Getting Started With GCode

This article explains some of the ways we could generate GCode using Grasshopper instead of using a traditional slicer like Cura.

For initial testing, I picked up the Grasshopper file provided by the Prof. and slightly modified it to slice a cylinder. The above images shows how the Cylinder would get sliced in Rhino, and the end result worn by my "model friend" Subra (who is also taking the course).

The number of horizontal lines determine the curvature of the cylinder, more lines would imply smoother curve, but longer printing time. A bounding box is created around the cylinder. Then the bounding box is subdivided into a series of rectangles along equal intervals along the z-axis. The rectangles are then used to slice our original brep

I used the Sample Grasshopper code without modification to test print the fabric. It took around half an hour to print the fabric. The scale of the fabric was pretty small (makes it all the more impressive that the 3D printer was able to draw a sine curve around those tiny pillars). The above image shows it's scale, it is kept on top of the initial fabrication cube we built for the course.

There was one downside with this - I could not break off the base of the structure in one go and had to hack it off piece by piece which slightly affected the pillars and the fabric.
I made a few parameter changes in the next version to see it if affects the base.

I made 2 variations around the basic Grasshopper file provided by the Prof. First one was to change the length of the fabric and the other one was to change the height of the fabric.

For the length one, I increased the number of pillars to 20 and changed the interval between pillars to 3.5mm. So, the overall length of the fabric came out to around 20 * 3.5, which is around 7cm. I also made couple of changes to the base for overall support and in the hope that it would break off easily. I changed the width of the base to 15mm and height of base to 0.6mm. And I also changed 'Amount of material of a hair per 1mm' to 0.025 to see how that varies from the initial fabric. Lastly, as per my filament I changed the Nozzle temp to 200C and Bed temp to 60C.

It took around 1hr 10 mins to build the structure and above has the image with scale in respect to the initial fabric.

For the height one, I kept the same values for the base. I increased the height to 45mm. I slightly reduced the 'number of pillars' and 'Interval of pillars' from the previous example. I changed the diameter of the pillar to 0.6mm so as to accommodate the change in the height of the pillar. This example is still in the print process at the time of my publish, and I will update it at a later stage.