What did you build and why?
I 3d printed a floor plan of the first floor of the school, excluding the automotive classes and the gyms. This was part of a group project for Science, where my four other groupmates and I needed to 3d print something to help Mollie, a student who is blind and partially deaf, more easily navigate the school. We thought that an extremely accurate tactile map may be very helpful to her as the only tactile maps she had used before were very rudimentary; being composed of lego, and usually only providing a map of one classroom.
If you could do it all again, what would change? What could be improved? Dream…
If I knew then what I do now, I would have printed it giant to begin with, first to save filament, second so that I wouldn’t have to do so much slicing, and thirdly so that I could print everything much more quickly; within a day or two rather than a full week. Also, my group mates and I wouldn’t have bothered with creating the braille as it wouldn’t be used in the final product.
What did you learn during the process? What were some of the challenges? What were some of the learning moments?
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- I learned that Blender can be sometimes limited when it comes to 3d printing, as it isn’t meant to be used as a cad software. Sometimes models can break when being exported, imported, and appended from save to save.
- As stated, using Blender as a cad software made some things challenging, even if it did benefit us greatly when originally modelling the school. But another thing that was challenging was managing to print everything within the alloted time we were given. Twice we presented our project to mollie and her assistants before needing to print it four times the original size. Also, the braille that we planned to label the map with ended up being too small for the slicing software to notice.
- I learned how to use Blender’s append tool much better, which will serve useful for future projects I choose to do with Blender. I also learned how to use the Adventurer 3d printers, as before this, I had only really used the Ditto printers.
First Version
Final Version
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