January 29, 2021

3D Printing - My first print

After successful printing the bed leveling gcode file, I was ready to print something small and simple. Many people print a boat or a figurine. I opted for something more mundane perhaps, this 20mm test cube: The cube comes as an STL file. There are any number of claims for what STL stands for, so apparently it is anyones guess at this point. An STL file describes the external geometry of an object. There are ascii and binary variants of STL files. It is unlikely I will ever care about the file format, it is just something that needs to be fed to a slicer which will generate gcode specific to a target printer. I use "Cura" for a slicer, and it seems to work out just fine (and is what my mentor recommended). Best of all, I can just install it from the Fedora package system via: 
su
dnf -y install cura
After this I type "cura" and it takes me through a bunch of straightforward dialogs to set things up. I decline the opportunity to set up an account at the Ultimaker website. I select a non-network printer, find the Ender 3D pro in the lengthy menu, accept all the default machine settings and I am ready to go. It tells me it will generate the "Marlin" gcode flavor, which is fine with me as long as it works (it does). The default nozzle is 0.4 mm (which seems fine). I go with the suggested 0.2mm profile with 20 percent infill.

I use file input to pull in my STL file, a button saying "Slice" appears. I press this button and in a couple of seconds it tells me it will take 31 minutes to print my object. I save the result to "xyz.gcode" and use my flash card reader to copy it to a micro-SD (aka TF card).

The card goes upside down into the slot on the printer. I then select "INIT TF" from the menu and then it offers me "Print from TF", with the files on the card listed. It takes my print head to 200 degrees and the bed to 60, which is a bit hotter than the 195 the bed leveling demo used. Could these parameters be in the gcode file?

It prints a line along the left side, which is a nice way to get the nozzle primed, then it puts a rounded square around the center of my print bed and then gets busy printing the cube in the center. The 31 minute time estimate is pretty accurate and the cube comes out great. I am starting with grey PLA from Overture, but expect to try PETG fairly soon.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org