3D Scanning and Printing

Work to be done

Design and 3D print an object that could not be made substractively.
3D scan an object.

Design an object

In this assignement I choosed to make a bearing alike design with bars closing which makes it impossible to be made substractively.
In designing this bearing I used FreeCAD software for modeling, I have referenced from a youtube on the design I made.

I started by big outer ring after the small inner ring which inclose the bearing plastin balls.

And continued with creating the bars which will hold the bearing plasic balls.

For creating the space where the bearing plastic balls will be, I created a torus.

I made a binnary intersection between the torus and the remaing body, to create a path for the bearing plastic balls.

After I created the plastic balls to complete the design.

3D printing

I used the ultimaker 3D printer for print. I exported my design from FreeCAD and created an stl which the ultimaker can understand. After I loaded my design in CUDA for creating gcode the 3D printer can understand.

After generating the gcode file I loaded it in the printer, and started printing the object. Printing process was straight forward since that was out of my control.

After 2 hours and 23 minutes(according to software) the printing was done.
As you can see on the side of the 3D printed object there were some filaments which were due to some overhangs components were being printed without support.

The result of the printed object didn't have good look, probably the reason was because of my designs had small size which didn't allow the printer to create strong object.
If would enable the machine to print support on overhanging object I think the problem would not be there.

From using the 3D printing technology, I found some advantage and disadvantage of this technology.

3D printing advantage

Customizable
Affordable and easy to use
They are rapid to make prototyping

3D printing disadvantage

Struggle to print small details
Limited build size

3D scanning

On 3D scanning I used the sense 3D scanner, I have scanned 2 things: human and an object with angles.

Scanning a human

During scanning, there were some part I couldn't capture, in the picture below you can see the right shoulder was not captured by the sense scanner.

The result of this assignement of scanning was not bad since you could see what I scanned and recognize it. One part of the scan was missing, it happened so many times while I was scanning and I didn't get the reson why It was happening, or maybe it was the software or hardware issue.
Also during the scanning the light intensity was different on parts I was scanning which contributed to bad scan.

scanning object

During the scanning I did many attempts and fails of the object I wanted since it has some angles which make it complex for the sense 3D scanner to scan it.
Also because of the angles in the object I was scanning light was not distributed equally which caused some parts to not be captured in its true shape.

After the scanning I learned that to have a constant light intensity on the whole object to be scanned is important and helps to get good result.