1 (edited by RGargus 2013-02-10 17:11:51)

Topic: First day with SD3

I barely had 24 hours at home with my new SD3.  While there were other things that I had to do, I snuck in a couple of hours to concentrate on my long awaited printer.  I first made several attempts to print the knobs designed to go under the table for level adjustments.  After about 6 tries, I finally got the height of the table correct so that the parts stuck to the end, and I ended up with 4 knobs and several small unfinished parts, all made from the sample filament that came with the printer.  Next I loaded up a spool of natural and began printing parts for my panalolu case.  I got the front, back and support printed before having to pack my bags for the next trip.
Sitting here gloating over the wonders of such a fantastic machine, I began to realize that the front panel is, while at first appearance perfect, wrong.  The outline is indeed perfect, but the interior is almost a solid filled block of plastic.  I obviously in my excitement overlooked this in the software after slicing, but for some reason, slicer filled all but the LCD cavity.  AS you can see in the prints, there is no place for the PC board or buttons, etc. 
Have others had such an experience with slic3r?  I realize now I have to pay a lot more attention to the results, but also have discovered that I have no visual in the gcode editor using kisslicer or skeinforge so have no way of confirming short of printing.  Any ideas to help me address this?  Thanks in advance.
Well.. for some reason my image is not showing up.  I will try to describe the problem.  There is a well for the electronic parts in the half of the front witht he rounded edge.  This area is filled solid in my print, where as it should be a cavity.

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Re: First day with SD3

If you use Repetier Host you can load the GCode from any software and view it.  You are still lucky, i am still waiting for mine to ship, got a while too.

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Re: First day with SD3

As it turns out, I had imported the original stl file into a cad program and removed a part of the internal structure to make room for an LED indicator.  Unfortunately, it seems this cad program did something to the integrity of the original file that slic3r has an issue with.  When I went back to the original file as downloaded, slic3r worked fine.  I have been using Repetier Host only, since I have never even downloaded Pronterface.  I am anxious to print many of the great innovations contributed by users of this community.  Thanks to all for their insightful ideas.  Long Live 3D Printing!

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Re: First day with SD3

RGargus wrote:

As it turns out, I had imported the original stl file into a cad program and removed a part of the internal structure to make room for an LED indicator.  Unfortunately, it seems this cad program did something to the integrity of the original file that slic3r has an issue with.  When I went back to the original file as downloaded, slic3r worked fine.  I have been using Repetier Host only, since I have never even downloaded Pronterface.  I am anxious to print many of the great innovations contributed by users of this community.  Thanks to all for their insightful ideas.  Long Live 3D Printing!

If it was an error on the cad programs part a lot of people use netfabb or

http://cloud.netfabb.com

to fix errors.  It has fixed a few i downloaded.

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Re: First day with SD3

What CAD did you import the STL into?  Do you have something that will convert STL to solid geometry?

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Re: First day with SD3

IanJohnson wrote:

What CAD did you import the STL into?  Do you have something that will convert STL to solid geometry?

I have been using Turbo Cad 15.  I have used it since version 1.0.  I don't think it is completely stl friendly as the parts I modify seem to not slice properly.  Perhaps others here have used TC with more success.

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Re: First day with SD3

Solidworks has a similar hit or miss with exporting STL.  Just bookmark cloud.netfabb.com and upload them through that free service and they'll get cleaned up for you before you slice.  It's nearly instantaneous.