Jump to content

mattgriffin

Team UltiMaker
  • Posts

    58
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by mattgriffin

  1. There are actually a bunch of art educators using these tools, from the team over at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, to some handy templating and perspective teaching printables. You should come share your achievements and meet other 3D printing educators at Construct3D 2018! https://www.construct3dconf.com/ Ultimaker is a co-founder sponsor for the conference, and it is vendor agnostic, uniting educators from all contexts from K-12 to higher ed to informal education. Art Educators next to mathematicians next to those exploring social history, next to robotics, engineering, architecture, and more! You'd be in good company, and other educators would be thrilled to see the achievements of your students!
  2. I really am loving these projects -- inspiring progress!
  3. By the way, by request -- here is the "Starter Round" sequence from the blog post. Give this a try! In the recommended “Starter Round” that introduces the game to first time users, participants receive one Challenge Card and two Parameter Cards. The Challenge Card sets the stage for all of the activity that follows. The participant studies this card to identify the problem(s) to solve. The two Parameter Cards provide additional considerations the participant must address in the design. We have dealt the following cards to you (above), the black-and-white Challenge Card on the left, and two blue-bordered Parameter Cards on the right. Read them, and consider what physical object(s) you might create/invent/construct that would solve this challenge: "Design a tool that can be used for drawing and sketching." And how will you address the face-up elements on the Parameter card in your design -- "Bike" and "Ancient"? By the end of just three minutes, you must generate the following: Name of your creation. An elevator pitch (no more than one minute) that would clearly communicate your idea to a stranger. Any quick sketches you need to help you to describe your project. Anyone game?
  4. Why is it that so many 3D printing-powered education projects rely heavily on downloading and printing someone else's creations? For the 2017 back to school season, the Ultimaker North American Community Team has constructed a game that puts the power of design back in your hands. Presenting the Ultimaker Design Engine Starter Pack: a game created to provoke, inspire, and entertain students, educators, 3D designers, artists, and engineers of all experience levels! In collaboration with our North American reseller partners, Ultimaker will offer a free Ultimaker Design Engine Starter Pack for every new machine ordered by a school, library, or makerspace from September 1st to December 31st, 2017 (or until Starter Pack supplies run out). While we only have enough sets for North American customers during this experiment phase, in the near future, we are planning to share the entire set for download and remixing as well. Not picking up a new Ultimaker this season? There are other opportunities to experience the Starter Pack at public events organized by the North American reseller partners and the Ultimaker North America Community Team at education workshops and other events we attend and host. You can read all about it here, on the Education pages! https://ultimaker.com/en/blog/50940-introducing-the-ultimaker-design-engine-starter-pack The Starter Pack can be used to generate scores of new projects, fueling a deeper exploration into the use of desktop 3D printers. For educators, students, and 3D designers of all backgrounds, the Starter Pack is both a handy icebreaker and a challenging activity that sparks creativity. While this is currently an experiment for North American education customers, there are a couple of aspects that everyone can experience and enjoy. In particular, starting September 5th, we will be launching a once-a-week Challenge within the Ultimaker education blog that anyone can explore and use. We already have heard from a bunch of schools looking to use these challenges as icebreakers in their classroom, encouraging students who are strongly interested to take this in earnest. We will share here next week for the launch of the challenge series, with details and answers to your questions, but for now, just wanted to make sure you know about this project and that even those beyond North America can make use of this! Here are a few testimonials so far: I could see so many applications for this activity, from icebreakers, to brain breaks, to brain stretches. There are no limits. There were so many ways to play. — Shawn Grimes, Executive Director, Digital Harbor Foundation As an engineer, we are taught to look for the 'right' answer. This game is wonderful at breaking through 'right answer' thinking to reach creative and inspired outcomes that can lead to real innovation! — Kathy Rutherford, FIRST Robotics Mentor After playing the Ultimaker game and judging student presentations after they played the game, my mind was whirring with all the possibilities this game has to offer. From using it as a brain break to using it for a complete invention innovation project, the Ultimaker game gives teachers the tools to teach and reinforce STEAM on a daily basis. — Jan Abernethy, East Elementary, Greenville, PA A great way to get your students in a designer’s mindset; the cards will elevate brainstorming to an even higher level. — Andrew Woodbridge, Grover Cleveland High School, Ridgewood, NY This will be an incredibly useful tool to use with students for their independent project work and creative prompts for design challenges. Thank you, Ultimaker! — Erin Riley, Greenwich Academy, Greenwich, CT
  5. Ultimaker will be at Solidworks World 2017 next week in Los Angeles. If you are going to be heading there, share here as we have some treats to bring along for you! ;-) In addition to the Ultimaker booth, the team will be participating in the following presentations (below). We can't wait to see you folks -- and will see if we can share the presentation afterwards for those who can't make it! Tuesday, Feb 7, 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM Design for Additive Manufacturing: SOLIDWORKS Tips and Tricks Luis Rodriguez (Ultimaker Community Strategist, North America) and Michael Curry, a talented SOLIDWORKS expert from our community, will be presenting a talk and demonstration to introduce SOLIDWORKS users to effective ways to leverage desktop 3D printing equipment, featuring our newly launched Ultimaker 3 machines and dissolvable support material. Wednesday, Feb 8, 2:45 PM - 3:45 PM Additive Manufacturing Learning Path Panel Discussion Michael Curry will also be participating in the final session of the Learning Path — a Panel discussion on Additive Manufacturing moderated by SOLIDWORKS’ Mark Rushton. Representatives from each of the major Additive talks that day will field questions from the audience on the sessions and topics they have attended that day to round out the day.
  6. Hello amedee! Thanks for the message. I forwarded your message on to the YouMagine support team. This is indeed an odd situation that I haven't been able to replicate. Please drop a message to hello@youmagine.com as well for email follow up on this item if you prefer.
  7. Well, just remember that you might need to continue to remind yourself to be careful, as you get used to working with this stuff. There are a heck of a lot of early DIY SLA and DLP desktop 3D printing folks who are now allergic to those resins because they "got used to" those chemicals and didn't always wear gloves. This is why laboratories have procedures you are meant to follow so mechanically that you don't have to think about them anymore.
  8. Hey cloakfiend, I'm hoping that you are testing these things in lab ventilation hood. There should be some hackerspaces or uni labs in London where you can get permission to run your tests in that kind of gear. I'd suggest reaching out to some chemists there if you are eager to test things but don't have access to this kind of gear. (Maybe you already have these resources?) Most of these vapor smoothing options we are discussing here are rough on soft tissues and brain cells. In the US you cannot get chloroform for example outside of a national lab or a dry cleaner. Not necessarily because it is as rough as some of these other chemicals, but because unsafe usage by general public lead to way too many harmful effects. You are looking deeply into this so I hope you do so safely AND share your results. ;-)
  9. I think we are living in a pretty exciting time for design software -- more options and capability appearing in free and affordable options all of the time. And thanks to how social all of us desktop 3D Printing folks are with our attempts to use every 3D design package out there for what we really need - 3D modeling , sculpting, and surfacing - I think they are all getting a bit better for this. I don't think anyone can go wrong by spending time in Blender, SketchUp (much better these days for 3DP than before), rhino, fusion 360, onshape, solidworks, Modo, tinkercad, openscad, zbrush, meshmixer, or freecad. And watching time lapse sculpts and modeling sessions on YouTube can help you pickup the "metaphors" for how superusers are using each set of tools to get what they want. But I have to say -- I've seen incredible, impressive 3D printed projects produced in every single package I listed. And as other responses have pointed out, there are huge fans in 3D Printing in dozens of more packages as well -- from design spark mechanical to wings3D to maya to 3DS max to grasshopper .....
  10. By the way, was having an excellent conversation off this forum about s3d's file management strategy, and realized that I should be clear here that I'm really looking for what works for YOU and the thinking, not only solutions with Cura. Because if you roll up your sleeves, any behavior is possible with any of the options, as long as you have decided what information is useful to you! So to bump this again -- what is crucial to you to include in your file naming and where do you put your files so that you can reference how you prepared them in the future?
  11. Are these gcode files tucking into folders with the STLs or somewhere else with all of the other gcode? Given the reasonable size of gcode, this suggestion sounds pretty good -- but folders full of STLs and gcode can quickly get messy for me, which is why I started messing with this stuff. And this is why I included the item ID to help me both figure out what the original source was (including my designs -- so I could archive all recent work but search for that ID number and bring up everything associated with it. This is really handy -- do you ever find yourself adding other comments into the head of your g-code for later review? And also do you ever consider keeping a log of these items and adding other details in another file listing? I'm tempted, but never remember to do this in the heat of the moment when printing something urgently.
  12. Yeah, i use "zARCHIVED" as a folder, so that on the laptop it is always alpha-sorted to bottom where I can tuck everything that's not active now, but worth not tossing out at the moment. That's handy -- I'm thinking to take a few of my machines to tinkergnome firmware and use those scripts -- will try that naming scheme.
  13. This is really interesting. there are also projects like the 3D Matter "Optimatter" tool that offer some free resources to help folks explore these materials.
  14. Hey Mark! Actually, the International Study Groups don't have to be Pioneer Program participants only. In fact, the international part of that won't be in the program, as the Pioneers right now are North America only. (there will be routes for others soon) I am looking to get folks who are passionate on a key question of value to everyone to work together to divide up the task of investigating and attempting to locate excellent resources and solutions and best practices -- and then as a group share them back in the education resources, in this forum, and possibly elsewhere. This is a relatively new project and we have a trial run planned that is mostly Pioneer Program folks to figure out how to do this effectively. But if there are people wanting to get in on this right now from elsewhere in the world, this would be a great way to get this concept rolling!
  15. As I spend more and more time digging deep into slicer nuances accompanied by hunting through YouMagine and other repos, I've been looking for a better solution for creating a folder template and naming scheme for STLs and .gcode files to take some of the extra effort after setting up each thing. Here's what I'm doing right now, and I'd love feedback from other users about what they prefer and why! I'm starting from how to name the gcode files themselves. These are most critical and this scheme, as awkward as it appears, means i never have ambiguity about what I sliced and when I sliced it. I drop this file name into a printing log I keep in plain text that has the details for myself about the actual experiments. And i rely on settings in comments (and add settings in comments if not there) to make the gcode itself also a key way to learn about how it was created. GCODE files: {Machine+State}_{FileName}_{YYYYMMDD-TTTT}_{FileID}.gcode for example: UM2+PLA8_NozzleMag_20160911-1520_ym9450.gcode Machine+State : - I create a new machine setting for each of my machines in any state that is annoying to setup. - So for my UM2+ unit by my desktop, I'll have a "machine" for each of the common configs I setup for it. - Right now this is UM2+PLA25, UM2+PLA4, etc for UM2+ slammed up next to the material and the nozzle size. - I'm tempted to create a lookup table for a tighter 3 digit prefix listing to save real estate for the display -- like AA8 for UM2+ with PLA using 8mm nozzle. - This is an adhoc solution, I think the evolution of Cura 2 series is already getting closer to a better option. FileName : - Smash it down the way ProTools and Avid use to, killing vowels and making sure i can still guess - Again, this is a real estate consideration, and there are probably better ways to do this. YYYYMMDD-TTTT : - While adding a manual timestamp in the file title is handy for looking at the card in a computer, you can rarely see to the end on the display. - By adding 4digit time in 24hr time, i never have clashes between slicing experiments. That's kinda critical to me, even though this isn't clear on the card. - Right now I'm using card management to remove any no-longer valid gcode from a card before running a model. - I'm okay with that, I think. Though again a tighter date-time code from a lookup table my save real estate. FileID : - This totally betrays my years of working hardcore with thingiverse, but I see this as handy with youmagine and others as well - Typically there is some sort of item ID for each design post in a repository -- I use it as a museum accession number to make sure even if just stumble on an old SD card with some files on it, i know what the heck "Mount" referred to" or similar. - For YM, there is a hidden ID you can find in the source (search for "contribution_design_id") or another trick I'll let other community members share if they know about it. - For Thingiverse, MyMiniFactory, etc, usually you can find the ID right in the URL or on the page (MyMiniFactory ends the design post URL with the number). Look forward to your thoughts!
  16. This is an excellent unboxing post -- thanks so much for sharing this! Heh, you can post at Thingiverse, Github, MyMiniFactory, and others beyond Youmagine, entirely up to you. Heck, I often hit several of them when I share projects. But as ultiarjan points out, there are some good resources there at youmagine that might interest you. give them a try! And there is a growing community of designers like ultiarjan who are taking advantage of all of these great resources for developing and sharing new work -- from JAM to Private Links to new practices among educator groups using Collections, ym has quite a bit of undocumented glory worthy exploring. (Oh, and we have some documentation tasks ahead of us!) I second ultiarjan's note about straightening the tips of filament, especially when starting a new spool. For ABS and PLA, you can move a little away from the bits the curved around the catches on the side of the spool -- pick where the filament starts to straighten out more naturally -- and just score the filament with a knife, razorblade, or even scraper, and then the filament should snap cleanly. That is a fast and easy way to have just what you need to feed into the port. This is somewhat unhelpful for those starting out, but after flipping the machine around to load when you are first starting out, you can very easily load by feel from the front of the machine. You can tell with your fingers if the leading section of the filament is ready to go, and then press it gently up into the port during the loading sequence, tugging the filament below the filament drive a bit to make sure that it is well-gripped by the gear teeth. At which point you can activate the fast forwarding stage of loading with you already in position to watch those crucial first stages of moving into the hotend itself. Hmmm, like kristenschreck's post, my additional details would have better been expressed in photos....
  17. These photos are great -- sounds like an excellent event. Where are the participants going to host their creations-in-progress? Please encourage them to share photos and progress here and/or over at youmagine. Not required, but a lot of us would love to see what folks are creating, offer encouragement where we can, and learn more about what interests them and what they are inventing!
  18. You might have caught the news on our blog about the new Ultimaker Education resources that launched on our site and the first 58 Pioneer Program educators. Well, we aren't just launching these resources and that's the end of it. Instead, Ultimaker and all of the Pioneer Program participants who have joined this effort are looking for a living conversation with educators everywhere. So we are looking to the Ultimaker Education Forums as an excellent place for all of us in the desktop 3D printing community to add to this discussion! (Whether that person is a part of the Pioneer Program or not.) So head over to the Education forums to add your voice, jump on threads exploring such topics as your experiences with the brand new Tinkercad Beta launch (and your thoughts about Pioneer Brian Wetzel's excellent in-depth review of it shared this morning), to a call to action inviting folks to contribute to the International Open Study Group - "Pro Tips for 3D Printers Shared to Groups" community-sourced resource. We are just getting started and eager to learn from you what will make the biggest difference for educators in our community. And another reminder here -- for those educators in North America who feel that would be a good candidate for joining the Pioneer Program, you can fill out an application here to learn more and join our next class. There will be opportunities for international educators to band together from territory to territory as well soon -- for now the Ultimaker Education Forums are the best place to get involved and give back to educators across the globe.
  19. Checking to see if there is interest here in launching a defacto "International Open Study Group" right here in the Ultimaker Education Forums on a particularly universal topic. There have been a lot of requests for educators in our community to band together to share best practices around managing shared printers in a classroom or makerspace. Everything from locking down the SD card slot and using 3D Host queue only to run the prints (for better audit repair and faster alerts when a machine goes down) to the eternal struggle to find the right spatula/scraper solution that is safe enough for you students/users and yet actually effective without mauling the bottom of every part. While Ultimaker and educators conversing here post frequently on aspects of this topic, staying abreast of the latest trends, tricks, and best practices can be challenging for overbusy educators. What educators have been requesting is a low-frequency "Pro Tips for 3D Printers Shared to Groups" (working title ) round up of the latest new strides made in this area, a resource created by educators and shared back to educators. A few of the Pioneer Program participants and other educators and those supporting educators at schools, universities, and beyond have already stepped up to this topic and are hoping to dedicate some time to contributing -- how many of you active in the forums here would be interested in participating by sharing your experiences, best practices? And more details than just your favorite spatula, that will never be resolved.
  20. Pioneer Brian Wetzel just shared an article today about this week's major Tinkercad Beta launch -- Tinkercad Beta: Great Strides But Still Some Tinkering To Do. This piece has some praise for the new launch, emphasizing how essential this tool has become for educators in the 3D space, as well as some tough constructive criticism for the collaboration model. From his wrap up: What are your experiences with the beta? How many educators here are considering making the leap to using this beta in their classrooms this season, vs waiting?
  21. This seems viciously hard -- unless you go dissolvable support. I feel confident i could make an immobile version pretty easily. Hmmm. I'm gonna run some tests with PLA -- though to date the most exciting thing I can think to do is use the openscad script to create a bunch of small fixed ones in different configurations, if that would be interesting. In a pinch, what about just printing caps for existing rubik's cube?
  22. Okay, project underway here.... I'm using this piece as my publicly hosted lab book. I'll check in and run each test when I have machine (and time) to do so. Which won't be as often as I'd like, but I'll be able to refer back to photos and resource there -- and over time get some science done. ;-)
  23. Oh, that's a brilliant idea for support testing -- especially because watching for those corners to get creamed top or bottom from support at too great a gap should be a great test. I grabbed Part C from the Half Hour Cube from Michael QueallyMichael Queally here. I rotated over to be all about overhang, and I'm going to use this to explore the various settings with the various materials and see how that goes. This is a great suggestion, Labern, because the total height of the model is pretty much only pertinent to the support test. My goal will be to find a solution with the minimal amount of support, that is easy to remove, and doesn't leave those corners to droop out of shape. And then when I think I'm close I'll switch to a "drunken" UltiBot (tipped on its edge) and start running mechanical pieces that are are critical in more than one axis. Would love a suggestion for the last one ... if you happen to have some really small mechanical projects that work in more than one axis.
  24. Ah, so you would say that Support Roof is much more a PLA strategy than a CPE (or ABS) one, huh. I just saw your note and went and canceled my test print. ;-)
  25. Heh, perfect. I had that in my queue to print, so I'll give that a go!
×
×
  • Create New...