Bubble Adjustments
(Backdated: Oct. 28, 2016)
Our first Sprint Review was today, and we got some great feedback from our reviewers. For instance, we were advised that air bubbles can be eliminated using vibration or vacuuming. Both of those will be difficult to implement, but either one will be more effective than trying to sense bubbles with IR sensors. And actually, I’m not sure how we would have regulated extrusion using the IR sensors anyway. Extrusion is going to happen as soon as the PLA is pushed to the end of our barrel; we don’t have nozzle control included in our project scope.
While discussing the feedback we received, we realized that air bubbles are not as horrible a problem as we originally thought. Not only can filament be usable even with air bubbles in it, but also the likelihood of producing air bubbles will decrease as we iterate on our extrusion system. We also realized that heat is likely going to be evenly distributed — plus heat control is going to be controlled by the electrical/firmware system. I guess it turns out that the sensors I researched in the first sprint are not something I need to be concerned with. Our system is going to work quite differently from the way I initially planned, but that is of course to be expected — it’s why we iterate! And regardless, doing the sensor research was a good exercise. I learned a lot about how to spec sensors, and I developed an initial idea for our software system which would then help with later iterations.
