The printer's 3D twin

By the end of this course you will set up a real printer and print three parts of your own.

A twin of a real machine

This is a digital twin: a 3D copy of a real printer, built to its maker's sizes. Its parts move the way the real ones do. What you learn on it, you can do on the real printer.

Four jobs before you print

A printer fresh out of the box cannot print yet. You do four jobs first, in this order:

1. Home it, so it knows where its nozzle is.
2. Heat the bed and the nozzle for your plastic.
3. Load the filament into the hot nozzle.
4. Level the bed, so the nozzle is the same small gap above every corner.

Why the order matters

Each job needs the one before it. The printer can't find a corner until it knows where it is. Plastic won't flow through a cold nozzle. And you test the gap with the nozzle where the print will be.

Then you print

In the second half you print a box, a pyramid and a sphere. You watch each one grow, one thin layer at a time. Then you send them to your Workshop bench.

Safety: on a real machine, an adult supervises, glasses go on, and you never leave it running alone.

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Sources: the CognitaSTEM Engineering Workshop's printer simulation, solid slicer and judge; Creality Ender-3 V2 user manual (the 3D model's printer: homing, preheating, loading filament, levelling the bed with a sheet of paper).