Wesley's Tool-Box

A home 3D printer has myriad of uses, but I think toy printing immediately stand out if you have children. Makibox can print in non-toxic (after printing, anyway) ABS polymer, so I set out to make a simple plastic figure for my daughters after the test prints were done.

One thing to note is that the extruder broke down a few weeks ago, so I had to send it back to Hong Kong for replacement. That's why there had been a lack of blog posts about the 3D printer since early January. I've got my replacement, and it works perfectly so far. Better than the original one, in fact.


I selected a squirrel design from Thingiverse because it didn't look to complicated, yet cute enough so that the kids would like to play with it. It turned out that I was right on both accounts. Keep reading for more pictures.

Resizing an image seems to be a straightforward task. You tell the app how small or big the image should be, the app scales accordingly, and the result is saved. So when you want to do this on iOS, you might as well just pick any free image resizing app out on the App Store and be done, right? If quality is of your concern, it's not so simple.

"The Toon-Box" photographic web cartoon on this blog is generated on my iPhone 5S (currently on iOS 7.1b3) and resized to a specific dimension before being uploaded. In choosing the right app for the resizing task, I came across four apps that claimed to do the job:

- Resize Image 4.5 (2013-03-04)
- Resize Photo 1.0 (2011-03-24)
- SimpleResize 2.17 (2013-12-11)
- Crop-Size 1.0.0 (2013-11-21)

The version numbers and release dates are for the latest release as of this writing (2014-01-14), which were used for the testing. So how did they fare? What was the best free iOS image resizing app? Keep reading to find out.

Here's how the first 3D prints out of Makibox look like. The bottom layers are slightly warped, but otherwise looks okay. There are slight curling up at the bottom edges because it did not fully stay stuck to the hot bed.

I think the Z-axis calibration can mitigate this issue, because I've seen the nozzle moving a bit too high up from the hot bed as it printed. I'll see what I can do tonight. Meanwhile, keep reading for more photos.

After much worries and adjustments, I decided to bite the bullet and connect Makibox to a computer to do a test print. Windows driver was loaded to my notebook computer, and I downloaded 5DPrint, the host software that operate the printer, to the Chrome browser. On the 5DPrint, I loaded the test cube G-code file provided at the Makibox website for the very first printing test.

First attempt went horribly wrong because I just loaded the filament and there wasn't enough material to stick to the hot bed first, making the material curl up around the nozzle. The second attempt, however, is going relatively smoothly as I write this. I need to level the hot bed a bit more, but other than that everything seems to be okay. To see the photos leading up to this, read on.

The axis movement issue was somewhat alleviated, so I went with leveling the hot bed where the prints will be formed on. This required turning the three screws on the bed ever so slightly so that the nozzle is basically at the same distance away from the surface.

I made the adjustments without powering on first because they were off by a lot and needed big shifts. The expansion caused by heating of the bed may require further adjustments, but I hope it will be minor.

As for how the axis movement got better, read on.