3D Printed Stick Insect: Development

 

Challenge: To use students 3D Design CAD skills to develop a 3D Printed insect suitable for display with Pet Day Art for our school.

Background: This print has been described over the last few days in terms of process and goals - this is an example of a student adjusting their print to be successful.   The two versions of the print are shown next to each other, before and after.   The dimensions of the head, thorax and abdomen are nearly identical - being 60mm long and having a diameter of 20mm.   The difference between the two however can be clearly seen in the legs.   In the original (in light blue) the student wanted to show the typical stick insect size legs and therefore had them somewhat correct although the diameter of them was only 2mm.   

The Bambu H2D and Bambu P1P are excellent machines (although we don't typically use a fine nozzle as we are looking at more printing in volume) however as you can see from the legs shown left the actual printing was too much for the machines as the prints did not survive the removal of the rafting.

The solution which came from the nine year old student when he saw the resulting print was to look at making larger more arched legs, that had a thicker diameter, which while increasing it only to 3mm significantly made a difference with the production of the piece.    As can be shown from the redesigned figure shown in the left photograph in dark blue the issues with the original print have now been resolved and are completed.

Resources used to complete this project: iPad, Tinkercad App, Bambu P1P, Bambu branded blue PLA.

Level of Difficulty: Medium, while its a pretty straight forward design the student has been working on it for some time and has revised it several times to get the balance right between having the recognition factor, being able to represent the insect and have some additional features.

Size: The revised print measures 60mm from head to the end of the abdomen.   It has a body with a diameter of 5mm.   It currently stands 20mm high.    These dimensions are so that it can be placed in conjunction with the students tin-can art display for pet day and not overwhelm it.

Cost/Price: To produce this print the printer used 6g of PLA to complete.  This gave it a price point of $013c to print making it an extremely inexpensive print.

Timeframe: The print took twenty nine minutes to complete which included a six minute warm up time for the printer.

What we would do differently/Next steps for the students:  There is still potential for additional features that could be added or extra design details that could be added (for instance the face of the stick insect is still a little cartoon like).    The feet also while now reinforced could have some more detail particularly at their base.