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About this Episode
Our prints and ambient temps, How to ruin an online object resource, Thingiverse posts getting unpublished
Transcript
3D printing today, number 606.
Our prints and ambient temps.
How to ruin an online object resource.
Thingiverse posts getting unpublished.
Welcome back to 3D printing today, the podcast about all aspects of 3D printing.
Hobby, professional industrial, it doesn't matter we covered all.
My name is Andy Cohen.
I'm here at Mr. Winnie Potter.
How are you doing, Andy?
I'm doing pretty good.
I know I got to admit right up front.
A couple of the stuff things we're talking about this week are already obsolete.
Things have changed so quickly in the past couple of months.
Yeah.
Our apologies right up front, but what we talk about is still relevant, although things have
changed and you'll see why in a bit.
In the meantime, we do have a new story that's interesting, an online magazine called BGR,
which regularly publishes stories about 3D printing houses, has interestingly slammed
the brakes and did a hold the phone, wait a minute, on this latest article that came
out this month about the title is The Complicated Truth about the price of 3D printing houses.
Sure.
It's really interesting.
Now, these guys did an article about a bunch of homes being built in Yuba County, California.
I think we may have mentioned that a while ago when they were talking about doing it.
They've been building them and BGR has taken a look at them and it seems there's a little
bit of mistake, not mistake, but not fully open about the price here.
They're saying that the houses will sell for $375,000.
Now, in California, that's a bargain.
That's a real bargain.
Sure.
Yeah, even in Yuba County.
Even in Yuba County, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah, Yuba County is not one of the higher priced areas of California.
I apologize.
That came off kind of negative.
Yuba County is gorgeous.
Yuba County is gorgeous.
It's lovely when it's not burning.
Sorry.
That's negative.
It's a bit of a whole California.
It's negative, too, but it's a beautiful spot, but it's not in the coast.
It's not in a metro.
Not in a metro.
Not in a metro, California.
Or the jobs are insane.
Or the jobs are where the people are.
Yeah, it's a lot of more rural areas and more retired folks.
But that's not where the, and that's so fast, kind of comes into play.
When BGR took a good look at the homes themselves and it turns out they're only 1,000 square
feet.
Right.
Yeah.
So by California standards or by North American standards, that's half a house.
Yeah.
And now the regular average price in Yuba County is about 450.
Right.
So 375 sounds like a bargain until you see they're relatively small.
Right.
But if the average price gets you the average house, the average house is twice that size.
Right.
So because the typical price per square foot is $268.
Whereas the 3D printed house is $375 per square foot.
Yeah.
So a couple of things at play here, I remember years ago working with my father-in-law,
who was a contractor and building an insulated concrete form house.
Right.
This is where you have these sort of like foam kind of Lego blocks that you stack up
and then pump full of concrete.
Yeah.
I'm very innovative way to build.
Not conventional, somewhat, somewhat interesting and different innovative.
Right.
I wanted to do it because it was basically hurricane proof, which is why we did it.
This was down in Florida.
The problem we had was that none of the subs that we hired on the job had ever worked on
that kind of house before heading idea how to do it.
So it took a lot longer.
Right.
And that makes it more expensive.
And 3D printing is the 3D printed walls going to be just the same because it's not just
your exterior walls.
It's your interior walls too.
And it's like, okay, so how do you put plumbing in?
How do you put electric hand, right?
You're going to have to have subcontractors that know how to do that on this type of construction.
Right.
And you're going to have to grow them.
You can't just hire them.
Right.
And the article does talk about how in time the price will reverse and it'll get cheaper
to 3D print.
It takes time to learn all of the processes and task flows and to optimize them and to
get people that know how to do it, just like opening up a restaurant, same kind of thing.
Well, sure.
And the other thing that bugs me is they're talking about 3D printing a house, not 3D
printing a house.
They're 3D printing walls.
Right.
And that's it.
Right.
There's the rest of the house.
Right.
There's the rest of the house.
And it doesn't, and so to me, calling it a 3D printed house, I mean, you can actually
see that there's an aerial photo of a site where you can see they've got, looks like
they're setting up a printer on one pad, they've got another pad ready to be printed on
and then they've got two sets of walls, and they've got trusses, just stacks of trusses
leaning up against them, waiting to be set when the crane gets there.
Right.
So they're not 3D printing a house.
They're 3D printing walls.
That's true.
Right.
Now, later in the article, they take a look at icon at Wolf Ranch in Texas and they
point out that even there, the prices are significantly higher.
Sure.
So this is not a one thing, just you, but county.
This is 3D printing houses in general.
Today, the tech is not fully there.
The systems are not fully there yet.
So it's going to be more expensive than everyone.
Right.
And if you look at what you're getting here, basically, it competes more or less with
a concrete block house in terms of what physically you're getting in terms of the
engineering performance of the building on the open terms of how environmentally resistant
it is, you know.
And so you're basically, they're saying it took, you know, their first house took 24
days to complete.
Right.
A concrete block house you can put together in two or three days with a crew that knows
what they're doing.
They're doing right.
Right.
And they're way easier to hire.
You know.
And then you would have framed walls on the inside instead of concrete walls on the
inside.
But if you're looking at the environmental aspects of this, you want to be using as a little
concrete as possible, not as much.
Yeah.
Right.
So you know, they're doing everything in concrete.
So right.
Everything's being done in concrete.
So it is absolutely like opposite of what you would want to be doing from a green building
perspective.
You know.
I mean, yes, you are building a very durable, extremely durable house, but you're building
a house that's impossible to adapt to or very difficult to adapt to the future.
I mean, if you decide you want to move a wall against that, if you get about it exactly
where if it's a frame wall and you want to, you know, put a new door in, move the, redo
the bathroom, whatever, there's nothing stopping you.
So I guess I don't want to, I like the idea of 3D printing houses, but the way they're
doing it now and I see there's a lot of problems with it as well.
Well, we'll see what happens with this, this market segment in the meantime.
Let's come in up on our show that I'll let's see we're going to start out talking about
our prints and ambient temps.
We're going to look at how to ruin an online object resource and we're going to talk about
Thingiverse posts getting unpublished.
Let's get started.
So do you recall a little while ago?
I started printing this clip, remember this clip, a pre, so what's easy you remember
this clip is that's when you print it the teeth or the inner jaws, you don't print them,
you don't print the thing with the jaws in it so that it's, how would you refer to
that as preloaded?
Preloaded.
Right.
So that when you put the jaws into the clip, it's preloaded so that it already has quite
a bit of pressure.
Preloaded the little built-in printed spring.
Right.
Now that's a clever design.
I like it.
So I use this design and I added a hook to the end of one side of it and that hook sits
nice and neatly and reliably into the track for a garage door and that and the clip holds
a curtain and that's and that's used for lots of reasons.
One is as a screen and during Halloween for effects.
Another one is as a sound treatment in the garage so that the sound doesn't bounce around.
So I've used them for a couple of things and lately we've been doing stuff in the garage
and it's getting cold and the clips no longer function.
So what happens is the ambient temps and we're not talking all that cold.
We're talking in the 50s.
Something happens to the pet G.
Interesting.
Where it's, it's not a springy and it's a little bit more brittle.
And it's like I'll open the clip and the clip will not close all the way again.
If I open it too much, I can snap the spring.
Thermal plastics are like that.
Yeah.
Now the same thing happens when it gets too hot.
If it gets too hot, it loses the preload.
So that when I squeeze the clip, it's no longer as tight and it's close.
It's springy.
Yeah.
Interesting.
So you really got to take that into account.
If you're going to 3D print some object, you really got to think what's the ambient
temperature that you're going to be using this object within and choose your material
appropriately, although I have to admit, using these polymers, there's a fairly limited
range in terms of ambient extremes.
These materials are made to be used within human living ambient temps, not extreme temps.
Right.
Yeah.
I can remember the old PLA stuff when people would print something in PLA and leave it in
their car.
Yes.
You've had wonderful experiences.
Yes.
That happened dramatically to a multi-month long bridge on its way back from a makerfare.
But I've had PETG act strange after being in the car for years.
One thing that you can do to make your material work fine in any ambient temp for a long
time is to anneal it.
Okay.
And that's why my favorite material is HTPLA.
It's the easiest to print comes out looking the best and then you can anneal it so that
it's functional no matter what ambient temp it's going to be worked with them to a degree
to a certain extent.
Have you tried it with that design?
No, I haven't.
But we did do that lamp that attaches to my desk with the bolt kind of plastic bolt.
And it tightened up and it was all annealed and it maintained its grip fairly well.
But remember that's an ambient temp that's living and that's like you know in the 60s
and 70s.
Right.
But it's under pressure from the clamp too.
So that's another strain.
But you know ambient temp, extreme ambient temps are going to affect our materials.
So you wear that.
So there's a way to make it difficult for folks to use an online object resource like
Thingiverse.
And we're going to discuss this one Thingiverse user whose handle is AR3DP who has done this.
Now maybe his reasons were not meant to be negative.
Maybe he's they're probably thinking people like these.
I'm getting likes for my objects.
Yeah.
But what what AR3DP is doing is he is posting AI generated little creatures in extreme
numbers.
Right.
Quite a few of them.
Let's go to his, let's see what's the number these days.
I mean, every day I go on Thingiverse, I see more and more and more of his object.
He's up to 390 of these.
He turns on the toggle that says they're AI generated, which is nice, which is interesting,
which is not necessarily a bad thing.
The problem is he's doing so many of them that it's crowding out other things on Thingiverse.
It's like he's increased the amount of water flowing through the fire hose so that it
makes it harder and harder to find that really useful functional thing that you may really
would love to print.
Right.
Well, and the big problem is that many of his things are becoming popular or least being
liked a lot.
So I mean, he's sort of in the first page, he's got one, two, three, four, five.
So five likes, five of his objects on the first page, which means about a quarter of the first
page is his content.
Right.
Right.
Which is, yeah, that's definitely, I mean, you know, it's kind of ruining it for all the other
objects.
Well, I mean, but on the other hand, can you hold him responsible for his stuff being popular
apparently?
Well, yeah, because what this, what this user's doing is he's presenting the object as a colored
object.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
And they are not.
Right.
All of his stuff is renderings, but the printable files don't actually have that color object
so you, you can't actually produce them like.
Yeah.
So they're, they're singular objects.
They're not multiple parts.
And the, and he does post them as three MFs for, for purchase slicer.
Uh-huh.
Um, does it show Bamboo Studio?
I believe so.
Yes.
Um, but when I open it up, there's no color information.
There's no painting done.
You would have to paint it yourself and how easy that would be.
And remember, these are not, um, how do I say this, linear, linear parts.
There's no, these are sculpting.
Right.
They're, they're kind of a little low poly, which is, which either makes it easier or harder
to make it way harder.
Yeah.
Depends on what, what you're trying to do.
The triangles are bigger, which means any kind of explicit line from the eyeball to the
side of the face of the object will not be discernible.
So it's not likely you're going to get a perfect circle for that eyeball.
Um, so if you paint these yourselves, they're not going to come out nearly as adorable
and pretty as his rendering shows them to be.
Right.
So the people that are liking them are knee jerking based upon a rendering, which is not
necessarily what you're going to get if you 3D print this thing.
Yep.
So how to ruin an object database is to pour a bunch of stuff that has no real value that
looks really pretty.
I mean, think, oh, think I could print that for my little kid.
They'd love that.
Well, you'll get it as a single color.
Right.
It will be quite as cute with a lot of support tied to it, which means it'll be kind of
rough.
We'll have that clean look to it.
We'll look anything like the rendering.
Sure.
AR3DP is showing.
That's true.
But if the thingyverse is, you know, a popularity contest, the only reason why he's
annoying is because he's popular.
Okay.
But thingiverse, I don't know about the other, the other sites, but at least with thing
iverse, we have a way out, which is very nice that he actually mentions this in his profile.
Yes.
So we know he's not doing this to intentionally hurt the thingiverse.
So he has the consideration to turn on the toggle when he posts one of these objects, turn
on the toggle that says it's AI generated.
As such, it probably is AI generated because there's so many similarities between each
of these objects.
Oh, yeah.
I know.
I'm sure.
And since he's turned on that toggle, if you go into your profile, edit your profile.
Let's do this in real time.
Let me see my profile.
Oh no.
We're looking at his.
Oh, there's my profile.
If the edit profile button and scroll down past your favorites to the browse settings,
there's two selections there, show NSFW content.
What is that?
Not safe for work.
So dirty stuff.
Yeah.
What's your, you don't really, there's really any of that on the, nothingiverse that I've
seen.
There is stuff on there.
There's like pictures of anime, female, females with the enemies that are probably not
appropriate for work.
Well, it depends on where you work.
And then the other one is show AI content.
If you turn that off, you will not get.
Yeah.
So turn that off and then save the settings.
And then, yeah, then he, he disappears.
Yes.
Yes.
Thankfully, however, there may be, there may be other AI generated things that you may have
wanted to see that know you will not see.
Well, that's true.
That's, that is a downside.
But I, I can do without the flood of AI stuff.
Yeah.
In general, I think.
Yeah.
So.
So a few moments ago, my partner and I, we recorded a segment about his, his giant Oreo
cookie post on Thingiverse.
I think I copyright struck.
So I could try to, try to push this one to a different, a different episode.
So it's not being too redundant.
After we did that post, that segment, I went and looked at my profile and dug through
the 136 things I've published on Thingiverse.
And lo and behold, sure enough, I've got the eyeball with the slash through it on a whole
bunch of stuff and I'm trying to look for a rhyme and a reason for why it's happening.
So my first thought was, well, it's all the objects that don't have a photograph that
are instead just the blue Thingiverse generated, right?
And that's just not it because, yeah, I've got a lot of those that are, that are still
published.
Okay.
So yeah.
So I've got like, for example, the test object for full contact support.
That doesn't have a photograph and it published it yet.
The object I generated, that's the 10 log prime and a wipe mod.
It held that one back.
So if I go there, it will not, it's it, it yanked that from publishing.
It says, hey, this thing is still a work in progress.
No, no, it wasn't.
And this thing has not been published.
Other people won't be able to see it.
So just for the heck of it, let's go to the publish button.
There is no publish button.
The publish button has not turned on, is it?
Yeah.
There's no way to publish it.
That's strange.
Let's go back and look at others.
What's going on here?
I'm thinking maybe because I use the word 10 log and that's somebody's brand name.
Maybe that's why they yanked it.
Here's one where I did the doggy wrist cuff.
I published that with a photograph of my labrador wearing the cuff on her paw.
And that one's published fine.
And then there's another published one which I don't recall having on there ever that
shows just the computer image of the doggy cuff and that one has been held back.
I don't know why.
There's no rhyme or reason to it.
If I click on it, it says this thing has not been published.
Other people would be able to see it.
And when I open it up, it shows the other post that shows the picture of my dog.
I think someone's manually going into each of our profiles and mucking with them.
Do you think I doubt it?
Well, here's another one called the Safe Distance Trick or Treat, Articulated Artistic
Skull, which was a remix from the Artistic Skull into an object that could be held with
a stick.
I remember publishing it with the photograph.
The photograph is gone.
And it's saying it's not published.
And the publication button is not there.
I can't publish it.
Who knows?
There's no rhyme or reason to this.
I can't figure out.
There is one batch of objects that I have on here that are all from custom, customizers,
software.
What was it?
Help me here.
Program.
Were you program it?
Drawing a blank.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It's like a programming language.
Yeah, it's a CAD program that's all programmable that you can attach as a customizer into
Thingiverse.
All of those.
All of those have been turned off as if they've eliminated that.
Yeah, maybe they're not supporting that anymore.
I don't know.
All of those customized objects are no longer available, at least as a published thing.
I can get to them from my profile.
I wonder if I can get the files.
Let's see.
Is the file still there?
Oh, boy, this is strange stuff because, yeah, the file is still in there.
So if I wanted to, I could download it from Thingiverse from my profile.
So I don't know.
I don't know what's going on.
You guys, if you're out there and you've got a bunch of stuff on Thingiverse, you might
want to check your profile and see if your objects are still there.
Make sure it's still there.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
Whitney, another show written to the SSD drive, waiting for encoding, uploading a commitment
on our feed to all of our very supportive listeners.
Thank you out there for your support on Patreon.
Thank you for those positive write-ups.
We really do appreciate those.
And thanks for listening.
We're just doing this for fun.
We're not here to make any money.
We're not here to become famous or anything like that.
We're just here because we enjoy talking about our hobbies.
And N3D printing is one of the biggest parts of all of our hobbies.
And we hope that's the case for you, too, because if it is, this is the show for you,
because that's what we talk about.
Now, this show is coming out at the end of March.
So April 1st is coming up.
So this coming up thing of the week, I'm not too sure if this is a real thing of the
week.
My partner suggested it, and I'm looking at it going, yeah, this is April 1st.
I think this is it's got to be a perfect.
I think this is the greatest idea in to hit 3D printing in years.
The 3D printed dive helmet.
Are you going to put one on and use it?
I don't know.
OK, so describe this to our listeners.
So this is, I'm trying to find the actual files to see kind of what, OK, no, so it's basically
it's a one big piece with a bunch of sort of sort of little accessories that bolt onto
it.
Yeah, that head part, the helmet is one big thing, which you'd have to have a big ass
burner to print that on.
But basically, this is like a hard hat, like a commercial diving, you know, like almost
like one of those old school, you know, the brass helmets that you see, like, and mostly
in seafood restaurants, but it's made with plastic.
But it's 3D printed, and not only plastic, it's 3D printed plastic.
And I think you're putting in, you know, Plexiglass ports or something there.
But there's a picture of the dude actually under water with it.
And he says it's, he says he has a video on it.
And if he doesn't link the video on the thing, so it's kind of hard to backtrack it.
But probably if you Google, or if you go on on YouTube and look for 3D printed diving
helmets, I doubt there's that many of them.
Yeah, it says there's a vid, but I don't see it.
Yeah, but I doubt that, but it's probably, you can probably find it on YouTube if you're
looking for it.
Probably.
But my favorite comment on it was somebody says famous last 3D print.
Somebody else is like this thing works.
And they'll replies, by the way, yes, probably because he tried it possibly.
So anyways, this comes to us from a hyperspace pirate.
That's a good name.
And that would be thing number 7307494 on Thingiverse.com.
The 3D printed dive helmet.
So happy April 1st, I think so.
And if any of you tried printing the 3D printed dive helmet, and you survived, let us know
how it works out.
If you got a tip, a question or a candidate thing of the week, what are you waiting for,
send us an email.
Send it to info at 3dprintingtoday.com, that's D-H-R-E-E, filed by letter D, filed by printing
today.com.
And as usual, we invite you to join our free forum on Google Groups.
Just go to Google Type in 3D printing tips and tricks.
When you get there, if you want to post, you got to hit that join group button on the
right and give them an email.
We highly recommend you don't use your personal email.
Make a burner email on gmail.com and interact through Gmail with the Google Groups because
the Google Groups user interface has never been updated and it doesn't work very well.
But the forum is free and I'm in there all the time making sure that people behave and
it's not like what you see on other forums for 3D printing where people kind of go crazy
and there's flame wars.
So we hope you'll join us.
It's eclectic.
In other words, it's not any specific 3D printer.
Let's see.
We do have a show next week.
Let us see.
This would be 608.
607.
607.
That's right.
607.
We're going to look at scene positions.
We're going to talk about controlling overextrusion and we're going to continue exploring 3D printing
with color.
I guess that's it.
Great.
Thanks for listening.
Thank you.
