What the hell is 3D printing?

Like many people I was bombarded with those videos of people 3d printing random tat a few years back, and for all was my first experience with 3d printing. Yesterday, I got a 3d printer, and what can I tell you, it’s probably the best thing that has ever happened! Discovering 3d printing was like opening a whole new door, or even a new floor of life.

In this article, I’m going to give my first impressions of 3d printing, what I think you should do when you first start 3d printing, and anything I would have done different whilst setting it up. Please take to account, I am still a complete beginner, things I may say may be wrong, or un-factual, they are just merely my opinions.

The big first idea

As previously mentioned, I discovered 3d printing a good while back when I was 11 and was watching some Tom Scott videos when I stumbled upon a video of someone who 3d printed a skull, and it completely failed, turning into air-spaghetti as I’m going to call it. (Air-spaghetti is where a 3d print messes up, and it just starts to shoot out filament and turns into a tangled mess). At first I had no interest in the hobby, but this is where it first entered my mind.

Only around last year was when I was getting back into manufacturing, and the creation of stuff, I watched many YouTube’s such as Things Made Here, and Integza, so forth, and I still watch them obviously.

Around 4-5 months ago I had the world’s best idea! I should get the ultimate creation device, a 3d printer. Hopping back to 4 years ago, I had the idea to create my very own hand held games console, and I drew some designs for it, obviously child me was not talented enough to create such complicated things, but what I was able to do was strap some bread boards together and an arduino, and program some C++ code onto the arduino and make my very own snake game with the aid of the adafruit graphs library, onto a two coloured-segment OLED display, I believe some of this code I may have put on my github, however this was before I started using github, so I am unsure if it’s on here, and it may still be on my old laptop. I messed around with this rudimentary game console with one game on it, before disassembling the two breadboards wired together by jumper cables attached to the arduino uno, and throwing it in its box again.

I believe I only touched the arduino one or two more times after doing that, starting something, and not finishing it is something I do a LOT, and when I say a LOT I mean if you were to count the atoms in the universe I will still have started a project, and stopped half way more times, I won’t have given up, I’ll just have not done it for a week, and then forgot to continue it, I’m struggling to do it with my main project at the moment (which I will talk about in a future blog post), I’ve been working on that for 9 months, and its nearly got its first working fully functioning build, I do plan for this to be my first commercial product, so… But back to the point, I wanted to have another go at the project, and what better way than to make a proper hand held game console. So here’s my plan:

We’re going to use the 3d printer to print the case for the games console, and potentially controllers if I want to do that, however I think sticking to something like a game boy will be good (love game boys I do), then we’re going to get an ESP32 and use that as the brains, the reason I am going to choose an ESP32 over an arduino micro/mini (forgot what they’re called), or uno is for one simple reason: when I used the arduino I kept running into one issue over, and over, I kept running out of flash memory, and had to continuously rewrite my C++ code (which is not a language I’m too fluent in, should have seen my C# code at the time, it was horrendous on it’s own, and that’s the language I was good in) to make it more memory efficient. This really got on my nerves, which is an additional reason to why I stopped working with the arduino. The only thing left for the project is for me to find a screen that I am able to use. I will also be using the lvgl graphics library for handling some of the interface, and if that doesn’t work I will be using the adafruit graphics library once again.

Once I start on this project, if you want updates please go on the github page for this, and go on issues, and make an issue (question) to this post.

Making my first piece of tat

Like a toddler, I had to speak my first word, or take my first step in the 3d printer world. What was the first thing I did when I unboxed the printer? Of course you baboon, it was to build the damned juggernaut. One word of caution when following the advice from this bit is: the printer I have is the Creality Ender 3 v3 SE model which from my research is a really beginner friendly printer, however if you have a different printer my advice may not apply to you.

My first piece of advice: don’t try follow the instructions, hold on hold on, the instructions for the Ender 3 lead to a random online PDF document - SO MAKE SURE YOU HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION, BUT YOU DO AS YOU’RE READING THIS - the PDF document wasn’t the most detailed, I got confused half way in on what screws I was suppose to put and where, it was honestly worse than IKEA instructions without being that complicated, I think I was just being stupid though, so instead I decided to follow this terrific tutorial, which helped way more than I was expecting. The tutorial gave more helpful tips to setting up the printer than the PDF document gave, and told me to adjust small little knobs etcetera the PDF didn’t tell me to, adjusting these allowed for longevity of the printer, and, so it was less likely to get damaged over multiple years, and require less replacements, which without me realizing probably saved me a good couple hundred quid, but we will have to see in a year. So advice piece one: follow a youtube tutorial setup guide, they give more helpful tips than the instructions to keep the printer working for longer.

My second piece of advice: don’t jump straight into making something complicated, the first thing I printed was a boat, one of those benchy boats specifically, this on it’s owned made me show the rest of my family who were over for Christmas my creation I have made. This actually made me so giddy. This was the best thing like ever! The only problem I have encountered with the printer is this strange line running up the side of the print, I read on reddit that this is to do with something called a Z-Margin error or something, basically the vertically height, and where the point meets, not sure how to fix it, but it doesn’t but me too much, and doesn’t look too ugly, so I’ll let it pass until I become a perfectionist.

My third piece of advice: don’t touch the damn bed! I learnt this the hard way. You may think I am on about that the bed is heated, nah 60 degrees isn’t too hot, I can deal with my hand against that for a good 10 seconds, but it’s what you’re doing by putting your hands on it. By putting my hands on the bed, I am taking the oils on my hand, and putting them on the bed, this is the opposite of what we want to happen. By lubricating the bed, the plastic no longer has a vehement surface to stick to, and the plastic just peels off, and walks away, SO DON’T TOUCH IT YOU RASCAL. This then leads into my next piece of advice:

My forth piece of advice: say your cheeky hands have been touching things they shouldn’t be touching, how do I add adhesion back to the bed, I remember from a few months ago someone said use a glue stick, so I got my Pritt Stick out of my pen pot, and… it made it worse, yeah nothing wanted to stick after this, I tried printing some more things with this methods and nope, nothing was sticking, then I also remembered that someone said hair spray also works, so I got some hair spray after cleaning the bed in hot soapy water, and sprayed hair spray on it (make sure not to spray too much as it is flammable) this then works flawlessly, and have not had any problems with it since.

What my super massive noggin decided to make now

I am not a person for tat, even though I’m British. I find plastic tat cheap, and annoying. I can stand some of it, if it’s decorative, which is why I 3d printed a miniature of Saitama from One Punch Man, as that’s my favorite manga, got a little Saitama on my desk now. But as I despise tat more than Greggs being shut, I wanted to make something practical, and low and behold, what do I make? I decide to download Fusion 360, and start designing a screw driver. WHY!?!? My dad lost his cool screw driver set, and I am building up a mirada of anger from not having the exact screw driver when I need it. So I am making a cool screw driver, similar to the Linus Tech Tips screw driver, but worse quality, I recommend that screw driver as well, very high quality. I want this to be a finalized product, so eventually instead of making it out of plastic I will use the plastic mold machines at my school, if I’m in college by the time I finish it, then I will have to see if I can use the ones there, however my subjects are very far from manufacturing, so I may not be allowed, or more than likely I’ll just use one of those online companies. I’ll make myself one of them too.

So what’s my first thoughts on this tat anyway?

So overall, quite impressed with the 3d printer, created some cool things with it, and planned a few cool projects for the future. Hopefully, I can use this to spring back into writing blog posts, as that is a good habit to have, even though no one reads them, I can show them to an employer, or my university, and hopefully be allowed in. The 3d printer is just awesome, and I do recommend you get one if it’s the stuff you’re interested in, this has opened a whole new world of possibilities for me, and would probably do the same for you. The prints don’t take ages to print, and don’t take too long, the stuff I’ve been printing has been taking around thirty minutes to an hour to print, and whilst it’s printing I can be working on the next prototype of the thing, or what I’ve mainly been doing: reading, in the last two days, I have read 3 manga books, and started Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, I will probably finish all of my books by end of week at this rate.

So apart from accidentally cutting a hole in the center of my hand during assembly of the machine, I’m good, it’s good, have a good year goodnight.

Editor’s Note:

I do like the word tat don’t I?

In the next blog post, I will be giving my opinions on some tech related things been going off at the moment, such as the honey scam, and the Devin AI, as they are both things I’ve come to develop opinions about.