My new Hobby

I’m starting a new hobby. Technically, I suppose, I already did. I recently purchased a 3D printer. I originally thought all printers were 3 dimensional so I had to see what the difference was. I felt kind of stupid when I found out it printed 3 dimensional objects … and is itself (here I go anthropomorphizing things again) 3 dimensional. Egg meet face.

In all seriousness, well maybe not all seriousness, there’s too much seriousness in the world so I try to be as not seriousness as possible, which might come through in my writing. But back on topic (I also get distracted easily which may also come out in my writings … crap, did it again.) So I got this 3D printer and thought to myself, the worlds population will most defiantly want to read all about what I do with my new printer and my cat and my hemorrhoids , well maybe not my cat. So, I’m firing up my blog again after nearly a decade of doing nothing. For those of you who were waiting with bated breath for my next post … you should probably get out more or just get out.

My plan, should I decide to accept it, is to provide posts about my 3D printing experiences as a hobbyist. This will include posts documenting projects I undertake, tips when I learn something helpful, general info like on filament types and possibly pictures of my dog doing what she does best.

Getting started

To get started in 3D printing you need a 3D printer. Not like other hobbies like bird watching and collecting old gum where you don’t get birds and then watch them (another case of egg meet face but that’s another story) and gum is kind of everywhere. So, unlike bird watching or gum collecting, to get started you need a 3D printer and there are many to choose from.

There are a lot of factors to consider when getting a printer. If you are interested I suggest going to YouTube and searching “3d printer review”, quitting your job and sitting back for the next few years to watch them all. Or not, I guess that’s really up to you. I found the videos to be helpful in my decision making.

You’ll want to consider things like cost, size, materials you can print with and product support. There are printers out there for as little as $100.00 U.S. Dollars (If I say dollars going forward, assume U.S. not Canadian or Australian, although the prices should be close) and up to tens of thousands of dollars (remember, I’m using the U.S. dollar as reference.) There are kits (parts lists and how to put them together), fully assembled systems and partially assembled systems (like my B1.) I think you get the idea, choices, so many choices.

I thought of including a top 10 printers list but the only printer I know anything about, and that’s less than I know about most things I know anything about with the possible exception of how to make small-talk, is the printer I bought. The BigTreeTech Biqu B1.

The BigTreeTech Biqu B1 is considered a budget printer with a retail price of $299.00 as of the writing of this post. This printer is comparable to the Creality Ender 3 Pro which seems to get more press. The price is about the same, they look almost identical and from what I’ve seen on YouTube and articles I’ve read they perform about the same but I have no point of comparison since I’ve only ever used the B1. After slowing down the internet for months researching 3D printers I decided to get the Ender 3 pro. Then I came across a review of the B1, it sounded really compelling to me and being completely indecisive and someone who will overthink and panic about whether to get chocolate or strawberry ice cream, this threw my world into a tailspin.

So I did what I do and spent many more hours than I would like to admit researching the B1 and finally decided to go with the B1 for a few mostly trivial reasons. First, the B1seemed to have slightly better thought out internal design. At least in the images I saw in posts, articles and on YouTube, it looked … cleaner. Biqu also put a little extra effort in, like a port in the back for a BL Touch automatic bed leveler, including a bracket for said leveler and firmware support out of the box. Most of the other printers I looked at required opening the case finding the place to plug it in and possibly updating firmware as well as having to get or make a bracket for the BL Touch.

I was also impressed by the touch screen used to control the printer. It looked polished and well done and as it turns out it is polished and well done. You can fall back to the Marlin menu system with the knob turning and pushing interface if you’ve been doing this a while and like that. But if you have been doing this a while then you already know that and why are you reading this? I haven’t dug too deeply into the menu system, that may be for a later post, but I was able to quickly move the bed around, extrude, load, eject, start prints, control temperatures and a bunch of other basic things without any trouble.

Another distinguishing, although completely frivolous feature, is that the extruder has a multi-color led light on it. Not of much printing use, but you can never have enough colorful LEDs on things.

Finally, you can get one with pink components. The braces at the corners, the extruder body and a few other parts are available in a pink anodized color. I ended up not getting this, because they didn’t have any in the North American warehouse and I didn’t want to wait 3 weeks for one to ship from China. It was cool, but I’m not that patient and it’s nothing some spray paint couldn’t fix if I really need to have more color.

Unboxing and Assembly

I should have made an unboxing video or taken pictures of the unboxing and build to post, but I didn’t think of it at the time. I only decided to do this blog at all because, why not. And maybe I can help someone make a decision or fix a problem, so sorry you’ll just have to watch one of the 200,000 other unboxing and build videos on YouTube. But seriously, if you’re thinking of getting one, watch a build video, they are helpful.

What I will say is that it was nicely and efficiently boxed. I like that efficiently boxed part. Everything had a space in the high density foam die cut packing and everything was easy to get out.

It was also easy to assemble. The instructions were clear, the parts well labeled and everything fit together without the need for a drill or hammer to make things fit. I’m not a patient person and normally just fly through assembly processes, which probably explains the boxes of screws, washers and other assorted parts left over from years of assembling things badly. But in this case I was careful, read everything twice and was done in about 45 minutes with no unexpected left over parts.

First Printing

I plugged it in, loaded the provided ridiculously short length of filament, leveled the bed according to the instructions and printed the pokemon figure file from the included SD card. To my delight (and also, to be honest, surprise) it printed without any issues the first time! Based on all the other articles I read and videos I watched I expected adhesion problems, a partial print then spaghetti or for 1/2 of the object to print and run out of sample filament. None of which happened. Of course this figure is about 1 inch square so there is more material in a fart than in this thing, but as you can see in the picture which is hopefully displayed below, the quality was really good.

Filament

I purchased some filament at the same time as the printer and went with PETG vs. PLA. PLA is the type which came with the printer. PLA is short for Polylactic acid (yes that lactic acid so if you are intolerant don’t eat any of the filament. Actually, even if you’re not intolerant it’s probably best not to eat any of the filament. Just don’t eat the filament.) PLA is easy to work with and produces good results so it is apparently often the first filament used by 3D printing newcomers. Most printers include a couple inches of PLA, typically enough to print 1/2 of the example item included on the SD card from the manufacturer. However, being that I am not prone to doing things the way most people do them, I purchased a couple spools of PETG filament. PETG is short for Polyethylene terephthalate.

I chose PETG over PLA because it’s a little harder, stronger and has a higher melting temperature than PLA which means it can be sanded or worked with a rotary tool if necessary (example below). The other reason is that it is food safe, just in case I wanted to print something that would come in contact with food (Which I did, by the way. More on that later too.)

There are several types of filaments, I suggest searching Bing or Google or Ask Jeves or whatever and search for “3d printer filament difference” or something like that. There are many articles on the pros and con’s of the different filament types, what they are good for or not good for, why to use them and on and on and on. I’m not going into that detail here since if that topic were a horse there would be nothing but a wet smelly unidentifiable puddle left.

I will say, that I have had very little problem printing with PETG once I got it dialed in and figured out some tricks. I plan on doing some step by step posts of the process of design to failed print, design adjustment, failed print, design adjustment, failed print, settings changes, failed print, head scratching google searching, settings adjustment mostly successful enough if you keeps the light low print process which seems rather common and what I’ve experienced so far with the few items I’ve printed.

Control Freaking

As I understand it, most 3D printers support reading files from an SD card or USB drive. My pokemon figure was printed from the menu system from the file on the SD card that came with the printer. But, you can also hook a computer up to the printer and use that to control and monitor it.

A short trip down memory lane when shortly before I decided to get the printer I bought a Raspberry Pi computer for just because. I had been messing around with it sort of generally using it as a small computer, which is exactly what it is. Anyway, I read about something called octoprint, which is software to control and monitor 3D printers and it has a version for the Raspberry Pi. Serendipity.

While I waited for the printer to get here I installed octoprint on the Pi and played around with it as much as I could to get familiar with how it worked. You can control most aspects of the printer from the web based interface including setting nozzle and bed (if you have a heated bed) temperatures, moving the printer parts, extruding, ejecting and many other printer features. Control freak nirvana. I highly recommend using software like octoprint, not just if you are a control freak, it will make life easier.

The feature of octoprint I like the most – which was a bit of a hassle to get configured and I will be creating a How-To post on octoprint at some point – is the ability to attach a camera and watch the print process remotely and/or capture a time lapse of your print. This way, you can put the printer in your kids or mother in laws room and be able to monitor it’s progress without the noise (although the B1 is very quiet) or smell (if you’re using a filament like ABS) bothering you.

Making

The printer uses something called gcode to control the printer. It’s basically instructions to the printer on how to do everything it does like move the print head, extrude filament, everything. A gcode file is actually text and you could read it if you wanted to but it’s meant for the printer. The gcode is usually output from slicer software. There are several free and for fee slicer products out there. I’ve been using Ultimaker Cura which is made by the 3D printer company, Ultimaker. The only things I know about Ulimaker are that the web site is really nice. The printers look really nice. And they make Cura which is one of the more popular free slicers.

The Slicer, as the name implies, slices a 3D object into … um slices (I’m using slice a lot here, sorry.) There are other things it can do like add support structure to models with overhanging parts or things like skirts, brims or rafts to help your thing stick to the bed better. I’ll probably do a post on those things at some point. In any case, this is needed to convert a 3D image, usually in the STL file format, to gcode so it can be printed.

So all this means that to print something you need the gcode file, which is created with slicer software that takes an STL file. STL files are usually the output of some sort of drawing or CAD or CAD-CAM software. There are some sites where people publish STL files for things they think others might find interesting, like Thingyverse or Cults as well, in which case you don’t need the CAD software. Otherwise you need to either 3D scan something, which I have no knowledge about at this time, or use CAD software to create something to print.

There are several easy to use free CAD tools out there. A popular one I’ve used is Tinkercad which can be used to make all kinds of 3D objects. It’s free, it’s easy and it’s web based so there’s no install and it should would from any type computer with internet access. More recently, like yesterday, I downloaded the free for makers version of Fusion 360 which is by AutoDesk who also makes Tinkercad but is a full on professional product. I went to Fusion 360 because I was trying to make something and Tinkercad just didn’t have the tools I needed. That said, it took me about 26 maybe 27 femptoseconds to become passible at using Tinkercad and I watched a couple hours of videos and spent a few hours trying things until I was able to create my very simple coffee funnel.

This was actually version 4.0 of the funnel having tried a few other unsuccessful designs and having measuring issues (keep your 8 inch jokes to yourself.) So, after 4 – 5 hours of reading, watching videos and experimenting I got what I wanted and, unlike my other attempts, it worked.

Conclusions

So far I’m glad I got the printer. For just under $400.00 I got the espresso portafilter funnel I always wanted and a box just big enough for a couple of buck converters. What a deal! I’ve got a few other projects I am planning and I’ll document my process here.

Maybe I’ll try my hand at an articulated arm for the camera attached to my pi watching the printer. Right now it’s duck taped to the door of the closet and looks like something … well like something I’d do, at least until I got this printer and can now print stuff to hold the camera where I want it instead of popsicle sticks, empty beer cans and duck tape!