Going into this project, I already had a fair amount of experience with 3D printing, so I decided that I wanted to print my five objects on five different printers just for fun. I wanted to make something that moved a lot, and I found the 7-sided fidget polygon from this link on Thingiverse. I started out by scaling it down to 40% of the original size and uploading it to 3D printer OS for slicing:

Then I printed it on the 3D printer I was most familiar with, the Prusa FFF, and here are some pictures of that first version, which turned into a very flexible little toy:

To make sure this process would work consistently, I decided to print a one more copy on a Prusa with a raft, and one copy on an Ultimaker with a raft (I used 3D printer OS again for the Ultimaker). As you can see, the sides where the rafts connected to the part are quite messy, especially on the Ultimaker:

To mitigate this issue on the Ultimaker, I decided to try slicing it with a raft made from dissolvable filament. This is not an option on 3D printer OS, so I downloaded the Ultimaker slicer and used that instead. This is the resulting print:

Here is what the bottom looks like after the raft was removed:

This method was a success!

Next, I wanted to try SLA printers. I started with one of the Form printers in the wetlab, which I had worked with before. In the slicer, I wound up having to add a lot of extra supports manually because the auto-generated supports were not enough for the slicer to pass the file as ‘printable’. Eventually, though, it worked:

Next, I used a printer I had never used before–– the new Prusa SL1S printer. I downloaded the slicing software onto the desktop at the makerbar, read the manual, and began printing:

Initially, I printed on this with a raft as well, but getting the raft off proved to be a huge pain:

So I printed it again without a raft, and it came out clean:

Then for my last print, I wanted to do something more unique, so I used the markforged, which I had used once before. Despite resulting in a much stronger product, the markforged is by far the easiest printer to slice for–– I set up the print with no supports, and it worked well on the first try:

In the end, these are the five prints I will be turning in, each from a different printer:

Cost

Here’s the breakdown for the amount of material and prices of material each print:

• Prusa FFF: $0.17; 4h 48m; 8.65g
• Ultimaker FFF: $0.16; 2h 25m; 7.96g
• Formlabs SLA: 3h 30m; 13.40 mL (grey pro resin, $175/1000 mL)
• Prusa SLA: 11m 10s; 5.89 mL (default orange resin, $80/1000 mL)
• Markforged FFF: $1.99; 3h 50m; 9.87g

This would mean a total of $5.136 in materials cost alone. In terms of labor, assuming OEDK lab assistant pay of $11 per hour, it takes an average of 20 minutes to set up and remove a print from an FFF printer, and an average of 30 minutes to set up, remove, clean, and cure a print from an SLA printer. So the total labor cost for the 2 hours of work would be $22.

Overal Total Cost: $27.136