Book Image

Simplifying 3D Printing with OpenSCAD

By : Colin Dow
5 (1)
Book Image

Simplifying 3D Printing with OpenSCAD

5 (1)
By: Colin Dow

Overview of this book

Want to bring your 3D designs to life with OpenSCAD, but don’t know where to start? Simplifying 3D Printing with OpenSCAD will teach you the key skills so that you can focus on your ideas, not troubleshooting your 3D printer. With the help of this book, you’ll build a solid foundation in 3D printing technology, the software used for designing your objects, and an analysis of the G-code produced by the 3D printer slicer software. You’ll also get to know your 3D printer and find out how to set up a printing job effortlessly — from configuring the parameters to build well-defined designs. Consider yourself a practical learner? Use real-world examples such as designing and printing a 3D name badge, model rocket, and laptop stand, to dive into the world of 3D printers build your skillset. By the end of this 3D printing book, you'll be ready to start designing and printing your own 3D printed products using OpenSCAD and being your ideas into reality.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: Exploring 3D Printing
5
Part 2: Learning OpenSCAD
9
Part 3: Projects
13
Part 4: The Future

Preparing our 3D printer

It's time to get our printer ready and start printing. For the remainder of this chapter, we will focus on printing out the #3DBenchy model. We will first prepare our printer before slicing our model into G-code. We will be using polylactic acid (PLA) to print our model.

The following steps will outline using the Ender 3 V2; however, these steps can be used with other modern 3D printers.

We will start off by leveling our bed. Using the G-code we wrote in Chapter 2, What Are Slicer Programs?, run the bed-leveling program and proceed as follows:

  1. Before we install the filament, it's a good idea to place the print head above the print bed so that we can verify that the filament has been loaded correctly. To do this, click on Prepare | Move | Move Z and set the value to 20.
  2. We will now load our PLA filament into our 3D printer. To do this, we have to raise the temperature of the nozzle. Using the control knob on the control panel, navigate...