Week 7 - Clay Printed Pottery

Clay 3D printing for MAT238 at UCSB!

To start off my project, I first looked at the documentation for CoilCAM (https://ecl.mat.ucsb.edu/coilCAM). Since I just wanted to make a simple vase, I decided that I would simply be easiest to start with their demo file. An important step here was that I needed to adjust the parts that were found under "Potterbot Configuration". Afterwards, I started to adjust the example files, specifically "CoilCAM_PBMicroDemoVessel.gh".

Through the process of editing the vessel file and figuring out what shape I wanted everything to be, I settled on a general shape for my design. The next step from here was the adjust the parameters to be compatible with the Potterbot 10, which included changing small things such as Nozzle Diameter, LayerHeight and number of Layers. A problem I initially had was that the nbLayers did not correspond to nbPoints in the design, which meant I was unable to change the number of layers. This was fixed by making sure all instances of nbLayers matched with all instances of nbPoints.

When I was attempting to print my file, I had a lot of help from Professor Jennifer. She instructed me on how much I should babystep the Z axis by and also gave me advice on changing the extrusion rate during the printing process. It was stressful to print the first few layers because the excess clay was being squished and it looked like it was too messy to be correct, but after the walls were being printed, it seemed to work out well. I remember the Z-axis being set to +2.5mm and the extrusion rate being tuned down to 70%. I discovered after my first print started, that I accidentally changed the sine wave to be half the length that intended, which created one big "wave" in my design. Since I had extra time, I printed a second vase with the correct wavelength, and this created a nice neck in the vase that I wanted! Overall, I was very happy with how my vessel turned out.