3d Printing and the Future of Piracy

Decided to pick up a Creality Ender 3 Pro after talking with Kovaks which for the price ($270-ish pre tax) seemed great. Definitely a easy to setup and fun device to play around with. One suggestion i'll make is if you get a Creality printer look at the borosilicate printing surface. The one that comes with it sucks and causes tons of print failures due to poor adhesion even when properly calibrated.

I made some joke prints i.e. the Fucktopus (Blue one on the left was a fuck up print the hands were too brittle):



I did stumble across Nanoleaf Light Panel Replica by Harvahammas which I started printing today. It's going to take a while to get all of them printed even if I run it while i'm not home but I like the idea of building the Nanoleaf platform myself using the same board I used on my Halloween project.

Couple of things I want to accomplish:

1. Make it easily mountable and interchangeable/modular like the the retail product sold as a package.
   1. This should be doable with the mounts and connector prints posted on Thingiverse.
2. Increase the volume of LEDs involved, the creator used 2x LED per corner of the panels. I am going to try and up that by using cuts from a 144 LED strip with a much closer pixel distance, guessing maybe 4-5 (6 if I can).
3. Use one of my Pixelblaze boards with the companion sound and light detection sensor board to enable it to react to ambient light and sound.
4. Not burn my entire goddamn apartment down in the process by wiring all this shit myself.

I will try and keep up on build progress, each panel takes about 4 hours and 55 min and this is not counting print failures. The covers for the front take about 1 hour and 13 minutes. I haven't even factored in the wall mounts or panel connectors but in the grand scheme of things those shouldn't take nearly as long. Either way it'll be a long term project.

Back panels have been finished (although I can add more if I want, starting with 8), moving on to the front panels next. During the printing process for the front panels I need to start on soldering the LED strips and wiring the panels. My original plan to increase the LED count has been abandoned because I forgot how bright just two of these LEDs can get on their own, it'd be needless overkill.

A knob on my dryer broke and I was able to 3D print a replacement that night, money well spent But for real it all depends about use cases, if you don't have anything in mind then buying one is probably not worth it. I've been trying to spend less time gaming and more time learning so picking up and printing/assembling side projects that interested me made it worth it.

My printing is mixed betweenn printing shit for around the house and making terrain/d&d shit for way cheaper than you can buy it retail. Another reason for getting into it is that my kids like stem and I figured letting them learn ealy might give them a leg up in the future.

Haus said:

If your kids also play Roblox there's a page out there on how to download and print a statue of your Roblox character.... I did that for one of my nephews.

Click to expand...

Good to know, my kids aren't there yet but my niece is into it.

Got my all metal hot end installed and running, I can finally start using some of this PETG filament I picked up.

Neat! Thanks for the heads up.

My project ADD knows no bounds I need to get back to working on wiring my panels. Got side tracked making a gift for a coworkers grandson, since the design is licensed for non commercial i'm only charging for the parts/wiring for my lighting setup but i'm excited to see how it turns out. Now that I calibrated my printer better the prints come out glass smooth on the bottom, it's so nice.

Lighting works! Now to just glue down all the panels.

I'm going to try to get into 3d printing. I've ordered the Creality Ender 3d Pro and am starting to look at models. So far I only know of Thingiverse.com for free models. What are some other sites?

I'm hoping to eventually get into some simple modeling of my own. I know of Cura. Are there better options for someone with 0 modeling experience to play around?