This week I finally felt like the workflow was beginning to click for me. Maybe it was because we were dealing with lower-level GCode, which gave more insight into what the 3d printers were actually doing. I tried many different routes and ended up with two artifacts as well as my second-ever open-source pull request.

Step 1: First Attempt in Grasshopper

I tried doing it in just grasshopper following a tutorial but was having trouble with the last export step. Copying to a text file manually wasn't producing a valid-looking GCode, and I was curious about p5.fab.js so I moved on.

Step 2: Attempt in P5.fab.js

I played around a bit with p5.fab.js but wasn't happy with any of the results. I think it was because I was missing a NoLoop(); call to keep from extra things being displayed in the p5.js editor that wouldn't have been there in the GCode. Also, when I added a printGCode function, I realized there were some feed rate values that were undefined. I found a bug and made a pull request.

Step 3: Second Attempt in Grasshopper

I went back to the simpleSlicer.gh file and made some shapes, lifted them, then lofted them to use as the first Brep. The code was easy, all I had to do was make some modifications to bed temperature and nozzle temperature. Marcel also pointed out that I should add some reset calls to the end of the Gcode, to let the temperatures return to their defaults instead of staying on. The first result, I had the origin incorrect, and I ended up with something more structurally sound than I probably would have gotten because of the orthogonal edge that the Ender defaulted to. The one I positioned in the center had issues because the layer height was too high and spaced out. I wish I had had more time to play around with smaller parameters like that, but I didn't want to take up too much time.

Step 4: Reflections

In hindsight, I would have started with the cylinder example that everyone else was using because their results were much more smooth than mine. However, I learned a lot. I also enjoyed the process a lot more, both because the entire fabrication workflow is becoming more comfortable to me but also because of the closeness I felt to the process from using raw GCode.