Fun with bee vision colour spaces

I recently spent some time collaborating with Dr Lucas Wilkins, a researcher at the University of Sussex, helping him to visualise the bee vision colour spaces he has been working on. He wanted to be able to show the three dimensional models as a plysical object and 3D printing them is the obvious choice. 

As a 3D printing problem the shapes are interesting because they have no straight lines or flat surfaces, all edges and curves, the "bottom" and "top" are sharp points. After considering printing them with support we tried a simpler option first - slice them in half and then glue them back together with acetone vapor post processing.

A bee vision colour space picture by Dr Wilkins, University of Sussex

After successfully printing the colour spaces we used OpenSCAD to create frames ( in purple PLA in the photo above) by subtracting the colour space shape from the frame for a secure fit.

The details are here in his blog which also gives the links to information about colour spaces and what they are.

All the printing was done on our new Lasercut Mendel90, which will be available from our webstore shortly.

ABS and Acetone - Look no support marks!

I recently tried printing the sticks bowl, one of Dizingof's great math-art creations. The first time I printed it in PLA with Slic3r's default support settings - this worked well as a print job but the support material was a rather long task to remove neatly

The last picture shows a close up of the bottom of the bowl which is still rough even after all support is removed.

This got me thinking about the acetone vapour treatment that Austin Wilson and Neil Underwood wrote about on the reprap blog. The next version of the bowl I printed in ABS at 125% scale, removed the support material and used the acetone vapour technique to smooth it, the result:

This time the whole model is silky smooth.

Inspired by the success of the surface finish I decided to revisit a print of Binary Roots by virtox. This design is possibly my favourite piece of art on thingiverse, I like the combination of geeky, useful and aesthetic. I had previously printed it in PLA:

 but this suffered from the same support material roughness as the stick bowl.

I had to test a number of abs colours a few weekends ago and combined the testing with a 0.75 scale print of Binary Roots, here it is prior to the vapour treatment with the support marks obvious on the bottom.

And following the acetone vapour bath, smooth and watertight ready to be a miniature plant pot:

Further info on the acetone vapour bath process is well covered in a number of blog posts by Austin Wilson. I wonder if my next Mendel90 will be made with smoothed parts....