One of the things we do at work is Biometrics PAD (Presentation Attack Detection) testing, which is just a fancy way of saying we break into biometric access systems by faking it will we break it.
This is all done in accordance with various ISO standards of course – such as ISO 30107-3 / 4 and ISO 19795 – and utilizes a lot of fancy hardware such as 3D printers and high resolution 3D scanners.
One of the things my roommate, RSO, did about a year ago when rumors of layoffs started to circulate, to make himself more valuable, was buy himself a $500 3D printer and work out all of the esoteric and arcane knowledge to use it. This includes the super-hard-to-work-with material called Varioshore foaming TPU that we use at work.
Varioshore TPU is so hard to work with because, depending on things like nozzle temperature, chamber temperature, flow rate, head movement speed, humidity, and the position of the planets, it completely changes its characteristics and it can be anything from a semi-hard plastic to a super soft foam rubber.
Due to this it also doesn’t start and stop flowing out of the toolhead on demand like other materials, because even when the machine stops feeding the material the Varioshore is expanding in the tool head and oozing out all over the place.
It’s basically hard-mode 3D printing.
Anyway, RSO is pretty much an expert in making this material work for what we need it to do at the office – and of course he was laid off a month ago…
And, in typical corporate fashion, just because you laid off the one guy you have that can make the thing go doesn’t mean you no longer need to make that thing go. So, some other overworked SOB has to figure it out.
In this case, that poor SOB is me. So, for the last two weeks (between fire drills for everything else) I’ve been trying to figure out 3D printing…
Complicating this is the fact that the biometrics department, who has the printers, scanners, and other hardware – but can’t operate them – is on the other end of the building from my office… So any opportunity I have to trial and error this problem is punctuated by transit time.
It goes like this: play with the 1×10^32 config options in the print software at the computer on my desk and send it across the building, hike the the printer to supervise the first layer or two, hike back to my office to deal with the most urgent of three emergencies, print fails, hike back to the printer to figure out the failure state and clean up the mess, reset, and hike back to my office to try again.
It’s so much fun…
Anyway, last evening while pacing and bitching about the state of things at work, I announced “fuck it” and got RSO to take me over to Microcenter in his truck to spend $2500 on 80 pounds of “educational materials”…
Enter the Bambu Labs H2D 3D printer – the same model of printer we use at work. It currently resides in my dining room, about 15 feet from my office here at home.
And at 11pm last evening I managed my first successful 3D print. Achieving in 6 hours what I couldn’t do in two weeks at work because of the flop and twitch inherent in being five employees at once.
Unlike most folks, my first successful print wasn’t a boat (called a ‘benchy’ in 3D printer nerd terms), or the x / y / z cube, or even the calibration test print – no – my first print was a modified-to-fit full-bed-width Gridfinity base plate…
Because even while I’m figuring it all out, the output it has to be useful…
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