…code, cg, electronics, 3d printing…

This weekend I got the diamond engraving tool assembled and mounted on the Ostrich Egg-Bot.  Like the previous assemblies, it went off without a hitch.  And engraving on a glass bowl worked the first time.

Things I’ve learned about the kit as a whole up to this point:

• The “center” of the print is where the pen is located when the print starts.  I hadn’t realized this for some time, and trying to figure out why my prints were drawing on the wrong part of the egg was confusing me:  I figured the print would start with the steppers “centered”, but that’s not the case.
• When I first was printing, the pause option wasn’t working properly, and I was getting a stair-stepped effect in the print:  Turned out I needed to adjust a very small potentiometer on the egg-board:  Both problems went away.
• During long prints, my screensaver would kill the print:  Downloaded the “Caffeine” app (for my Macbook Air) to help prevent this from happening.
• Things that like to be printed on:  Glass balls, baseballs, Christmas-ornaments covered in paper grocery-bag like material.
• Things that like to be etched on: Glass balls (that’s all I have right now…).
• Things that don’t like to be printed on:  Tennis-balls, styrofoam balls, styrofoam balls coated in the putty you fill small holes in your wall with:  Ink takes to the styrofoam really well, but all the small divots and holes between the expanding beads cause the pen-tip to get hung-up.  Filling them in with putty just seems to clog up the pin when drawing
• When I first started etching, the etcher didn’t do anything:  I had to adjust the little blue pot on top to get the motor spinning up fast enough.
• When etching, I had to turn the “speed when pen is down” to at least 100 to be able to see the effect on the glass bowls:  I’ll try it even slower next time.

Next up will to try spray-painting the glass bowls, and see if the etcher can take it off.  In the meantime, here is my first etching:  I figured I should do something the Mrs would appreciate 😉

"Eric + Jodi", aaahh..... :-)

And here is the shot of the engraver itself: