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StephenCarlson / MiniHawk-VTOL

Artwork for the MiniHawk VTOL, a 3D-Printed Tricopter/Fixed-wing hybrid aircraft.
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Explicit Internal Geometry (Infill, Ribs), Partial Skin Generation #9

Open StephenCarlson opened 3 years ago

StephenCarlson commented 3 years ago

Currently, Cura, or whatever slicer program is used for 3D Print GCode generation, defines the internal geometry of all structures. This has worked fine, but most modern 3D-printed aircraft have the internal spars, ribs and stringers defined explicitly in the 3D model, and the slicer simply treats everything as walls. An explicit structure would be nice for providing an unambiguous model, and allow for stress analysis and optimization.

Related to explicit internals is finding a way to exclude certain regions of surface skin from printing. The internal walls of the main compartment, for example, are redundant and unnecessary. Large sections of the wing could have 3D-printed skin omitted in favor of film or tape covering.

StephenCarlson commented 2 years ago

The "Good First Issue" flag on this Issue is meant as a sort of bounty/invite for if anyone has insight into how to define the inner sparse ribs/stringers that would replace the slicer infill.

pbreed commented 1 year ago

Also some of the larger Resin printers can now print this model, so the defined infil/internal structure STL's would be useful for this as well...