foehnsturm

Another interesting combination to talk about. Of course you could print things like buildings with windows or decorative parts. But more "technical" stuff like controlling the opacity of lamp shades might be even more fun. As we can stack transparent and opaque material with a vertical resolution of 0.1 mm or less, structures would become almost invisible.

Using Moi3D I'm not much experienced with parametric design and constraint sketches. But I'll try one of my recent, small designs with onshape and perhaps fusion to get a feeling.

Well, that would be nice. However, the setting time for that stuff is still in the range of some minutes to one hour. Too slow for direct printing. If you heat it up like in liquid silicone injection molding it would set within seconds.

2-component silicones: Liquid silicones, thickener and silicone putty

Filled it. Guess what arrived today

@Dim3nsioneer This leads to an interesting question. Why would I use such a platform? - Just to realize a interesting project for my own? Mostly no. - To create something for a certain demand or community (e.g. a direct extruder for UM2 or the next drone generation) but with no plans to commercialize? Yes. - To create someting which might be monetarised in some way (same examples as above...)? Yes as well. I think, collaborative projects require people who share a strong motivation to succeed within reasonable time. A platform should help to build up that motivation with offering publishing, distribution or even selling opportunities. Ultimaker could play a very interesting role here if the options will be declared clearly. But supporting that work would require considerable man power at UM.

I'm quite sure it's the PHA component.

@SandervG I’m not able to draw an overall picture. But here are some ideas. It’s about collaborative development of „things“. But contrary to e.g. SW development, these things will likely be hybrid (a mixture of printed stuff, parts to buy, electronics, software etc.). As you already mentioned this interdisciplinarity is the most interesting aspect as this is a main reason why people should collaborate. I don’t have deeper knowledge of frameworks for collaborate working but I suppose many of them may fall short in terms of the required flexibility. I always preferred LEGO over prefabricated stuff as a child as I now for instance prefer MODX over any other preconfigured CMS. Too many templates and preset workflows have always been suspicious to me … People contributing to a joint project here wouldn’t work in the same company or even live in the same continent. They’ll have different private backgrounds, liabilities and dependencies and they will work in their free time. So, most of the elaborate scheduling and time planning features won’t be of much use. The best way for me to describe is „object-oriented“. Think of a project as a „thing“ consisting of other things and a canvas showing them clearly arranged. Dependency will most likely be a hierarchical graph. Hey, your SW department pays a lot of attention to cutting edge screen design, symbols, icons, color tags. This could really be useful here Each thing has certain properties, like an owner, contributors, an attached discussion (about design decisions, current state of development, issues etc.) and, most important, a repository with a (simple) version management, and a tagged latest-stable release. The stuff within can be arbitrary like CAD files, software, a bill of materials etc. „Source code“ for any of that should be managed outside like in Github I think. Don’t re-invent the wheel. With a simple command you should get a collection of the latest-stable versions to build the the whole thing. The second pillar might some kind of evaluation and testing „timeline“. Here I would think about time as a main criteria. Like Joris keeps telling „3D printing is not so much research & develop but research & do“.

Ok, wasted one day for a simple insight. Don't use Colorfabb PLA/PHA with flexible filaments based on TPU or TPC. The PHA kills any adhesion, like printing on grease. If you use standard PLA instead: Soft/rigid handle, yellow = Filaflex, blue = PLA

Regarding the mechanical bond, an interesting fact is that with 3D printing you could almost "blend" one material into the other. The only limitations are nozzle size and layer height.

@wishbone, good that someone reminded me of my incomplete profile. It's an UMO with my magnetic tool changer. https://ultimaker.com/en/community/10657-a-different-multi-extrusion-approach-um-tool-printhead-changer Sounds like you have some expert knowledge on this subject.

@DidierKlein That's more or less what I'm trying to do.

@SandervG Adhesion properties are likely to differ. Ninjaflex is a different polymer, thermoplastic polyurethane they say.

That's what I would like to talk about Right now I'm experimenting with tiny nested structures like the dovetail guides in wood working. With 3d printing, adding these structures to the parts comes more or less for free. And they could be designed in arbitrary ways, way beyond my imagination.

The next one, an example for a simple watertight housing, was surprisingly easy. The sealing is just printed into the groove and the small membrane features tiny holes to interlock with the rigid part.

for some strange reason, the picture only shows up in the reply but not in the first post ... OK, will be a serial then While the stopper works and looks quite nice I ended up with glueing the flex parts to the PLA ... multi-material printing was more or less useless as parts started to separate mid-print.

[media=11818]I expect multi-material printing to become a hot topic the next years (at least I hope so). If it's just about colors, other technologies show way more potential. In contrast, exploring the possibilities and limitations of multi-material printing is certainly worth it. The actual printing hardware is only one part of the story. BCN3D made a promising step forward, there are other approaches as well and I'm using my tool changer But part design and slicing becomes really interesting and sometimes demanding. I started to play with the soft & rigid combination, like PLA and Flexifil (or some other flexible filament). There's a multitude of possible use cases: varying surface quality (like with 2k injection molding -> tooth brushes), partly flexible parts, integrated sealings ... But there are challenges as well. The most fundamental one: Thermoplastic Co-Polyesters like Flexifil don't really stick to PLA. So you have to take this into account when designing a part. Which I did not here:

just testing temp resistance.

Baah, too much numbers for me I only looked at the graph, which shows efficiency rates between 75 and 97%, if I read correctly. If they were that bad like 13% efficiency no one would use them.

@neotko you don't bother I just don't have enough time atm to continue with this project. But in not too far future I'll proceed with it. M1 is ok I think if you go for modest gear reduction. As I looked 1:4 or more, gears just would become too big with M1. There are very small and affordable (ok rubbish in some way) lathes

@neotko you need access to a lathe. I drilled the gear bore to 8mm (I think) and machined one end of the the mk7 down to this diameter. Then it's almost a press fit.

Interesting! I'll print some thinner structures the next days.

Way better than expected. Feeder pressure set to minimum, 0.8 mm nozzle, 0.2 mm layer, 15 mm/s, 225°C, no retraction, some drops of oil, no modifications to the feeder Requires some patience but the 0.8 mm nozzle somehow compensates for the 15 mm/s.

Well, the price target might be close enough and the message could be like "within reasonable time this will be affordable for you all". So no one feels betrayed.