Episode: 3201
Title: HPR3201: A small intro to 3D printing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3201/hpr3201.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:43:00

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3201 for Monday the 9th of November 2020. Today's show is entitled
A Small Intro to 3D Printing. It is hosted by Euro-OnBatten
and is about 11 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
everything a newbie needs to know to start 3D printing.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared
hosting with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15. Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair
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Hi guys, this is Euro-OnBatten again. It's been a long time since I did a podcast and, well,
you know, been busy, busy, busy. By the way, I did do podcasts as a matter of fact, we just
accelerated 50th edition, but it's a podcast in Dutch aimed at the Netherlands. It's called Angry
Nerds. There is a website, Angry Nerds podcast.nl. So if you're Dutch, well, maybe you find it fun.
For the rest of the world, yeah, I'm sorry you're out of luck. Like I said, I was busy, but I got an
email from a good friend of mine saying that HPR really needed a few shows and I did a sort of
a query in my mind what I have been recently up to. And I concluded I could do three podcasts
all after one, you want to have to the other, just making a brain dump of recent stuff things I learned.
So, well, here goes. The first I want to talk to you about is my experiences with 3D printer.
And this one is just for newbies. So if you have a 3D printer, there's nothing you will learn here,
and you can simply skip to the next HPR podcast. But if you don't have a don't have or don't own,
or have no access to a 3D printer, let me just fill you in on the the basic stuff. So
as when you get the opportunity, you can start playing with them and what's the expression for it?
Hit the ground running, you know. So some time ago, a friend of mine emailed me saying, look,
this is a webshop, they've got a very nice seal on a 3D printer and it's not for you can't refuse,
which turned out to be pretty much true. And this time in a nice sense, you know, there's always
this is not for you can't refuse and it's dead or you get concrete shoes, but this time it was
a nice offer. And so I bought myself a 3D printer and it was a N3 from Creality. And it's a Chinese
manufacturer, it's really it's a it's a very low cost printer. But it's it's also very much fun
to to print with it. So I bought it, it came in a package that I had to reassemble myself and
well it took me some time, but that's not because it's a lot of work, it's just that I was pretty
busy at that time. So it took me a couple of weeks, but you know, every evening quarter of an hour
or five minutes, just finding stuff and and putting it all together. The thing is with this printer,
so your mileage may vary with other printers, but this printer, the manual that it came with was
not exactly great. But I went to the website, I was updated manual, there are YouTube videos
really taking you by the hand as they say in assembling this printer. So it's it's not
difficult at all. Every tool you need comes with the printer, screwdrivers and a lot. So
no problem there. Then it's my question was, okay, now I have a 3D printer, how does printing work?
I mean, there is a sort of a knob on the system and as a display, but what do I do? Turns out
you have to heat the preheat the printing head to some default temperature, depends on the material
that you print it. I use PLA for one because it does biodeigrate, so I don't pollute the world
in the end. And so I have to warm the preheat the printing head to 185 degrees Celsius.
And then it's okay, but what do I print? How does that work? Well, turns out for printing,
you need to find yourself an STL file. And the STL file is a file that contains the geometry of
the object that you want to print. Now you can make those with editors, there are numerous editors,
some are closed source, but free to use for personal use, others are commercial. So there's
even websites that where you can design stuff. But at first to start as a newbie, the easiest way
probably is to go to Thingiverse.org.com. Let me have a look. Thingiverse.com. Okay,
Thingiverse.com. On Thingiverse.com, there is a total of probably close to a million objects
with photos and the readme file. And also the accompanying STL file that you can download
for free. So you download the STL file or something that you like. Now you can't print an STL
file that you need something to do something with it. And that process to come from an STL file,
STL file to something that the printer can print is called slicing. It's sort of the process where
you have this area where the object will be printed. And in a horizontal
the horizontal dimension, I don't know what the word is in English. But anyway, in a horizontal
manner, the product is sliced and the printer is told where to go to XYZ coordinates and where
to print and where not to print. And for that slicing, you need a program. So you need a program
to convert an STL file to a file that the 3D printer will use. And there are several STL
accessories, several slicing programs in the world. But one of the most well-known is Kura.
And Kura is open source. It's made by a Dutch manufacturer of 3D printers, actually,
called Ultimaker. But Kura supports a lot of different 3D printers. So not only Ultimaker,
even the Creality 3 that I have. And when you slice, you have the option to, for instance, say,
I want the speed of the head to be 40 millimeters per second or maybe 10 millimeters per second.
And the result of your printing job will be either coarse or either fine, depending on, for instance,
a printing speed. The other thing is that way you have an arch in your product that sort of
floats in the, well, it doesn't float in the air, of course. But it's not supported by
the printing base. Then you sometimes have to fill that area up with some loose printing that
you can later remove. And so that's sort of a filling of vertical areas. And that's also
something that the slicing program will do for you. If all goes well, then you can download
the result of the slicing process to your printer and start printing.
Then the next step you probably want to do is get, make yourself a more user-friendly setup.
And the way you do that is you start with a Raspberry Pi. You start with a piece of soft
echo. Octoprint on the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is connected via USB to your 3D printer.
The Raspberry Pi is also connected to the network. And then Octoprint will present you with
a web GUI where you can upload, where CURA, for instance, can upload for you the result of the
slicing process. You can store stuff there. You can see a nicer visualization of the printing
progress. You can extend the functionality of Octoprint with plugins. For instance, a telegram
notifyer. So let's say every 10% of progress you get an app on your phone saying, oh look,
it's I'm now at 20% or 30% or I'm finished. Because, well, that's nice functionality because
printing is not fast. The first object you will do probably are pretty small. So that will take you
maybe, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 minutes. But if you're going serious with boxes, et cetera,
I have had printing jobs that lasted for more than a day. So you also have to consider do you want
to leave your printer because for more than a day, if it's in the same house the way you live,
do you want some device with a pretty hot printing head to keep working while you sleep.
And you know, just out of safety. Just think about it for a second. It's not that it has it
is, but it's good to have thought about it. And well, yeah, this is basically the beginner's
guide to to 3D printing. I guess if I've left something or you have additional questions,
just drop a note in the comments of this episode. And I'll be more than happy to respond to those
as well. Okay, well, this is Joel Betten again with my 13th podcast on 3D printer. And when I'm
done with saving this one, I'll start recording the next one. Okay, have a nice day. Bye bye.
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