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About the Course
3D Maker is a 2 day course, designed to give junior campers (ages 9-13) an introduction to 3D design, modelling and 3D printing. This course is part of the 'Maker Week' series including 3D Maker, Laser Maker and micro:bit Maker.
We're trying to get the students to:
- Learn about the different types of printers and what they can be used for
- Quickly build lots of fun projects
- Understand how to model in 3D using Tinkercad
- Have an introduction 3D printing and the possibilities of things it can do
Health and Safety
As well as the rest of this guide, please also see:
General Workshops Risk Assessment
The Kit List
Student consumables (per student to take home)
- Large ziplock bag for taking home all of their projects
- USB stick for taking home 3D files (if a camper is doing multiple maker courses or Maker Week, they should only get 1!)
- 50mm length of dowel for making their custom stamp
- Rainbow stamp pad for stamps
- 6 Sheets of Depron foam for laser cutting projects
- 1 sheet of P120 sandpaper, 1 sheet of P240 per camper for sanding foam projects
- All of their 3D printed parts
Class kit (not to take home)
- 1 3D pen per camper with stand and PSU
- 1 Laminated 3D pens ideas sheet
- 1 4 way power board per 4 campers for 3D pens
- 1 3D printer per 8 campers
- 1 Laser Printer
- Laser printer for printing part number sheets for stacked foam projects
- 6 reels of PLA filament (different colours)
- 1 Pritt Stick per camper
- 1 Laser cutter transparent platen per camper
- 1 set of needle files between 8
- 1 pair of side cutters between 2 for cleaning up prints
- 1 pair of pliers for unblocking 3D pens
- 1 double sided sandpaper board between 4 (for sanding foam projects)
Maker Week Shared Class Kit
- Maker Week course badge (1 per student doing whole week of Maker courses)
- Laser cutter, extractor, PSU, platen and USB cable
- Laptop with EleksCam installed for running laser cutter
- 2x 5m extension leads
- 1x 4 way power board, + 2 per 8 campers
- 1 safety mat per student
- 1 set headphones per student
- 100 sheets A4 paper, and 10 per student
- 1 pencil per student (and 2 spare)
- 1 rubber per 2 students
- 1 ruler between 2 students
- 1 pair of scissors between 2 students
- 1 set of felt tips between 4 students
- 1 pencil sharpener between 4 students
- 1 roll double sided tape per 4 students
- 1 Tech Camp Stamp per tutor
- Roll of bin bags
- 1 set dry wipe pens
- 2 permanent markers
Preparing Yourself
Like any practical course you'll find this much easier to teach if you have run through it yourself as completely as possible first.
As a minimum, you'll need to:
- Read through this guide completely and be comfortable with it
- Run through the student's guide completely, building all of the projects using Tinkercad then importing them into Cura, and trying out the slicing software for the laser cut projects
As the start of this course is tutor-led you'll also need to run through your delivery of the course a couple of times - ideally out loud, but at least in your head. If you are working with more than one tutor, you will want to decide between yourselves how to split the tasks/explanations in this initial part of the lesson.
Pre-Camp Setup (By Tech Camp)
- Cut dowel into 50mm lengths
- Cut Depron sheets to fit in laser cutter
IT Systems Check
- Sound and USB ports functional on computers
- Cura 14.07 installed and functional
- Cura setup with Ant Mini printer Machine (see picture) - if Cura is already installed you can do this by going to "Machine > Machine Settings > Add new Machine", or on a new installation a wizard will open on first launch.
- Associated profile for the Ant Mini installed in Cura (see student guide)
- Slicer for Fusion 360 installed and fires up - if it errors on launch, system does not meet the minimum requirements as below.
- Latest version of Inkscape installed
- At least 1 laptop, or desktop that is close to the machine ( which will need to be close to a window) installed with Elekscam for running the laser cutter - you can download it here. After installation you will need to click the down arrow in the top right and "Install Driver" to install the USB driver for the Laser serial chip.
- Student logins work for this website (login details for students on this page)
- Check following websites are available:
- tinkercad.com
- courses.techcamp.org.uk
- Level bed and check 3d printer works well
System requirements for Slicer - software may well not load if these are not met
Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10 (64-bit only)
CPU: 64-bit processor (32-bit not supported)
Memory: 3GB RAM (4GB or more recommended)
Graphics Card: 512MB GDDR RAM or more, except Intel GMA X3100 cards
You will need to signup for a Tinkercad account and register as a teacher (straightforward to do on tinkercad.com) so that you can give any students under 13 an approval code (see the first student guide on making an account for more information).
Tutor Training Day
When you arrive for the tutor training day (at Winchester this will be before the students arrive, for other camps it will be a number of weeks before the first camp), we will go through some general things (like child protection training), but the bulk of the day will be on preparing yourself for teaching the course.
What will I receive?
If you are working at a non-residential venue, in advance of the training day you will not receive any parts for this course, as the 3D printers are heavy and difficult to ship. If you are working at a residential venue, you will receive all of the equipment and training on the first day at camp.
How will we check that you are prepared?
We will expect you to:
- Explain to us some of the concepts in the tutor guide - i.e. you need to be able to tell us how the course is organised, what some of the important points are about safety and efficiently operating the courses, and be able to answer questions about these things intelligently!
- We'll ask you to show us some of your designs you have made in Tinkercad - hopefully you will have come up with a few original takes on the stock designs!
What will we show you?
- We'll bring along a printer and laser cutter, and give you the chance to try printing/cutting some things on it, and look at how it is put together
- We'll bring along some 3D pens so you can try them out
- We will give you some pointers on printer/laser operation, debugging and handy tips and tricks
Any additional time will be spent practising printing and trying out the printer/laser cutter, and if the training day is immediately before the commencement of the course, organising supplies, and getting things ready.
Pre-Course Setup
There are no parts required for the start of the course, just ensure all computers are functional.
It works best if you give out the other components as they are required - this allows you to explain what the components are and makes sure that students don't start later activities before they have finished the previous ones!
Rules for Students
This course is primarily delivered by a number of tutorials. For this to work well, the students should:
- Carefully follow the guides, and be sure to read the information on them before asking for help!
- Be careful with all of their parts - if they lose them, they should look carefully in the surrounding area and on the floor before being given any spares, as there will be a very limited number available.
- Be sure to save each design and file they make on their memory sticks so they don't lose them.
Guidelines for Tutors
- All of the projects have very clearly defined limits for either printing times, or how many sheets of foam their laser designs should fit on to. It is imperative that these are stuck to - the course has been very carefully designed so that there is enough time to print/cut everyone's projects during the session times. The students have instructions on how to check this, but it is down to you to make sure they stick to the limits when printing/cutting their designs.
- For the stamp project, they each have 1 large stamp pad. It should be fairly obvious that it is imperative they do not get ink all over the tables/themselves/each other. It is up to you to keep a careful watch on this, and probably keep their stamp pads until the end of the course/week and then give them back only when they need to take them home.
- The online editor can crash, and they might lose their work - make sure they are saving all of their downloaded files to their memory sticks so they don't lose anything.
- There should be plenty of activities and projects for even the most competent camper not to run out of things to do during the day. If younger ones don't manage to finish all of the projects, don't worry - it is better for them to go home with fewer well finished projects instead of many that don't look good.
- Try to make sure that campers don't rush through the projects without completing them properly - in this situation they might run out of things to do!
- Use the permanent marker to name their plastic bags, so they can keep track of their parts
Running the Session
- Tutors introduce themselves / kids introduce themselves
- Explain the structure of the course, and get them excited by quickly explaining some of the cooler projects and showing them any examples you have made yourself (virtually or physically)
- Tutors do quick presentation on different types of 3D printers - download presentation here, and presentation notes here.
- Explain how the online documentation system works, how the guides are laid out and how they should carefully read the instructions before asking for help
- Show them how to login to the system and get them started on the first project
After the first session on the first day, the campers should generally be completing 1 project per 1.5/h session, i.e. 4 projects per day. Try and get them to stick to this - at the end of the course there are two options for other extension activities if there is time left over: they can either create their own designs on Tinkercad of anything they like (but make sure they are aware there won't be time to print it!), or they can play with the 3D pens - see below.
3D Pens
These allow the students to freeform create their own designs from plastic. It is possible to actually draw in 3D if you do it very slowly and blow at the same time, however the best method is generally to create 2D sections on the desk, peel them off and then stick them together to create 3D objects. For example, you can create an Eiffel Tower by making 4 sides and then sticking them together in 3D. If they don't have any ideas, they can use the laminated ideas sheets to draw onto and then peel off. There are enough for 1 per camper and a few spares if you need to fix any that clog up (see below). Before using the pen, use the blue masking tape to cover and area of desk for them to draw on so that the surface is not damaged.
Guidelines for tutors:
- Keep the pens in the stands as much as possible when they are not in use (and encourage the campers to do so as well) - this makes it less likely that the filament yet to be melted will come into contact with a hot pen tip and be melted/destroyed
- Cut off small sections of filament from the reels to use in the pens - only a few metres at a time is fine. The pens should never feed filament directly off of a reel. Keep any pre-cut parts in a tutor only area - campers should not get these themselves.
- Generally, when the pens get blocked there is a small piece of filament in the end.
- Heat the pen up, then us a screwdriver to push in the black tabs at the tip and remove the black cover.
- Carefully use pliers on the black mount of the heating element and tip to remove it.
- There will usually be a piece of filament sticking out now – grab it with a pair of pliers and pull it out.
- Reassemble and this fixes 95% of broken pens (and this does happen quite a lot)
- If pen won’t feed filament out of back of pen, heat up then press the release button and pull hard with a pair of pliers on the filament, this will usually release it.
- If the black shield on the end keeps coming off, or won't clip back on after being taken off to fix a blockage, gently heat each tab with a soldering iron at around 300 degrees, and bend them outwards carefully. The tip should now clip on nicely. Ask the Technical Manager/Manager to borrow a soldering iron from the emergency toolkit.
- Anything else broken generally involves disassembly and swapping out parts – back white section can be removed by prying with a flathead screwdriver and everything else inside is obvious how it comes apart.
- “ERR” on the screen either means the heating element isn’t plugged or has a faulty connection, or the heating element is bust completely
- Please inform the Technical Manager of any pens deemed unfixable (they are Chinese and this may well happen to don't worry - this is why there are 2 spare pens).
Guidelines for students:
- Don’t touch the hot end (sink and tap will be available if they do, but it isn’t that bad unless you try and stab yourself with it)
- Press the down button, plastic will come out of the nozzle
- You can adjust the speed using the slider
- Don’t press the top button – (this will eject the filament to change colour, but takes ages and should only be done by tutors only)
- Place the pen back in the stand when you are finished
- If you want a different colour, swap with someone else of find a spare pen with that colour in
- Hold the tip of the pen very close to or even touching the page, this will make the plastic stick to the laminated sheet
- It works well if you outline the designs, and then shade them in like you would with a normal pen - they can sketch on the tape with a pencil first to give themselves a guide
- If they are stuck for ideas, use Google image search to get some inspiration
3D Printers
General instructional video - loading filament, levelling bed, starting prints etc.
The 3D printers used for this course are small but perfectly formed - they have been chosen for their combination of rugged frame, small form factor and fast printing times thanks to the small build volume. All of the projects in the course are designed to be small anyway to be quick to print so this isn't an issue.
Cura should be setup on each machine with the Ant Mini printer settings - see picture for required parameters.
- Whilst the campers can check their print times themselves, the printers should only be operated by a tutor. The campers should bring their STL file to you on a memory stick, which you then import to Cura and double check the print time is inside the limit for the project - you will want to have a spare computer setup for doing this. You should then transfer the GCode file onto the SD card to use in the printer, and set the printer going.
- For a guide on using Cura and creating GCode files, please see this guide and this guide. Note that some of this info is specific to the Anet A8 printer rather than the Ant Mini.
- The second guide linked above also has detailed information on how to level the bed of the printer. This is critical in getting reliable operation - the guide is for a slightly different type of printer but the steps are broadly the same. You will have an opportunity to try this out on the training day.
- You will want to assemble the filament holder and tool holder using the two bolts provided as per the picture - this is important as otherwise the filament won't be able to feed into the extruder properly.
- At your discretion, campers can choose the colour of their prints - to swap the filament, use the interface on the printer to Preheat PLA, then squeeze together the extruder on the top of the printer when it is up to temperature and pull out the filament. Do the reverse to insert the new colour - it can be difficult to get it and might need to have the end gently straightened by hand. When inserting a colour again after it has been removed, cut of the end of the filament so it is clean and straight.
- If you are struggling with getting prints to stick to the bed (especially objects with potentially small base areas such as the letter cube), try setting the bed adhesion setting in Cura to Raft, and then decrease the print size slightly to keep to the allotted time. This prints a large thin flat surface under the print which makes it stick to the bed much better.
- Make sure bed is level! This is the most common way for prints to fail.
- X axis carriage must be perpendicular to z slides – check by eye with something square inside the machine
- If not, insert hand into machine and turn one of the z leadscrews by hand with the machine off – there are two separate z stepper motors so it can get out of alignment
- Next level the bed using the 4 screws in the corners and an allen key – a piece of paper should have small amount of resistance between the end of the nozzle and the bed
- Print something large and check the first layer lines around the outside of the bed are consistent to make sure – if one corner is too high/low adjust as necessary
- First layer lines should have a slightly flattened profile as they are slightly pushed into the bed and should be consistent over the whole surface if the bed is level.
- If bed is level but first layer is too close/too far away from the bed, use the prepare menu to move the z axis up to more than 30mm, then increase/decrease the height of the z homing stop in the middle bottom left of the printer as required. This allows moving the whole bed up and down with individually adjusting the 4 screws.
- Generally, if a print suddenly comes unstuck half way through, the first layer is probably too far from the bed – use the method above to lower the z homing height by ¼ turn and try again.
- Ensure filament is feeding well – if roll is tangled, printer will under extrude resulting in weird prints and might not stick to the bed on the first layer. Check roll isn’t tangled and by sure to use new roll holders, which should mostly eliminate this problem.
- If print keeps coming unstuck from bed, there are probably letters poking through the bottom of the design – this is the case if the skirt outline is square not round for that nametag – confirm in cura by looking at the underside. Designs with this problem must be fixed in Tinkercad and reexported as they will basically never print properly.
- Printers can be preheated at the start of a session using Preheat PLA from the Prepare menu to speed things up a bit and avoid waiting around all the time for heating up.
Laser Cutter
The laser cutter is different to models you might have seen before - it is a compact design we have produced ourselves specifically for running courses like this. It uses a solid state laser instead of a glass tube, which means it is easy to transport and rugged, requires minimal focusing, and has no expensive/fiddly optics or watercooling systems. It's main limitation is the materials it can cut, which this course has been designed to exploit. It is generally only able to cut materials which are dark in colour, as the laser is in the UV part of the spectrum not IR, so white materials will reflect all of the laser power instead of absorbing it - it cannot cut white paper for example. It is also only a 5W laser (typical glass tube lasers are at least 30W), so the materials it can cut effectively are limited to foams, dark card and engravings only on things like acrylic and wood. It's strengths are Depron foam, which is great for modelling, and other types of foams such as neoprene, and thin black plastics such as HIPS.
Setting up the Machine
- The machine should be setup close to a window, as it has an extractor and hose that must be vented to outside.
- The extractor fan should just be pushed into the hole on the back of the machine. Before you start cutting make sure the air is moving in the right direction!
- The laser should be already focused and cut well at the speeds outlined below - if not you will need to adjust it.
- To focus the laser, load a simple file of a small circle or square and set the speed to 3000 (see next section for how to use laser software). Cut it once, then make a small adjustment to the laser focus by turning the silver ring on the end roughly 1/4 turn in one direction. Cut it again - if the cut width is smaller than the first test, keep making small adjustments and cutting again until the cut width starts getting bigger. If it is bigger, keep adjusting the other way and making test cuts until the cut width is as small as possible. Once the cut line is as small as you can make it, the laser is focussed. It should cut through comfortably at a speed of 3000.
- Max acceleration for both axes (in the Config Tab of Elekscam) should be 1200
General Use Guidelines
- Keep watch for any cables that come loose or are dangling down that could drag over the surface of the item being cut - these are very likely to cause a cut to fail. Do periodic checks by moving the head around manually to check everything is free moving and no cables can catch on anything.
- The clear platens should always be used when cutting the designs for the stacked foam projects - slide the platen and cut parts out together, so they don't fall out, and give the whole thing to the camper so they don't lose track of which piece is which. There is 1 per camper (which they mustn't take home!), however they might need 2 as they can use a maximum of 2 sheets for each stacked foam project, so bear this in mind - they should be progressing at different rates so they won't all need 2 platens at the same time. The cut parts can also be slid onto another Depron sheet or the table if needs be. For this project, there is also a laser printer which should also be connected to the laptop running the laser cutter. Print off the campers' design sheets with the numbers on using the laser printer when you cut their designs out of foam, so they know which piece is which for assembly. See the student guide for the car project for more information on this.
- Use the following speeds for different materials:
- HIPS 0.5mm- Speed 400, raised on piece of scrap depron
- Depron speed 3000
- Acrylic 3mm engrave speed 1000
- Neoprene speed 1000
Using the Software
- The software used by the machines is dodgy at best - it's only function is to import SVG files and send the data to the laser. You cannot do any file editing or resizing in the software at all. Your kit will come with a dedicated laptop for running the laser cutter, with the software (EleksCam) already installed. If you need to reinstall for any reason, you can download it here.
- Press the ‘PICCarve’ button, and then load the camper's file from their memory stick
- Highlight the ‘0’ in the ‘speed’ button and change to the speed required (N.B. if you delete this zero first it will crash out, so just overwrite it – doesn’t like having a blank field)
- Click the ‘R-T’ coordinate button (even if it is checked, click it again otherwise it won’t work)
- Put in the foam sheet pushed to the back screw stops, and make sure laser is at back right
- Shut the lid and press start - the machine will cut out the design.
Troubleshooting
- Com port setting is temperamental. Might need to refresh port and/or click on the newly found port once or twice if errors come up about the port being invalid or the something already using the port.
- If port problem still persists, try putting the cable in another USB port and refreshing again
- If lasers cutting erratically, check cables aren’t dragging against foam (move head to all four corners manually and see if foam moves or cables get snagged somewhere when doing so)
- Check focus is correct - see setup notes for how to refocus the laser.
- If you are having issues with scaling when importing the stacked foam projects from files the campers have produced using Inkscape, follow this process to get the correct result:
- Make a new document in Inkscape, and set the units to mm in the document properties
- Drop in the file from the camper's memory stick
- Ungroup everything many times (at least 5) so you are sure that drawing is fully ungrouped
- In the Path menu, click Object to Path with everything in the design still selected
- Save the file and import into EleksCam again
- If it still doesn't work, try again and make doubly sure that everything has been completely ungrouped or this process is unlikely to work.
Packing Up
- Make sure all of the campers take home all of their equipment in their named plastic bags.
- Make sure 3D printer(s) and laser cutter are packed up carefully with all of their sundry items packed as they came
- Any spares should be in bags (not loose in the box), and any broken parts in a separate bag clearly labelled. One or two things that are broken or have been broken for unavoidable reasons is no problem, but lots of broken items should be reported to the Technical Manager ASAP so it can be avoided in the future.