YaRep: A Personal 3D Printing Simulator

摘要

Personal 3D printers and printing applications are being embraced by consumers across the world, thanks to the strong demands from both hobbyist makers and users. Despite of such popularity, several barriers hinder their wider adoption: affordability - financial burden to buy and try various printer designs and models; operability - requirement of skills to tune the printer and printing parameters; efficiency - lengthy time spent during the printing process, and sizable amount of printing materials used on unsatisfactory printouts. With these observations, we propose to use simulation technology for personal 3D printing. The proposed techniques were reduced to a preliminary implementation called YaRep simulator. Based on the study results on ease-of-use metrics of several state of art personal 3D printers, YaRep clearly exhibits benefits and potential to improve the user experience for 3D printing fans.