On My Process with 3D Printers

I have my Microcenter-brand Replicator Dual clone pretty well-tuned to match my model dimensions, but it is not perfect. I go through dozens of iterations for my designs. Each iteration, I design something that will let me test as many aspects as I can without them interfering with each other, then I print it out. Next, I test it for fit and with calipers and screws, and make adjustments here and there in my 3D model based on the print. Then I print it again and repeat the process. If you are really moving, sometimes you can be tweaking one aspect of your design while a test print for a different design problem is printing and really iterate like woah. In my case, each nightlight enclosure takes about 45–60 minutes to print, so I would generally spend about that long making revisions to my 3D model during a session, and then retrieve the previous round’s print and immediately start the next.

When you’re really moving, and your printer is working well, this is a very rewarding creative process. I was fortunate and had a very low failure rate, only one out of probably more than 40 test prints failed. It was not always so.

Like any craft, 3D printing tools each have their own idiosyncrasies, and you can only master them through experience, repetition, and a complete understanding of the tools themselves. I started out in 3D printing by fixing up a Cupcake CNC back in the day, and my struggles to tune/rebuild nearly every part of the machine rewarded me with a pretty complete understanding of it. That experience really proved invaluable for troubleshooting and designing 3D prints. I’m only recently reaching a point where I’m usually able to go from idea to 3D print without too much back peddling. It’s been a long road to get here. But let me — a person to whom Blender appeared as an impenetrable riot of grey squares and chaos three years ago — stand as testament: you can do it. It Gets Better.

(Also: AquaNet (unscented). I’m serious. I spray a sensible mist of AquaNet on my heated print bed every 25 prints or so, and things almost never curl.)

Designing the Nightlight

For the Game of Life Nightlight, I wanted to use parts that were easy to come by. The Apple Cube USB power supplies are cheap and ubiquitous, they put out a respectable 1 amp of current, and have a nice, sharp-edged shape. I wanted to design an enclosure I could snap one of these in and out of without any fasteners. If I could do that, then the hardest and pretty much only potentially dangerous aspect of this project, connecting with mains voltage, would have been left in the experienced, supple hands of an Apple engineer I’ll never meet, with far more experience and liability insurance than me.

The processor and display module are both from Adafruit, coming in at about $6 and $10 respectively. The processor is an Adafruit Trinket, the display module is an LED Matrix w/ i2c Controller. I could have saved some money by designing my own boards, but I wanted to make something that I could eventually publish on Thingiverse for others to build, and I had a schedule to keep.

The Code

Zillions of versions of the Game of Life algorithm have been written. I derived my code from a handful of different sources (esp this one) I found through some Googling. The Trinket has just 5KB of usable program space, and I used very nearly all of it. There is definitely room for optimization, and I am including a rather large LED Display library I’m barely using. But again, I had a deadline, so once it worked and fit on the Trinket, I called it good enough to ship. I let the Game of Life simulation run until 125 generations have gone by, or all the cells are dead, whichever comes first, and the display shows the state of the game array.