InVision 3D printer tutorial:

Open up the Invision Client. 

Our printer is called invision_0666.  Double-click the icon.

This should bring up a second screen called INVISION_0666 - Info.  Click File->Submit.  This brings up a screen where you select the .stl files you wish to print. Once you've selected your files, hit Preview...  This takes you to the GUI where you position your parts on the print bed.

The GUI is fairly full-featured.  You can scale and rotate your parts and move them around.  Note that to move objects manually, you must be in Top or Bottom view.  There is a feature called Auto Part Placement (top right toolbar) that works quite well to place (by translating) your parts efficiently, but it doesn't also rotate your parts.  This is important because the single largest factor in determining the time it takes to print your part is the z-height.  So you want to rotate your parts to minimize the height in the z-direction, then you can manually place them efficiently (tightly spaced), or use Auto Part Placement.  At any point during the positioning of the parts, you can hit the Estimate Build Time icon (top right toolbar), and it will tell you how long your job will take.  The box in the GUI bounds the working space of the printer.



Before submitting your job, ensure that the printer is prepared.  There should be cartridges of the print and filler material in the loading bays of the printer (refer to pictures).  Additional cartridges can generally be found in the shelves to the right as you enter the door.  The bottom hopper should be free of spent cartridges.  You should have a fresh metal tray inserted into the printer workspace (refer to pictures).  The tray has a spring-loaded latch you pull to take it out and reinsert when putting back in.





Once you have your parts oriented, click File->Submit Job.  In the INVISION_0666 - Info window, you'll see your job, the estimated build time, and the status.  After some pre-processing status messages, the job will be sent to the printer.  There will be an interim warm-up period, and then the Invision LCD screen will go through a short checklist asking you whether there are cartridges and if the bottom bay is empty.  Answer Yes to each after verifying.  The part should start printing, z-layer by z-layer.

When your parts are finished, take them out by removing the tray.  They will stick to the tray, and there will be a thin layer of filler material that was laid down between your part and the tray.  The outer rasterized coating is the filler.



Use an exacto knife to strip away the layer of filler between the part and the tray.  Unless you have fine features in the vicinity, you can be pretty aggressive here. 



Once this is done, remove your parts from the tray.  Try and strip as much of the filler wax off by hand as you can, because it will take longer in the oven if you don't.  Clean up the metal tray by removing extraneous wax.  You can use the edge of a metal ruler for this. 

Melt off the remaining wax in the little toaster oven in the laser cutter room (the one labeled wax).  175F is a good temperature, though you can also use 200F, on convection bake.  It should take on the order of 10-30 min, unless you have quite a bit of wax left, in which case it could take an hour or more.  If you want to be more thorough in removing the wax, you can set it in a corn oil bath at 150F. 





Some collective pieces of wisdom.  Edit and add as you see fit:

The Invision takes only somewhat more time for increased print surface area on any given Z layer, meaning no matter how many parts you have on the print surface, the single greatest constraining factor on time is the number of z layers to be printed (height of the tallest object).  So its best to make your parts somewhat flat in at least one dimension if you don't want the print job to take forever.

Just because you got a good surface for a complicated part does not necessarily mean you got a printable volume.  Make sure all your surfaces have thicknesses and form an enclosed solid, otherwise your model will collapse when the wax melts away.

The Invision doesn't have a built in method of testing whether your STL files are alright to print i.e. if you've got inverted normals.  The Zcorp does this, so you can just drag your STL file into the Zcorp software icon (ZPrint 7.2), it will open it, fix it if it needs to, and you can then export it to stl and rewrite your old file.

The Invision likes the units of all the parts to be uniform.  If some STL is off, you open it in the Zcorp software, reexport in the correct units, and it should be fine.

The support material for the Invision is just a loosely structured wax that crumbles away pretty easily.  Try to remove as much of it manually as possible, then go melt off the rest in the oven at 175-200F (10-30min).  If you want to be thorough, you can melt off the wax in a bath of corn oil at 150F.

An internet source lists the cost for the InVision print material at around $250/kg, and for the filler at $150/kg.  Be careful how much material you use.  The Zcorp is much cheaper and somewhat faster.