July 3, 2024

3D Printing - the Accuwedge

I see many places to download a design for this. I went to this one: The download gives me a bunch of images and an STL file.

Reinstall Cura

I did a major update and from scratch reinstall of Fedora since the last time I did any printing. As a result I need to reinstall cura. 
su ; dnf install cura
This pulls in 112 packages (mostly python3 and qt6). It even pulls in openscad. I launch Cura. It identifies itself as RPM 5.4.0. It launched the setup dialog. I skip the business of setting up an Ultimaker login. I select "non-networked printer". I scroll down to Creality ED and select "Ender-3 Pro" (fine print on a tag on my printer confirms this is what I have). It shows me a bunch of Machine Settings, which I leave as-is.

Slice the model

I will print with Hatchbox PETG. The Cura interface is weird and non-intuitive. I guess you just have to thrash and work things out. Near the top of the GUI is a box that says "Generic PLA". Clicking this gives a menu. One entry is "Material" and this yields yet another menu with a bunch of filament makers nobody has ever heard of. One of them "eSun" has PETG in a submenu, so I select that. My notes from a past project say I used a 245 nozzle temperature, 80 bed temperature, and a fan setting of 50. The eSun PETG choice gives me 245 and 80 and under Cooling I see a fan setting of 40. I will go with the fan of 40.

I use File -- Open Files (I tried New Project, but it didn't seem to do anything). Rather than showing me files in the current directory, it has a bunch of weird choices that it thinks are "Recent" -- but at the bottom of the left side menu I see "Wedge" which would be my current directory and that is an easy way to get to my STL file. I open that file and there it sits and the big blue slice button on the lower right seems ready to go. I click it and it shows 13 minutes (with 20 percent infill)

The micro SD card

Remember that this goes upside down into the Ender. My card is a 16G SanDisk Ultra. I put the card into a USB card reader and plug it in. After a short wait, the Blue Cura button changes from "Save to Disk" to "Save to removable media", which is very nice. I click that button. It says: 
Saved to removable drive as CCR10_ACCU_WEDGE.gcode
The card goes back (upside down) into the printer.

The printer

It has been sitting idle for about a year, so I clean off the Hictop build plate with denatured alcohol. I click the big button, selected "print from TF", click "Refresh", then select the ACCU_WEDGE entry. It says "bed heating", so apparently the game has started. I hardly expect this to print right the first time, but we shall see. The bed gets to 80 and now we see "extruder heating" with a 245 target.

And it is off to a nice start. And it printed perfectly!

More infill

I go back to Cura, struggle with the weird interface, and manage to change the infill setting from 20 to 100 percent. This only increases the print time from 13 to 14 minutes. Apparently the part is small enough that even with 20 percent infill it is pretty much solid plastic.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]