Clay Printing With Potterbot 3d

For this assignment, we were given hands on experience with the Potterbot 3d, which prints with clay. We wanted to create beautiful and functional pots with interesting designs to them.

Using the parametric cylinder code as a base, Tina put in her own code to create a hexagonal base.

In our initial print, we faced issues with the positioning of the nozzle being too high off of the surface, resulting in the Potterbot printing the hexagonal pot in midair. We had to then manually adjust the height of the tube to bring it close to the surface as we were unable to successfully fix it through the software.

The next issue that we encountered was the consistency of the print. As seen in the image above, the extrusion of the clay was inconsistent which led to half of the pot not being printed and layers collapsing on each other. We had to increase the extrusion rate by about 200% to obtain a more consistent flow seen in the last image.

After a few printing mishaps and fixing of the settings, we were able to obtain a beautiful final model! We printed out another one in which the base was not as clean because we did not account for the change in heights of the new surface we put in, but both pieces came out beautiful in the end. We printed a bowl as well to explore other designs Potterbot was capable of to create a basket look.