Week 5

We finished our designs this week and learned how to save the Tinkercad files as .stl files that we would open in our slicing software, which is called MatterControl. This software takes the designs and just slices it into very tiny layers and then it sends the information to the printer and it prints the pieces tiny layer by layer. It is really cool to watch and even though it seems incredible that a printer can make anything for us out of plastic material, when you see it in the MaterControl software you can look at the layers and it really makes sense how the printer works. It is still amazing though how smart and precise it is. These pictures show you the shapes we used for the main part of our pieces and the shapes we used to cut pieces out. Even though it seemed really hard to think we were going to design these 3D objects on a computer, once we started doing it, it was actually pretty easy. We know there are super complicated things that engineers and stuff design, but we have a pretty good idea now how they do it. Even though, we found out we weren't quite up to snuff enough to make our octagon ramp completely because we didn't have time to learn how to make our own shape to fill the other 4 sides in, so really it's a 4 sided ramp. The Tinkercad shapes would not work because they all were 5 sided shapes and we needed a 4 sided shape. We think if we had more time, we could figure out how to draw that shape, but we just didn't have time in 6 weeks.