I do love 3D printing! It’s a recent love, but nevertheless it’s becoming a big passion for me! I bought my first 3D printer almost 2 years ago, leveraging the usual Black Friday discounts and I’ve never looked back!
I’m going to come out right from the gates saying that despite all the enthusiasm I have for this discipline, it can also be massively frustrating! I guess it wouldn’t be as rewarding if it also wasn’t a bit complicated!
My 3D printer is a fairly basic entry model: Creality Ender 3 V2 Neo (really rolls off the tongue). I’m not a mega expert, but I know nowadays there are way better options out there. The field of 3D printing seemingly advances at a break necking pace and Creality certainly plays its part by releasing one new model every month (or so it seems).
For my “needs”, this model fits the bill 100%. It’s fairly fast, the print volume allows me to print pretty much everything I need and it’s not too big overall, so I could easily find a space for it in my home office.
Now, you may have guessed it from the title of the post, but I’ve tried for a while now, to completely detach from the need for a Mac/PC for 3D printing. To understand why this was a challenge, let’s recap the three main steps involved in 3D printing:
- Design
- Slice
With design, I mean arriving at the complete 3D object you want to print. There are so many online portals where you can download cool 3D models, if all you need is a more “standard” object. Of course, the main point of 3D printing is to create something that didn’t exists before, something that can fill an incredibly specific niche, often the need of just one person.
For me specifically, the design stage became and still is the main reason why I got into 3D printing in the first place! I’ve always loved technical design, from my early days at school on pen & paper, moving to my first 2D designs on CAD, naturally evolving toward more complex and fulfilling 3D models.
On Mac/PCs there are huge amounts of software dedicated to 3D modelling, going from free and open source, to thousands of pounds/dollars/euros and anywhere in between.
But again, I wanted to leverage the power of an iPad to get the design done. Even before the acquisition of the latest M4 models, I had an OG 2018 iPad Pro that was mode than capable of tackling this job.
After many tries and tribulations, I’ve settled on my 3D design software of choice: Shapr3d. Don’t get immediately scared by the license fee!! Yes it’s expensive, but in my opinion is the best, the fastest and most friendly software. It also integrates super well with an Apple Pencil, making design work an absolute breeze. Plus, if you are a student/educator you can apply for a free license.
On top of that, there is still a way for non-educa tors to still enjoy the software for free. You will be limited to only two projects in your library and to a low-fidelity model export for print; but I’ve found both being acceptable trade-offs, especially if you only design once in a long while. The low-quality export is certainly not an issue if your designs are fairly squared and regular as you wouldn’t really be able to notice the difference. Where you’ll be hit the most is if you have curves or more complex designs, and very specific tolerances between pieces. If that’s the case, you should go for the license and you won’t be disappointed! I’ve haven’t renewed my license yet as I’m not designing as much in the last couple of months, but I’m picking this up again and will resubscribe soon! (No this bit is in no way sponsored by Shapr3d)
Now we get to the hard part! After you’ve got your 3D model, you have to slice it. If you are new to 3D printing, this term may sound funny, but it is exactly what it sounds like: your 3D model needs to be sliced in many many tiny layers that will eventually add up to your final model.
I’ve never really understood why, but for a long long time, there was basically no native way to slice a 3D model on an iPad. Yes the operation is fairly compute intensive, but you’ve been able to run a slicer on a Raspberry Pi for years and for all its power, it’s nowhere near what an iPad packs underneath the display!
For quite some time, I was running a VNC client on my iPad in order to connect to a dedicated Raspberry Pi in my network closet that has the sole job of running Cura slicer on it. I’d would save the 3D model on my NAS, open it from the Pi to be sliced, to then save the result back on the NAS.
Finally the dark days are over, thanks to the release of the aptly named Print to 3D. It’s not the prettiest of the apps and has a bit of a learning curve, but everything that you need it’s there.
Printer settings, slicing settings, automatic support generation; all you may need to move your production off a computer and onto your app it’s there. It took me a couple of prints to dial in the settings to match what I was using before and I was off to the races!
And now we come to the last piece of the puzzle: the actual printing stage. Octoprint is the name of the game here. Using a dedicated Raspberry Pi connected to the front of my 3D printer, you can make any printer a network printer. Meaning that now you can manage your device remotely, upload print file and manage print queues without having to touch any SD cards (bonus point: Print to 3D can integrate with Octoprint directly to send gcode files directly to the Octoprint interface)
Octoprint is another piece of software that definitely requires some time investment to begin with as you have an almost infinite amount of options to configure and you can customise it to your heart desires; but once you are done, you are set for good.
You can access Octoprint directly on your local network, or you can use one of the many 3rd party iOS app that uses Octoprint as the backend in order to manage your printer. I personally use OctoApp and I’m very happy with it as it’s super easy to setup and use.
I did mention my NAS already and that’s been the main glue that brings it all together. As all the apps and devices are on my network, I can seamlessly move files in between my iPad and my 3D printer, achieving the goal of going fully mobile and completely detaching from the need of having a computer around.
It’s been quite a journey of trials and errors, but I’m so happy with the final result and that’s why I wanted to share it with you!
If you were on the fence about 3D printing, there has never been a better time to start as costs and complications are becoming lower and lower. It’s an incredible feeling to go from sketch to physical product, really gets your mind and creativity going!
