Software Issues

I have a MendelMax printer with dual bowden extruders, one has a 0.35mm nozzle which I use with ABS, the other nozzle is 0.5mm and I use it for HIPS. Or at least that's the idea. I have found that most slicers have trouble with multiple extruders that are not equal in every way to each other.

This seems to be a general problem with 3D printing software right now. Another example of this problem is that Marlin doesn't seem to allow different PID settings for different hot ends.

A lot of the hardware improvements right now are incremental and I don't see this changing until we get colour mixing or something similar. What we need right now is more and better software. 3D scanning that can be done just with a cell phone, in the future we may have things like project Tango, but we can do this *right now*. Slicing should be better quality, by which I mean the gcode should be valid and produce an actual print if the printer is in working order, and faster, as I expect meshes to get much more complex in the near future.

A few extras would be support for better file formats, I don't love AMF but it's less limited than STL, new file formats for things we just don't do at this point that could really improve constellation support. I would love to see better firmware, but that may require better hardware as it looks like Arduinos are maxed out by current software.

TL;DR: 3D scanning with phones, slicers that are faster and never produce garbage. Extras: AMF, intermediate representations.

Dissolving HIPS in limonene

While working on getting my printer back in shape I printed a small gear with HIPS (High Impact Polystyrene), it was about 3mm thick, you can see it here, with two bananas for scale:

 I figured this was a decent amount of HIPS and the thickness might be representative of what would be used for dissolvable support, so I put a small amount of limonene (enough to fully submerge it), placed it on my printer's heated bed and set the temperature to 100C (which is of course much lower than the temperature it actually reaches...). After two hours it looked almost gone:

 Half an hour later I couldn't find the object at all.

I was pleasantly surprised at the speed at which HIPS dissolved. The limonene became cloudy, I'm not sure how much HIPS can be dissolved or if I can somehow get back the limonene, I'm trying a few things so there might be an update in the near future. One thing to look out for is that HIPS becomes very sticky as soon as it's put in the limonene, so it might be a good idea to set the object on a screen or something that stops it from sticking to one of the jar's walls.