MAT238 HW2 Stacking Objects

For this project, I followed the course tutorial to create 5 stacking cups with affine transformations.

After I installed the new filament and level-ed the bed, I first printed a calibration cube to test the printer. For the calibration cube, I used the stl model from this website.

My first attempt with this printer wasn't too bad. The printed cube looked very close to the expected image. However, the bottom of the cube was a little deformed. I had a brief discussion with a friend. We discovered the leveling of the bed or the bed temperature might be the cause of this. I did another bed leveling and set the bed temperature to 50 degrees C from the previous 60 degrees C.

I followed the course tutorial to create a transformation function to generate a list of objects by doing the iterative translation. For this part, I generated 5 cubes with the transformation function and offset each cube relative to the previous one. The result is 5 cubes in a row.

Then I followed the tutorial to create a simple revolved geometric object to get familiar with the process of converting open curve profile into 3D model with the Revolve Surface component in Grasshopper. Here I draw an open curve in the front view, set the Z-axis as the rotating axis, and revolved the profile to create a cylindrical cup geometry.

One question I had during this step:

Why does the curve need to be open?

For this part, I combined the previous two steps together to create a list of stacking objects with affine transformations. I followed the tutorial to modify the original transformation function to create non uniform scaling for the x and y so the objects can stack on top of each other. The resulting objects are five cups. Then I union and baked the objects and saved each in a stl file.

I opened the stl file in the Cura. I then scaled the model to the appropriate size and generated the corresponding Gcode.

I printed out 3 out of 5 cups.