This week was 3D printing, which was good since I was already familiar with the process, so I didn’t have to experiment as much with the equipment. This helped me since the last weeks of October and all throughout November is stacked with projects and deliverables. I first identified several possible option on Thingiverse, then selected a project that both interested me personally but was also easy to print without much need for optimization, all while complying with the requirements for the assignment; this is how I ended up with Zelda Guardian project, which is a remix of a very popular mini-octopus model with the Guardians from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. For resizing, I just measured the smallest diameter of the capsules and set that as the largest of the X-Y measurements of my prints, taking into account that my specific project wasn’t very tall.

My original plan was to print all of the guardians on the Prusa MK3S+ available at the OEDK, until I saw that we needed to use at least two different types of 3D printing for our deliverables. I suspected the even Formlabs Form 3 wouldn’t be able to print the articulated Guardians at such a small scale since SLA printing is commonly known to fuse together joints unless the settings are optimized for that particular material and project specifically. Because of how much longer SLA printing lasts in comparison to FDM printing, and the high demand for the few SLA printers there are at the OEDK, I decided it was better to just show a failed print than to dedicate time, resin and mind-space to optimizing for an articulated print in SLA. I printed my Prusa test Guardian with Santi’s ducky to not waste printers since we were gonna print at the same time.

After printing on the Prusa and the Form 3, I was told we could also use the faster Bambu X-1 Carbon; which also meant using their Bambu Studio editor and slicer that has many automatic print optimizations. I chose this for my final 3 prints as I knew it was a safe bet for good results with less effort. Overall, the presets the OEDK staff had at the slicers were nice jumping off points so that little to no editing was needed when slicing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the end, while trying to free the articulated joints from the resin printed Guardian, one of the legs broke so I decided to leave it at that and capsule all the prints. Here’s an example of the final product:

Cost	Price	Amount	Source	Quantity	Unit	TOTAL
White PLA 1kg spool	$18.99	1000	Amazon.com	20	g	$0.38
Formlabs Grey Pro Resin	$200.00	1000	Formlabs.com	1.6	ml	$0.32
3D Printer Technician (3D print setup and post processing)	$21.00	per hour	Ziprecruiter.com	2	hours	$42.00
3D Printer time	$0.21	per hour	Prusa3d.com	7	hours	$1.47
Quality Control	$18.00	per hour	Ziprecruiter.com	1	hours	$18.00
					NET TOTAL	$62.17