Virtual printing session | when the files will be available

Approx. 4 minutes of reading time

As the preorder launch date is about to be announced, we wanted to cover the “What will you need to print” topic as well. So that you have clear expectations of what you’ll get and what you’ll need to do in order to get SimpleFCU assembled. Of course, there’ll be tutorials, PDF guides, ongoing discussions about slicers, materials and so on. But in a nutshell – you do need to know what you need to print. If you skipped our previous blog about “What’s in the package”, set aside a few more minutes and enjoy it here.

Let’s divide the printed plastics into two groups: visual plastic parts and functional plastic parts.

Visual plastic parts

We’re talking about those two pretty big plastic parts that are in the picture above. These two take the most time to print. Also, those are the ones you’ll be looking at. We really recommend calibrating your printer before printing these. You can post-process the plastic with manual sanding or spraying after it’s printed. That is completely up to you 😏

The longest side is 245 mm long, and the print is designed to use the Z axis for this. This means you can use practically any available printer on the market, as required bed dimensions are 200x200mm.
We’ve printed everything on Ender 3 Pro and also used Ender PLA with different colors for various finishes. The printer has absolutely no mods (crazy, right?!) and printed everything just fine.

However, with the blue sticker included in the package, the white filament for the visual plastics looks the best for us. Maybe next time we could also try gray 🤔

Printing each part takes roughly a day and altogether needs 200 m of filament. That’s approx. ⅔ of a regular 1 kg filament package. The final printing time, however, highly depends on your printer settings, of course.

Functional plastic parts

You’ll also need to print out the plastics that are being used for the Korry buttons and Push&Pull modules. To have a brief idea about how many parts there are, see all of them in the following images.

Printing out 7 Korry type buttons takes approx. 12 hours and 25 meters of filament and, printing the 4 Push&Pull plastics takes approx. 15 hours and 40 meters of filament. If we’re talking about the bed size again, we had to print the Korry buttons and Push&Pulls separately on our Ender. The bed just isn’t big enough to cover this within one big print.

So in total, we’re talking about 3 days of printing time and approx. one spool of filament.

We’d like to encourage you to experiment with the colors of the filament. As you can see above, we have printed the functional plastic parts in black. Mainly, because LEDs go into Korry, so it’s better to have these made from dark material. So you can be sure the light won’t be emitted outside of the inner mechanism.

An important question follows:

When will STL files be available for download?

We’ll provide all the STL files approx. 14 days before we start shipping the preorders. Let us explain this decision:

• you’ll still have enough time to start printing before the package reaches you
• we’re still fine-tuning the models and trying to make them the best we can
• a few prototypes will undergo a review and we’d like to implement the feedback (if needed) – this means you won’t have to re-print some parts

We invite you to discuss anything that was said above in the #printing channel on our Discord. Join us today!

If you’re already planning on creating your custom box to use with our hardware, let us know and we might be able to share with you the major dimensions that we’re sure are not subject to change.
We understand making a box out of metal or wood takes time, so we’ll happily chat about this once your preorder is in!

Speaking about preorders… you know what the next topic for our blog will be? Everything related to preorder process, YES!
Already have your questions ready? Great! Save them for later and stay tuned!

Safe travels & happy landings ✈️

For the whole SimpleFCU team

Mike