Scientific Artist

Digital Sundial??  Gotta be joking right??  Nope – some genius out there has created a 3D printable Digital Sundial with 20-minute resolution (at 0.1mm printing resolution).

It is a remarkable piece of work.

Only gripe is – it was 10:23 a.m. when I took the picture, not 10:20 a.m.  Just kidding – it’s remarkable!!

Here is a rather large 6th order Sierpinski sponge printed on the Anet A6 3D printer using Rigid.Ink white PLA.

All was going well 120-hours into the print – when I got a nozzle clog.  This meant the top portion of the pyramid didn’t get printed.

Luckily there are some pretty clever people on the 3D printer forums and one guy suggested I use Ideamaker to just select the missing bit of print and then print out the missing top section separately.  First attempt at doing this I didn’t choose a big enough section to reprint and it only just slightly didn’t fit.  Wanting a perfect fit I had a second go, this was in itself a 9-hour print just for the missing top bit – and fortunately this time all was o.k.

So here is the longest print to-date on the little Anet A6 – 129-hours on a Sierpinski sponge.

A Klein bottle only makes sense if it’s transparent so you can see what’s going on inside.  Not that easy to make transparent/translucent 3D prints.  Here you can see 3 different Klein bottle prints using an Anet A6 3D printer and Rigid.Ink Trans Blue PLA filament.

The leftmost bottle is a 0.8mm solid double-wall print – even back-illuminated you cannot see what is going on inside.

For the middle Klein bottle – I have cheated.  That is a 0.8mm solid double-wall print of a half Klein bottle – the bottle has effectively been cut right through the middle, at least that way it is clear what is going on inside.

The right-hand Klein bottle is a 0.8mm SINGLE-WALLED print!  Being translucent you can at least see what is going on inside.

I think we need a 3D glass printer to get what I’m really after.

 

The longest print I have made to date!  This is a 115-hour print of a 4th order Menger Sponge 122mm on a side.  Printed on an Anet A6 3D printer using Rigid.Ink white PLA.

I’m not sure if I will go for a longer print time than this again, it was a pretty nerve-wracking experience, particularly once it exceeded the 100-hours.

Just about half way through a 100-hour mega-3D printing session.

The latest 3D prints are the objects in blue.

Can you spot – T Rex skull, Reuleaux Tetrahedron, nested Dodecahedra, small Klein bottle with very thin walls?

In Rigid.Ink Trans Blue filament we have a 42 hour long print of 4 nested Dodecahedra.

0.4mm nozzle and 0.2mm resolution.

It will take about a week to remove all that support structure.

The cup with the funny bit in the middle is a Pythagorean Cup – 3D printed – 13 hours and 160 gramme of filament.

A Pythagorean Cup is a weird beasty – it prevents piggy drinkers.  If you fill up the cup to below the line on the rim (below the top of the domed piece in the middle) then you can drink from the cup, no problem.  If you fill the cup to above the line, then a siphon (which is within the domed piece in the middle) will empty the cup through a hole in the base all over your lap.

The 3D printer has been working overtime recently turning out fractals.  Here we have Sierpinski (triangles) and Menger (square) sponges.

These objects are 4″ on a side, the Menger Sponge is 4th order and the Sierpinski Sponge is 6th order!!  Both are 0.2mm resolution printed using white Rigid.Ink PLA and a 0.4mm nozzle.

The Sierpinski Sponge was a modest 30-hour print and the Menger Sponge was a humungous 65 and a half hour print.

I am thinking about printing a 5th order Menger Sponge, again around 4″ on a side – but this will take around 90-hours in total.

May also print a larger Sierpinski Sponge at higher resolution (0.1mm).

I have just been disgusted to see that Dame Glynis Breakwell, the VC of Bath University, is taking home £451,000 a year!!

As someone who spent a little less than half their career in Industry, and a little more than half their career in a University (Professor of Photonics at the University of Southampton for 23 years) I think I am fully qualified to comment on this vulgar Dame Glynis Breakwell revelation.

 In “business” I have seen the CEO and the company chairman raking in huge salaries for doing 2/3rds of bugger-all, whilst the people that do actually make the company work, slog on with mediocre pay. And as our Universities have slowly morphed into “businesses” we are of course seeing exactly the same thing happening there. It is the Academics that do the teaching AND bring in the grant money – not the Administrators. The Academics themselves could very easily handle the University administration (they do most of it anyway), and if not a full teaching academic, then an academic nearing the end of their career who would like to remain within the Ivory Towers for their last few working years. Similarly it would make sense if the Vice-Chancellor was an academic of the University who has been there man and boy (OK woman and girl if you really must) – then they might actually be able to make more sensible, more well-informed decisions regarding THEIR University than some plonker pulled out from a totally unrelated “business” on the other side of the planet.