After designing a prototype steering mechanism driver by servo, I decided to venture back into the world of 3D printing to make some parts for Beta. In this case the two steering parts are a 3mm think rectangle and a "T" to mount on the front of the 'bot. Having newly ventured into Sketchup in December, I chose to continue with that tool vs. Shapesmith or Tinkercad. To be honest, I have opened each of those on several occasions and not gotten very far but I was pretty sure I could do this in Sketchup quickly. After about 30 minutes I thought I had it done, exported to STL for Makerbot and brought it in the morning. WRONG. The print did something that made Dan exclaim, "Hmmm... I've never seen it do THAT before!" Now that I know what happened I understand what the printer did: printed a circle (part of the raft) and then a very small (1.5mm) dot before laying down seemingly random "strings" everywhere. It turns out that I had not created the holes properly, and in fact one of then (the 1.5mm dot) was a small cylinder protruding out the bottom. Dan helped me through several attempts to "land" the object on the platform (at first we thought it was floating, not noticing the cylinder) to no avail. I found video info on how to make holes with the "push" tool, but had only moderate success: it seemed that I had to be at just the right zoom and view angle. After asking everyone I could think of at school who might know, I finally stumbled on the obvious when I had a chance to sit down and re-think: if you "push" to the exact depth of the bottom layer, you get a hole! There is supposed to be a visual cue, but in Sketchup you can also manually enter the exact depth as you push. DUH.
Live and learn.
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