Some notes on what’s been happening in the 3D printer world. Mostly it has to do with software. Here are the highlights:

Tinkercad is still by far the easiest program to create simple designs for test printing and design.

Fusion 360 is slightly superior to Tinkercad but ONLY because it ‘automatically’ bevels holes. I realize that’s just a default parameter setting, but still – it means my final design has a bevel when an interior hole is reduced, which means no support structure required and thus faster/easier printing.

But – Fusion 360 is still a bit of a pain to use, especially compared to Tinkercad. I usually end up deleting my first effort and trying again (and again) to get the desired final result. It’s annoying because the options/interface is so horrid.

Example: I ‘accidentally’ created two bodies when I wanted just one. I don’t know how I did it, and can’t reproduce the case, but once created I could NOT find any way to merge the two bodies back into one. It should be as easy as “select both, press ‘merge'”, but there’s no ‘merge’ function that works this way.

Finally, Sketchup. What a horrid beast of a program so far. Not only is it quite counter-intuitive to build anything like a cylinder, but I cannot find a way to export the result as a printer file. Not looking good for Sketchup at this point.

As for printing, I did discover one odd behaviour about slic3r. If you add multiple designs, say add a gear to a cylinder, or just add two of the same thing and arrange them, the resulting gcode file contains the complete model. HOWEVER, if you save the stl (model) file, only the last thing added gets saved. YOU CANNOT SAVE A COMPOSITE MODEL in Slic3r. That’s a pain, but I can live with it now that I know.

Other news: I built another gear model for the Canon camera. This one is a zoom gear for the 17-85mm zoom lens. The gear is the same one used for the 60mm focus gear I built last week, but the cylinder ID was larger to accommodate the larger diameter of the zoom lens. There were a few other adjustments as well, but the final zoom gear fits and functions perfectly.

I tested the focus gear in the housing underwater last weekend, and will try the zoom gear and lens in the housing this week. If it fits and works, I’ll test it underwater this Sunday.

Note: The zoom lens is not designed for this port, but the port is longer than needed for the 60mm lens, and so I thought I’d like to try it on the camera in the housing. Before I could do that, I really needed the zoom gear to be able to actually test the zoom function in the housing. It’s a ‘chicken and egg’ situation really. Also, until I had any working gear, there was no point worrying about the zoom lens. That dictated the 60mm focus gear being designed and printed first. Once that worked, the way was clear to go for the whole zoom test.