This week we all pulled together to get ourselves ready for QRB and make as much progress as possible to present to the review board.
Printing
Caylynne and Brittney made some great progress in getting the printer to produce actual prints. We still have a lot of tuning to go in order to reach the quality we’d like to see, but this is a great start and they produced some great videos to show the judges. We look forwards to seeing the quality and speed of the prints continue to improve as testing continues.
Material Testing
Over the last week Liying and Lucas have been experimenting more with the Instron, getting data on how more materials extrude and behave in a printer. Thanks to our sponsor Newell we have a new blender to try purees, pastes, and other blended products in our testing. They used this blender to blend carrots into paste as well as testing cream cheese.
Board Integration/Testing
This week Ian and Andrew worked on producing a test program to demonstrate the ability of the printer to read and correctly follow gcode, including heating independent nozzles, moving all axis, and moving the Extruders. Additionally they tested the heaters and ran an experiment to track their accuracy and temperature stability.
Thanks for reading and we hope to see you next week with more updates!