The Ultimaker is a fantastic piece of hardware for the space that was paid for by community crowdfunding and as such should be treated with more-than-the-usual amount of respect.
While members are encouraged to use it to experiment, any large or commercial uses should be compensated for.
The below costs are approximated to include a small fundraising amount above cost-price to make the printer sustainable in the long run
|| |------|----| |Filament|5p/g| |Electricity|10p/hr|
When the ultimaker is being let out for an event or for non-members use in the space, the consensus is to charge £5/30mins of print time.
The usual suspects for model design:
- Solidworks (Not availiable in the space)
- Sketchup (Free to download/use)
Slicing is the process of taking a model file (usually STL) and turning it into a GCODE toolpath that the Ultimaker can accept either directly from an attached computer or via an SD card inserted into the Ulticontroller on the machine.
- Cura (Most popular in the space and in the general Ultimaker community)
- Slic3r (Also quite common in the space, a barebones Skeinforge GUI)
- Many others are available, Google Is Your Friend