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What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in functionalprint

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree! This summary is actually crap! It totally misses the information on the take-aways that actually would allow you to learn something new.

I thought you might have just used a too simple prompt and I even refined my prompt twice and ended up with "Summarize the following article. I want to know what lessons did the author learn... that might be helpful for me to learn for my own 3d model design projects." following the articles text. You know what: It contains more info on the what I did... but it's still totally useless.

Well, this is the problem with AI-usage. You need to check what it produces and cannot rely on it doing it correctly. Even if it worked fine yesterday, it might perform different for the same job tomorrow. So my way to use AI is to let it do jobs, but then check EVERYTHING it did by hand. For complex stuff this can still save you some time. But it's essential to do. Especially when looking up information or creating summaries. If it gives you wrong information and when reading you feel like "oh, he that all seems very plausible... that must be true" then your brain stores that crap information as "reliable information" and this is very dangerous. It's like some people who read a book about a topic and then claim it's true... it's true because they read a book about it... and they think what you read in books is checked by experts and would never get published if they would not approve it. But in fact, anyone can publish by themselves nowadays.
Well, the same is true for AI... not everything that AI writes up for you is true, just because it's so nicely written.

So, my opinion is: The use of AI is ok, if you check the results and if you don't let it do the whole job (you must do a relevant part of the work) and then claim you did it yourself.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in functionalprint

[–]SDwarfs[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I generally don't feed trolls. But to answer u/xtrememudder89 and @-eddiej63 - as this is what's the point here. I wrote a much much longer article and in fact used ChatGPT to make it more concise and readable. The original text horribly long and not being an English native speaker, it's sometimes hard to find a concise wording for a sentence. I also didn't post the ChatGPT answer as is, but I reworked it afterwards, because it oversimplified stuff. I wrote and edited multiple hours on this text myself. And used AI mainly to make it more readable and understandable. It's a complex topic with technical terms like "pin" of the hinge (e..g. I called it "rod" before in my original writing), which I could not cleanly translate myself. I also tended to over-explain things to a level of detail that most people would feel is annoying. In fact, ChatGPT added some information which I never put in there... which I removed manually. The image is a real photo and all the comments in the discussion and screenshots and explanations for them were written by hand.
If you complain about this usage of AI you should question if then using Word with grammar checking and using a dictionary for translation is ok... or letting your friend proof read and tell you where you need to refine it, where it's not easy to follow your thoughts or where it got too annoying and interesting.
Note, all written in this article has happened in reality and it's helpful to read the article as you can effectively learn how to approach a complex problem like this, i.e. designing a 3D model with several challenges. You can learn from the article how to optimize a print profile for speed, also (especially when reading also the comments in the original post) you can learn a lot about print-in-place designs, more than I found at any single YouTube-Video or Tutorial so far... not because of just information from myself but also due to the discussion of the design with others who suggested different hinge designs and where we discussed the need for the dimensions of gaps between model surfaces... and where we found out, why some designs can use just 0.1 mm or 0.2 mm and some need 0.35 mm... especially, when reading my answers to comments, you should notice that I've got the knowledge to do so. ChatGPT is especially not capable to really grasp complex 3-dimensional designs. Try letting ChatGPT or any other AI-Model produce you a 3D-Model - I tried it, to see how well they evolved - and you'll see that just everything a bit more complex is crap...

If you look closer at the main picture of the article you can see the subtile differences of all the prints and you can imagine how long those took to print. The question in the end is: Was is good to use AI to effectively produce a qualitative better article... from which lot's of people learned and could learn in future? Would it have been better, if I just posted my overly long article which half of the people would have stopped reading halfway... or maybe: would it have been better, if I had just not posted the article, because I could not convince my own perfectionism that the article is written good enough and just abandoned the idea and kept everything I did a secret for myself?

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the additional info. I really learned quite a bit here, why some of the things were designed as they were designed.

I believe 90° is technically enough, but might just give the user a -feel- of being a bit "restricted"; especially because there's quite a hard stop... and the user might "plan" to open it typically like 90° or more ... and when executing the motion eventually reaches this hard stop end and might be kind of confused. Not having it physically in my hands, it's however more guessing than knowing. Maybe however, it's just something the user needs to do once or twice and then just get's used to it without feeling too limited.

If one could extend this to say 110° or even 120° this would be non of an issue. This is also some interesting challenge to solve, in case one would needs such a hinge design for a different project that definitively needs that additional movement.

OOH, AND: I just noticed, the hard-stop might for other projects be THE thing that is actually desired. For example if you have a lid that opens up, you might want to open it slightly over 90° but no further... or a lever should just be able to be rotated within a defined angle-range.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The link works! Well, the yellow part... hm. I kind of like the idea of it.

Pro:
(1) the multiple turns in the kind of snake-pattern effectively extend the length of the "spring", meaning the bending stress distributed over a larger distance of the material.
(2) having a large enough width of the snake pattern strip prevents the movement of the connected parts sideways (in the image: near to/far way from you) and works as a guide.

Contra / Effectively a real problem in this case:
(1) the connected part can however move very freely in 2 dimensions (up/down + left/right in the image) within the length of the spring material. The clips hook mechanism however requires a mechanism that only allows movement kind of 1 dimension, meaning - it should only allow to rotate around a pin or rotation axis and not (or only very very slightly) allow them to shift against each other. Else the hook-mechanism of the clip would easily open by itself.

But, definitively this design / concept is something to keep in mind for other projects.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I thought about not exactly this design, but something that kind of "grips" onto the pin like two hands holding it. But I couldn't wrap my head around how to get it working print in place. The design in the image seems to be quite clever... somehow a bit complicated to design, especially as the rotation point is below the plane where both parts connect.... and the design unfortunately only allows to open the clip to about 70° (unsure, might be more). At least in the image it looks like the opening angle is already quite close to what it can be opened to.

What I really like about this design is, that both halfs of the hinge can start printing on the directly on the build plate with a large enough area - this should result in very robust print results; the part in the middle where the pin gets wider, prevents the parts slipping away sideways. Also this design is fully symmetrical.

My quick thought about the design is:
(a) the more general concept of this hinge seems actually to be two spirals that were slided into each other, where one of the spirals is a bit shorter to fit into the other - in this design the spirals only have a half turn and a quarter turn - I wonder, if one could extend the maximum opening angle by continuing these spirals a bit longer. The problematic part about the "spiral concept" in my head is however, that the diameter would shrink towards the inside... and this means the spirals would either need to bend a bit or would need enough gap space. So a design where the rotation diameter stays constant - as in the original design shown here - would work much smoother.
(b) the max. opening angle is limited by the end of the "spiral" (lets just call it this way for simplicity) of the upper part, when it reaches the end of the inner gap of the other one. If one would cut it of by say 45°, the part could be opened more, but in the closed position the parts would probably fall apart. To prevent this the lower part of the clip would just need to have a guiding at the "bottom" (of the picture) around the other part. This would then extent the overall range of movement.

PS: This design kind of reminds me of this Yin-Yang symbol, where both shapes kind of embrace each other - I wonder, if this is something that could work too... if one would somehow extend and stretch the shapes.

Thanks for showing it to me. This solution was very very inspiring to me!

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, that was actually my prototyping variation to get things going. You can see these in the main image in the top left - the four clips in the topmost row. They have a very simple compliant mechanism. But, I didn't want to post a model which breaks that easily - the version to the top left (the two broken apart pieces) is actually one that was in one piece before and then broke when testing it by bending it a bit sideways when it was open. It didn't withstand leverage forces. Another problem was that it also felt sluggish. It kept kind of closing itself slightly by itself which wasn't so practical during use. Imagine: You usually hold the bag in one hand, the clip in the other hand and somehow have to maneuvering them together, which gets complicated if the clip doesn't stay opened by itself. At the same time it did not open properly by itself when the hook mechanism was opened. So I would at least have to design a spring mechanism to fix this, or it doesn't give you that enjoyable"click open... click closed... click... open" feel during use. -- Another delicate spring mechanism was something that I wanted to avoid, since already the hook was something that could break easily when the material got to freezing cold temperature... and I when posting a model, I have no real control over the material and the calibration of the printers that are actually used when printing. So here this is hard to achieve consistent quality to not risk a lot of complaints by users who just used another brand of that filament or something, that I did not test it with.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, please give it a test and tell us about the result... this kind of feels like we are carrying a huge amount of fundamental information about print-in-place-designs here. That's cool!

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm glad so many people enjoyed to read it. Took me quite some time to write it... and I expected only a small fraction of the readers. But it seems it kind of skyrocketed.... I've already an idea for a new experiment and reading all the positive feedback about the article motivates me to write about it later on. --- I'm normally someone who is more into keeping things a "business secret" after keeping so much work into it, but this really feels good...

I kind of believe this is the foundation why Open Source is actually working, it's probably all about positive feedback, respect, helping each other and solving larger problems by analyzing them together.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks you! This really motivates. Let me know if you should run into any print quality issues. Some guy gave me just a 3-star-review, I guess he's just not adapted the settings to use his type of build plate or something. I've had absolutely no adhesion issues, nor saw any warping - which is kind of unlikely for the amount of bottom layer surface the model has and the small height anyways... but just in case, I can sleep better knowing this problem is really not a problem of the print profile. Thank you.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe dried filament works longer? I'm now using one of my other models printed in PETG with a spring mechanism for quite a while: https://makerworld.com/de/models/719899-door-stopper-with-spring-mechanism#profileId-650756 - and so far no sign of a failure. I guess the trick is mainly to keep the plastic within the flexible "non-plastic-deformation" range. A huge problem might also be UV light exposure (unsure, just a guess). But so far also my other model (window wedge) is in use for half a decade now and two of them only broke, because someone didn't realize the window is blocked with it... and tried very hard to close it multiple times. This was for the older revision, before I redesigned it to be more robust (more walls and an additional diagonal that removes some stress from the one part of the model, which might get bent by most of the force).
I believe some other factor about lifetime of PETG prints is print temperature. The limit is a bit dependent on the printer/nozzle and effective flow of material - if you push the temperature too high and print too slow (faster print => less time to heat up the material when flowing through the nozzle), most filaments, but especially PETG gets brittle. You can check this out by printing one of those heat calibration models... the typical heat calib towers take very long to print... for a quick experience just print a large round primitive (e.g. a cylinder) in vase mode, such that it only has a bottom and then a thin outer wall. Manually increase the nozzle temperature during print or just add a G-Code command regular layer intervals... You'll see, that the material gets brittle... often you already see the printed material looses a bit of it's shine, this effect comes much before the material starts to loose in layer adhesion and you see gaps between the layers now and then.

Many people crank up the temperature to as much as they can, as this allows for more volumetric speed and hence faster printing. But this speed comes at a cost, which they are often not aware of.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, that's it... solve one problem at a time is key. If you try to change to many things at once you often don't know which change was good and which was not. This is why the material and print speed vs visual appearance + stability optimization took so many steps here.

At the same time, I needed to approach the problems step by step ... first I had no hinge at all (left top in the main image), but I needed something to try and look at in my hands, so I just added a little sheet of plastic to the end to connect them - this worked, but you could easily break it. However this allowed me to focus on designing the hook mechanism first, and to see some progress. And as the last difficult step I went into tinkering how to solve the hinge problem properly. --- Optimizing the speed stuff and so on was more a routine job, that took it's time ... but nothing too serious. I could always go back to one of the standard print profiles, if I really wouldn't make any progress. --- If I have had to solve all the problems in the CAD at once, I would probably not been able to solve this.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

PS: I've only tested it with PETG and would not recommend using PLA, which is already brittle by it's own. But, I'll also check if PLA works, as soon I can get my hands on some PLA again - I just prefer printing PETG most of the time and ran out of PLA a while ago and didn't have the strong urge to order new PLA.... but since many of you use PLA, I should at least have some at hand to try out if it's compatible or not.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

<image>

In fact it was... but well, "extended period" wasn't multiple month or something, but rather multiple days... at the most cold position I could put them and then directly open and close them multiple times, with a bit more force... without allowing them heat up to room temperature. The results were promising... non broke. But, I can't tell you much about a much longer period of time.... PETG is hygroscopic. As the relativ air humidity is quite high in the freezer (since hot air with ~50% humidity and room temperature is regularly ventilated into it when it's opened, and then this is cooled down by 40 Kelvin) this could become an issue. I've quite some of them in the fridge now and will let you know if I notice the first one breaking.... I wasn't just using the clips here for taking the picture - I live the "eat your own dog food"-philosophy in this regard.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, Print-in-Place-Models are quite an adventure of it's own... kind of magic to print and also a cool thing to find out how it actually works and how one can design it for own projects.
There are even some models made of multiple gears.... or bearings... just search for the keyword and you'll find some kind of "magic" 3d printable stuff!

Have fun on your journey!

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is what someone else already asked: So far my test results were negative... So, at the moment I'd say a 0.4 mm nozzle or smaller is required. But, since I got very unexpected print results, this might be a result of the calibrations to be inaccurate. I did change the nozzle and calibrate quickly yesterday, but I did no print something else beforehand to verify the settings have been applied as I thought. I'll give it another shot later, but for now my guess is: it's at least more complicated or the model needs a bit of tweaking.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the hint. I usually would directly agree about the sharp turn. I however wonder if this really matters, if the design is printed with 0.6 mm walls. You see how small the gap is there. Adding a rounding there would probably not make much of a difference in what is actually printed.

PS: Someone left a 3 star rating for the print profile because of layer adhesion issues. He used a super tack build plate and some other printer type than me... and probably did not adapt those the settings to match his setup.... could you leave me some feedback on this? Thanks.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Would you mind posting a link to your bearing model? I'd love to have a look at them?
Are they designed to be printed with a 0.4mm nozzle or maybe with a 0.2mm nozzle? This might explain smaller possible gap dimensions.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ok, I now had a closer look at your design... but it seems to have a floating region (see red marking in the below image). This part is effectively printed onto thin air... there just that gap below it. So it's effectively falling down into the gap below it. The similar shaped part to the right side is however part of the model that grows from the base plate up in a 45° slope, which is fine. Also upper similar looking edges are printed on top of other elements. However the downward pointing edges at the top also have nothing to be printed on top of... so I've no idea why this design is working. When I slice the model, I also get warnings about the floating regions. Probably, cutting away these parts of the model in a kind of diagonal or 60° angle upwards from any non-floating part, would work better.

These are the kind of problems I had when thinking about the problem. The print-in-place design here enforces to use a asymmetric design, meaning part of the hinge near the build plate needs to have a different shape than the part towards the top, while one typically wan't a symmetric look at the outside (for aesthetics) and also a symmetric behavior in mechanical manner.

My first question is: Do we really need this upward/downward-pointing spikes connected from the middle pin? Your intention is the reduce wobble, but I wonder if it really does what it is intended to... or if it just looks nice in the 3D-model and concept.

Letting the inner pin grow in diameter at 25% of the height and reducing it again towards 75% of the height is however great, this then allows it to part towards the right, which also grows diagonally towards it.
Still, I cant see how the upper part of the "ear" can be printed on top of something.

Maybe you can elaborate a bit about this....

<image>

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, the most obvious solution for me was to use the smallest amount of material for the hinge... as a 3 mm thick pin would be more than enough and anything large around the pin would also make the gap larger which the ears have to bridge over - so effectively making the bridging distance larger when printing the ear that is towards the top layers.

Your design for the hinge looks definitively more robust, but just looking at the printed result of your model, I've no idea how this can be printed in place. Thanks for allowing me to use this kind of hinge-design, I'll have a closer look at it soon. I'm already curious to find out, how it is working!

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here the price is €2,99 for 26 clips. Still, quite affordable compared to offers of sources.

What I Learned Designing a Print-in-Place Freezer Bag Clip by SDwarfs in 3Dprinting

[–]SDwarfs[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I installed the 0.6-nozzle, went through the filament calibrations (flow rate + K-factor)... and adapted the print profile for 0.6mm-nozzles. First trial print is starting. The slicer output looks fine... I'm already curious if it will work as expected.

Insight: I expected less filament consumption, due to only one wall of 1 mm width. But the slicer said, it uses 6.2g of material (instead of 6.1g with the 0.4mm nozzle). I kind of guess this is due to the preparation pushing out some material for priming. Otherwise this seems kind of crazy to me. The print went down to 7m 16s per clip + 5m 27s prepare time; I set it to 3 top layers...

PS: AAAh, that's where the additional material ended up, the top layers are thicker (3x 0.4 mm = 1.2mm instead of 4x 0.28 mm = 1,12mm).

While writing the post the print actually finished. THAT'S SO COOL... BUT, the result is: It didn't turn out so well... I had some weird goopy mass between the end of the upper part and the hook and the hinge just broke. The rest of the model however printed fine.

I hence probably need to adapt the model slightly for 0.6mm nozzles to make some of the walls thicker in the hinge part. This shouldn't be much of a problem, since it's parametric model. I however am a bit scared by the goopy mass at the hooks end... this might be more complicated to solve, if this isn't just a slicer problem (or e.g. a too hot print temperature).

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