'On-the-Fly Print': Interactive 3D Printing While Modeling

Cornell University researchers have come up with an interactive prototyping system called 'On-the-Fly Print' that prints what users are designing as they design them; the designer can pause anywhere in the process to test, measure and, if necessary, make changes that will be added to the physical model still in the printer. The new system uses an improved version of the 'WirePrint' printer developed in a collaboration between Guimbretière's lab and the Hasso Platner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. WirePrint aimed to speed prototyping by creating a model of the shape of an object instead of printing the entire solid. The On-the-Fly-Print system builds on that idea by allowing the designer to make refinements while printing is in progress. The new system has 'five degrees of freedom.' The nozzle can only work vertically, but the printer's stage can be rotated to present any face of the model facing up; so an airplane fuselage, for example, can be turned on its side to add a wing.

Transcript

00:00:01 we present On-the-Fly Print a system allowing the user to design 3D models digitally while having a low-fidelity wireframe model printed in parallel On-the-Fly Print allows the user to check the design in a real usage context and continue to design and print afterwards our On-the-Fly printer builds upon an off-the-shelf FDM delta printer we replaced the original print head with an extended extruder tip a retractable cutting blade and a pair of mist cooling nozzles that can efficiently solidify extruded plastic wire to speed up printing our extruder modification supports printing wireframe models with large cells

00:00:46 many models can therefore be printed within minutes we also modified the building platform to have two extra degrees of freedom as a result, the building platform can yaw and pitch during the print giving the user a more flexible 5DOF printing capability this empowers a newly designed primitive to be incrementally printed to the original model iIt also allows subtractive operations at various positions to support real time printing while designing we also developed a Rhino software plugin in the automatic mode the user can create 3D primitives and use common CAD commands such as extrude or revolve

00:01:34 our plugin monitors the creation converts the 3D primitive to machine instructions and starts printing automatically while the machine is printing the user doesn’t need to wait for it to finish but can keep working on the design in parallel our software can also optimize printing orders to maximize printability when designing this candlestick the user creates the bottom branch first and the top branch later before printing these branches

00:02:07 the software calculates the best printing strategy that can avoid collision as a result instead of following the design order the software prints the top branch before the bottom branch in some cases not all parts are printable when that happens our software uses a best effort printing strategy it askes the user if she wants to have the model printed partially to still offer user a quick physical preview unprintable parts will also be highlighted in the software plugin

00:02:51 we now use the design of an aircraft model that can fit to the Lego airport as a running example to illustrate our system in detail to summarize On-the-Fly Print allows the designers to design 3D model in CAD and have it printed in parallel it opens new opportunities for rapid prototyping and has great potential to improve the overall quality of the design process