seen so very few of these around, and because EMH was such a great show, not to mention the character of Ultron is completely bad ass, I felt compelled to go ahead and move forward with the project. Around this time, Marvel comics was pimping out an upcoming arc titled "Age of Ultron", which I was extremely excited about reading.


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As I do the majority of my creation in 3D space before physical building begins, I began searching for any sort of existing 3D model which I might be able to use as a base. Unfortunately it seems that Ultron has not been a favorite in any of the Marvel games so no such model existed. Enter a friend of mine from TheRPF, Lael Lee. He had just completed a 1987 RoboCop pepakura model which he released, and so I decided to contact him about doing Ultron justice.

After about 2 months of work, the results were beyond anything I could have hoped for!


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Since this would be worn heavily at conventions, I decided to go with an EVA foam build like I had done with my War Machine last year. I will admit that I skimped on progress photos during this stage, since I was posting regular updates on TheRPF and seeing foam builds is so common, I wouldn't be showing anything that anyone hadn't seen before. But I did get a few, which you can see below.


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It was around this time that Marvel announced that the Avengers sequel would be titled "Age of Ultron", which made me that much more determined to complete the project. I know that in the next 2 years leading up to Avengers 2, there will be more and more Ultrons showing up at conventions, and I had to make sure we were early on the trend!

Once the principal parts of the armor were completed, we coated/primed everything in black PlastiDip, which gives a nice surface for paint to bond to as well as make the foam both more durable and slightly more rigid. Again, we were in such a rush to complete painting for the project a week before the convention that, again, I had failed to take progress photos of this step.

I had also 3D printed some of the pieces for Ultron, namely the antennae on the helmet. These were printed in 4 parts, which were then assembled, sanded, primed, and then molded in Smooth-On Mold Max 30 silicone and cast in Smooth-On 65D resin. Why Mold-Max 30 and 65D? Because that's what I had laying around, of course!


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Our original plan was to use an Arduino to control the mouth LEDs in a twinkling pattern, but time permitted us from getting this done for Dragon*Con. Instead all of the LEDs - about 75 of them in total! - are lit constantly. These are mounted in to a sheet of thin craft foam, and then covered / diffused using a thin black fabric. The resulting effect gives a convincing "Kirby dots" and changes depending on what angle you're looking at the helmet.


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And then, of course, it being Dragon*Con, things got a little weird.



As with every project, there are repairs and upgrades and changes to be made. My friend who wore the costume has made a few requests, and hopefully we'll be able to have those changes made by Atlanta Mini Maker Faire. I'll leave you with some photos that we've taken and ones I've found around the net so far. Thanks for reading!

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