Sunday, March 14, 2010

Netfabb for Rapman Basic ... FAIL



Okay, now I'm not happy any more.  I designed and used Netfabb to clean up a set of 4, 12-toothed herringbone pinion gears that I have successfully printed many times on the August 2009 release of Skeinforge.  Here is what they look like in Netfabb for Rapman Basic.



Here's what happened when I ran the gcode and "printed" them.



I think it's pretty clear that the raft technology that Netfabb has designed does not work for small, detailed objects.

6 comments:

Casainho said...

Why don't you go with Open Source Skeinforge? -- you have the source, you can improve it and then own it!

It's interesting to see how you where happy and trust on a piece of software even before testing it, just because you bought it - ahah :-)

paul said...

Is the raft supposed to have standoffs or something? It looks like the pieces start somewhere up in the air with negligible tiedown, which is pretty much the opposite of what people are using rafts for.

Charly said...

I think it is pretty clear that you still have have to improve your calibration :)
sometimes it is not the fault of the car ....

Forrest Higgs said...

Casainho: I was using Skeinforge. I got into a memory leak tangle with it about a month ago and decided to finish developing my own Slice and Dice instead after I found that the Skeinforge upgrades were really buggy.

carl: I have no doubt of that. I also have no doubt that Netfabb has some more work to do on their raft scheme.

Casainho said...

Forrest, I think that a general software for 3D printing should be in beginning... and the money and energies you put on a closed source program, will remain just with his author! -- I think is a lost, all the knowledge should be public and Open.

Why not pay to Enrique of Skeinforge and ask for a feature? or pay to some other software developer to add a feature/plugin to Skeinforge?

Anyway, I wish you good luck.

Forrest Higgs said...

Casainho: You are, of course, quite welcome to your opinions.