The job, getting everything sorted before hitting print. With the job stage, we enter the time that is most similar to a flight list. Once you are ready to produce the part and have the digital design object in hand that you will use to produce it. You are ready to create the mesh export file, you will need to move the preparations into the 3D printer control software. At this stage in the process, you must wear two hats simultaneously, software and hardware. With a digital design file and 3D control software, your target is a G-code job file. With your hardware, on the other hand, the target is a machine loaded and ready to run your file, just as soon as you get it to the machine. I have selected three key topics for the job. Identifying key questions, preparing the job file and preparing the machine. You will setup the G-code job file to instruct your machine how to produce the object. And configure your machine to the materials, settings, and add-ons required by specific job. This means that if you need it, you will install custom nozzles and cores. Or execute build-plate-adhesion strategies like glue, film, and slurries. You'll do this now. You need both the physical and the 3D printer control software settings to match up perfectly. This stage before activating your desktop 3D printer to start producing the object is a narrow. But important window during which a few last steps need to happen. Configure the hardware for the specifics of the job if there is anything. Load the material you need. Got enough? Refresh the bed adhesion strategy. Confirm basic per-job calibration. Send the file to the machine. Those steps complete, it is now time to run the job. Identifying key questions. The first topic might sound like it is completely unrelated to the matter at hand, namely getting to the printing stage as quickly as possible. But it is actually with the following three questions that teams and individuals are able to gut-check themselves. And identify alternative strategies that better serve the project than simply reverting to printer defaults. Here are the key questions every project should answer at this stage. How does the part relate to the project? What do I need to learn from this part? What do I need to learn from this print? You will no doubt generate other project-specific questions at this stage. But these three are the most critical. The first question is the gotcha, that sometimes saves the day. If you merely need to represent something instead of making a refined model of it. Then producing the model quickly at a smaller scale or at a lower resolution. Or featuring only a small excerpt of a larger digital design. Might be a means of rescuing dozens of hours back from a project heading towards a critical milestone or deadline. Question two, what do I need to learn from this part? Again, getting beyond the instinct to simply print the thing to a moment of reflection. Why am I printing this thing? We'll help you make decisions, in the realm of preparing the job for printing, a lot easier to resolve. One possible outcome at this stage might be to say, I don't really need to print this thing thing. The digital model will suffice. Or, if another aspect of the project has hit obstacles, you may really need that print. You might be counting on an impressive looks-like prototype. And we'll want to make sure to add dozens of hours of sanding, priming, painting and coating to the expectations. For how long it will take to make the part. Question three, what do I need to learn from this print? There are the considerations for the part as an aspect of the design. And there are also the opportunities to learn from this specific print about a material, printing profile, or process pipeline consideration. Rather than always reinventing the wheel, consider making a plan to save a piece of each iteration of a design marked for future review. To demonstrate the result of print profile values. Feature and interface prints. One of the most useful techniques for making your printing much more intentional is to eliminate the assumption you always have to print entire parts. And instead perform feature and interface test prints. A feature test excerpt is just a critical segment of the geometry to focus review and discussion. Think of a feature on a building or a detail enlargement and a technical illustration. While you won't necessarily get the entire compositional sense of how the feature fits in the whole. You might also save yourself hours or days of printing to get what is actually critical for this discussion. Interface test excerpts are those that focus on how the printed part will match up to the real world objects. Could be other printed parts. Could be fasteners. Could be external mounting targets such as railings, pipes or a door knob. You don't need to print the entire object to learn the most important details about scale and tolerances for this critical point of interface. You just need the small part that interacts with the other item. So, segment out just that part, print it, and test it. Make adjustments if needed to the part as a whole. And when you are confident that the interface test passes, then you can in good confidence print the entire object. Preparing the job file. The next topic for the job focuses on the process of actually making the job file itself. There are a number of considerations for this topic, machine and config profile. Import design, design transformation, select print profile, 3D Slice part and save the project file. We'll zip right through them. Machine and configuration profile. The first step when using 3D printer control software is to pick the initial machine and config profile. That establish details such as the size and shape of the build envelope. The location of the origin, the number of tool heads involved. And the disallowed areas where printable material cannot be placed. Most of the time, you will select a pre-built profile for the machine and tool heads. And Ultimaker 3 Extended or a Prusa i3 mk3 or a low-spot mini. And then pick a printing profile that is close enough for you to make the critical tweaks to serve the part at hand. What happens as a result of picking these initial profiles is that the 3D printer control software will manifest a virtual build envelope. Matching the physical machine for you to stage your part. I like to call this building the platter to remind myself that you are establishing your use of the printing territory. Not just printing one part, not just putting one thing on a plate. You might have dozens of things on the plate. Tools like Ultimaker Cura, Simplify3D and Slicer. Offer generic template to build off to where you can established the type of mechanical design, partition versus delta for example. The size of the envelope, the location of the parts' origin, details about the in-stop placement and coordinate system. The size of the tool head, that's the available part of the bill platform that can be address in various tool head configuration. As you continue to get to know and reconfigure the machine with modifications, tweaks, and operational optimizations. You may end up evolving your profiles in new directions. My advice is to limit your customization to the elements that really improve parts and operational efficiency. And to write the tweaks to any preset profiles down. So that you can quickly rebuild a profile to suit your workflow if you shift to a new version or a new vendor for your 3D control software. Import Design. THe next stage is to import your design. In most packages this process is fairly intuitive. File open, drag object, etc. What is worth considering are the preferences that affect how the 3D control software behaves at the moment of importing a part. I refer to this process as digital plating, ie, putting an object onto a printable plate or platter. For example, many 3D control software titles have features to automatically drop them all onto the plate, even if the design origin has a part floating up in the air. Other features center parts or keep parts separated as you bring in multiples. Scale up really small objects 25.4 times to convert them automatically from imperial to metric, or reorient them to maximize the numbers of parts on platters. Many of these are really handy. The important thing is knowing which preferences you have active, if you want them. Depending on how you're planning your prints, or if you are performing feature and interface tests, you may want to prevent the printer from reorienting so that you can make placement and scale decisions for yourself. Design transformation. Once you have your part on the plate, each package offers a number of tools to help you take that base mesh as it arrives into the build volume. And offer transformations and translations of that geometry to lock the piece into the exact one-to-one placement and scale you want for baking in the path instructions for the machine to follow. Translation from mathematics refers to moving the data set of vertices and triangles in space, left, right, up, down, rotating around a vertical line, or tumbling forward or back in various orientations. Transformation refers to taking that set of points and changing how they relate to each other. So scaling, whether uniform or in a particular axis, expands, contracts, flattens, lengthens, or squishes the object. Mirroring reflects the geometry across, in a reversed orientation, such as an object and its mirrored reflection, a great way to make symmetrical pairs of things, like bookends. Then there are other types of tools for assigning how the machine will interpret parts of the geometry, such as which materials should be used. It is possible to group and ungroup objects. You can multiply and delete objects. Select print profile. While you may have had to select a base profile before to even set up the 3D control software for the configuration options for your model, now is the time to really dial in what you need. And chances are, there is a profile that is closed. When you look at the list of the things that are available to you for your particular machine, figure out what qualities are most important for you to target for your design. And pick one of those, and see if you can make the fewest number of changes to that to get what you need. I've talked about this in greater length when we talked about 3D slicing. 3D slice part. We have talked extensively about 3D slicing. This is something of a dark art. But as long as you focus on building your slicing plans for profiles with solid track records, such as those created by the materials companies, I would like to point out, and focus on your tweaks on a few key areas, you should be able to track the results of your changes. Feature print tests. Feature tests are a powerful tool for testing and tuning slicer profile settings as much as they are for testing the feature topology itself. The goal is to identify one or two elements of a much larger object, and extract them out of the project as a whole. So that you can apply your settings to a job that requires only, say, 60 minutes printing, instead of 60 hours. What I recommend for those looking to really use this technique frequently is to first set up the platter for the final piece that you want to run, resolving scale, orientation, and other transformation and translation elements. But then, with those elements fixed, segment out just the part you want to look at, and print it on the same orientation and scale. The imperfect but expedient way to do this in Ultimaker Cura without creating your own plug-in is to simply drop the part through the plate. And have the job cut off at the base of the plate when Cura slices the job. If you want to save yourself the guesswork of picking where to stop the job above that, add a pause to the project. Or use a cutting object in the pure object settings to just stop printing right there where you need it. I typically pair the project in Ultimaker Cura and Autodesk Netfabb, and do my chopping in Netfabb to a plate that is already set in place as a project in Cura. But you may find other routes to suit your needs with the design software and mesh repair software that you prefer. Here are some goals for slicing to keep in mind. Achieving better top surfaces, supporting management for high support in models, exploring support techniques in general. Cheating support, finding ways to eliminate as much as you can, adjusting the angle. Save the project file. This last item is the easiest to do when you remember, and the hardest to recreate when you forget. Go ahead and save the project now. The easiest trick to find it again is to add a date stamp to the file title so that you can identify it by thinking back to your calendar, to at least the day you printed it, if not the hour. Here's what not to do, and this is an actual file title I am quoting here, FinalMaster-thisone-version2-support. Here is a much better example, 2019-01-01-1030-partA.3mf. The 3MF files, by the way, in Ultimaker Cura include all of the settings and all of the decisions that you made in the 3D printing control software. So you can audit what you did and use it as a template, if you want to repeat the same approach. Okay, so you have your job file to load, and you have the machine ready to go that is in well-working order. Here are the final two steps before you can hit print. If you look back a couple of hours or a couple hundred years, what are the elements you need when you're ready with your design elements in hand? Ink for marking, and paper for accepting those marks. A desktop 3D printer delivers marks that are dimensioned and stacked up layer by layer to produce a physical object, but the process begins the same way. You need to load the filament, the ink, and you need to prepare the print bed for receiving it. So the last stage before you start to fabricate your parts is no more glamorous than setting up a 2D printer. You need ink, filament, and paper configured to receive it, the build plate. Rather than making assumptions about the last job, get in the habit of loading the material that meets your needs, and prepping the bed yourself by following a simple checklist. In shared printer environments, many new operators have bad experiences because they made the wrong assumptions about setup and materials. And as a result, convinced themselves that the machine was broken. I've heard technical support teams from multiple vendors refer to this as the too lazy to set up the machine, so they decided to take off the side panel syndrome. Don't be one of those. Some materials are better for neutral drafting options. Don't try to convince yourself that any material will do, unless any degree of success is fine for you as well. Bed adhesion strategy. The phrase bed adhesion strategy can refer to efforts you take in software to append elements to your design in order to help you hold it down to the plate. A brim, raft, or user-designed elements, like mouse ears, in your design software. The phrase can also refer to physical efforts you take with the hardware to apply glue, coating, films, or adhesion surfaces. There are many strategies you could explore, but the key goals for your actions are these. Extend the base of your part so that when you're working with more warping materials, such as ABS or polycarbonate, the elements that first cool and shrink are the sacrificial features you have added. Delaying any damage from reaching the actual part itself. Provide better purchase on the plate. Many of the strategies used for the print beds, as well as adhesion solutions are looking to produce surfaces where there are more places for the material to grip as it is laid down. Many glass or metal plates that ship with printers themselves are also chemically etched in ways designed to allow parts to have better grip. This thinking extends to other tapes and films that you apply to the plates for better adhesion. For example, the reason that print surfaces like blue 3M painter's tape is used isn't because paper tape is helpful. Generic paper tape is a terrible surface. It is because of the combination of a bottom adhesive that can handle temperature and force pulling on it. And yet can be removed cleanly from the plate along with a top surface that is produced in such a way that while it looks flat, there are many, many microscopic features that print materials can grip on to. This was unlikely to be an intentional feature and many technical print surfaces, tapes and films that target this engineering requirement do offer better, stronger grips than blue tape. But blue tape tends to be much cheaper. Increase the surface tension. While this is also the goal for surface features to grip on, these strategies approach the problem from another angle. It means that more force will be required for edges and base of your part to pull away from the surface. Now that it isn't necessarily the permanent bonding strength of the adhesive that determines its effectiveness as much as it's ability to raise the surface tension transmit heat up from the plate and then be able to release the part. Either from a twisting function, removal tools, sliding in with sideways force and levering up the part or by soaking the plate in water. You don't need to spray epoxy in there to permanently bond the part to the plate. You just need a little help during the printing process. Improving bed calibration. Bed calibration is essential for accurate parts as we discussed in the systems and component lectures, but it also plays a critical role in the first layer bonding. Adjustments to the position of the plate augmented by adjustments in firmware after probing the plate. Ensure that the nozzle remains at a uniform distance from the printing plane, from the first to the last layers. On this lowest layers, ensuring that the distance is uniform. Also has the effect of providing evenly distributed first layer bonding, so that there aren't parts that are stuck on in some places better than others. Making it easy for sideways forces applied to the part to concentrate in those weaker areas making it easier to dislodge the part. As we covered elsewhere in this course, there are a number of strategies you can use to increase the likelihood that your part will remain fixed to the build plate for the entire fabrication process. How do you pick what you need? Start with the material you have selected and the base of your design job, and investigate which strategies tend to be used to counteract forces to dislodge parts like yours. If your part is taller than it is wide, you might want to take extra pains to clean the bed of oils. Apply a film, such as polyester printing sheet or adhesive to make sure that even as work is done to the part from further and further way, higher and higher up, that force for mechanical advantage won't pop the part off the plate until you're ready. The key is not to assume everything is fine before you hit print. Check the plate, touch it up. Watch first layers. Schedule the job. Now, it's time to deliver the job to the printer. And depending on what printer model you have, there's going to be a range of options. From sending it over a network using OctoPrint or sneakernet just walking over with a SD card or a USB thumb drive or putting it in the machine and hitting print. Okay, the job prepared and ready to go, it is time to print. Before we move from the job stage to the fabricate stage, I wanted to remind you that you probably don't want to just hit print and walk away. Even if you're doing very, very little that requires your attention in the next stage, plan ahead for the time to watch the print begin, so that you can watch the first layer go down and ensure your work won't be wasted. We'll explore this in more detail in the next lecture. Now, all that is left is for you to hit that print button.
