I took a very short break from printing visors as PPE this afternoon to have a quick go at 3d printing into material. I'd seen this done a fair bit by others but had never had a go myself. The idea being you pause a print after a few levels, jog the head out of the way and tape down some cloth over the print before resuming the rest of the print.
After printing and removing the cloth and print from the bed it's very pleasing both how well embedded the prints seem in the cloth and also how flexible the created object is. Whilst it's highly decorative it makes me wonder what mechanical uses this technique has.
I'd designed each of the hexagonal islands in the
fantastic free and opensource FreeCAD, to have a 3mm hole in the back which could receive a 3mm led.
I removed the cloth from inside the holes after printing using a dremel and then tested to see if/how the LED diffused through the print. It's not great tbh as I didn't think about which geometry infill or the I thermal design of the hexagons so I could certainly make this work better. I did however want to have a go at fitting at least one using some conductive thread I bought an age ago.
The circuit was just an LED and a corresponding resistor and a power source (a 7.4v lipo). I first fashioned some circles in the leads of he components and this gave me something to tie the conductive thread too.
As can be seen in the first image in the post the effect is OK, the stitching is poor, not helped by the thickness of the conductive thread meaning it requires a very fat needle, which was a bit to much for this fine meshed fabric. However, it was a good experiment and I am already thinking of projects that can be realised with both of these approaches.
No comments:
Post a Comment