Robo - Printed Solid style

I've had my Robo for about 2 weeks now.
It arrived well packaged. The shipping box was even damaged pretty badly, but the machine was unharmed.
My machine is the PLA model. The giant black shiny bed just looks awesome.
I tried out a few little prints stock with the filament they sent. Cal cube trying out vase mode in slic3r (I know it's silly, I just wanted to see if it worked). Also an octopus, but I had a midprint filament change mishap (forgot to home and ended up with a shift)

Here's the cube. Interestingly enough, it does hold water and doesn't exhibit the wicking I've seen with other PLA prints.


After that, I ran a letter bowl, but ran into a mid-print jam. The jam was caused by a combination of two things:
1) as mentioned in other threads, the stock hobbed bolt does not have a recess to help keep the filament aligned.
2) I had the filament spool mounted on a piece of pipe next to the machine. The filament had to feed up and then back down through the slot. This created a fair amount of drag on the x-axis.

So. Upgrade time. Ordered a new hobbed bolt, bought a piece of 2mm thick plate glass from lowes, added in my remix of the Cambo z-axis mod, and the reprapdiscount XXL LCD controller and we're ready to rock.

Here's a pic of my machine after mods.

If you like the XXL controller, PM me. I bought a bunch and have a few left. It took about 5 minutes to update the firmware and hook it up.

I'd like to throw up posts of all of the super cool things I've made, but I've got a backlog of letter bowls. So instead, I'll talk in broad terms about performance.

Here is a pic of some close up views of the outside of a letter bowl. 200 micron resolution. Notice how the layer resolution is quite good but there is a little bit of waviness to it. I'm not entirely sure what causes the waviness but it still looks pretty good.


So far, I am pretty impressed with the robo. I've definitely seen other printers produce higher quality at higher speeds, but they're also more than twice the price.

 

Looking great Matt! Glad to see you're loving your RoBo it seems!

 

Deadwood, I don't think you'll have any trouble getting results like that!

I did try 100 micron, but only as a test to mess around with settings. It was the happy octopus says hello. I don't have part cooling fan installed yet, so the suction cups on the lifted tentacles didn't turn out so well. I was also messing around with speeds and temperatures throughout so there is a little ridge where I was massively overextruding for a few layers. It looked pretty good in the few spots where I had settings dialed in well.

 

Alright, I don't think this is going to blow anyone away, but I wanted to try out the colorfabb in my robo. I can't really get more fancy than this until I get the fan installed, but I highly recommend this little guy as a test print. Even if it fails, it's still great.

At 200 micron, in ColorFabb PLA/PHA olive green, I present to you
Bucket O' Octopodes by moleofproduction http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:8896

 

Looking great matt!

 

The octopus is very glossy.
With most materials , you can transition from matter to glossy with temperature. Haven't tried this with the colorfabb yet.

 

Can you give an example of how you would do this I tried lowering temps and it just resulted in layers separation so I am curious about this I have some filament and it is very shiney also was wondering what I may be able to to get it less shiny.

 

Jeff, are you asking about the colorfabb or PLA in general?
I may have misled a little with my answer. I was making an observation, not a statement about something that you can control. If your PLA or PLA/PHA prints are matte, it probably does mean you are too cold and might have layer adhesion issues. But, if you have your PID settings dialed in perfectly, you might be able to find a very small temperature window where you can get a matte PLA to print consistently.

 

OK thanks I just thought you may have known about an interesting thing to try with PLA

 

Ran a print in T-Glase Translucent Black. Very nice material. Nozzle needs to stay over 220 or it will clog up immediately (although can be unclogged quickly when temp goes back up). You can vary clarity with temperature and flow. You can see at about 3/4 up where I increased temp.
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:42570


Here is a twisted heart vase with 1 shell.

 

I took that t-glase vase and vapor polished it with acetone. It was placed upside down in the presto cooker I use. Results were pretty impressive!