Here is a 5th order Menger sponge I made up from 20 4th order Menger sponges printed out on a 3D printer. A 30cm ruler is included for scale.
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I just created a 4th order sponge on Sketchup (quite quickly), exported it as an STL file, and sliced it with a Prusa slicer (quite slow), which reports a calculated print time of 2½ days on my Prusa i3 Mk3S, making the 5th order sponge take over 7 weeks continuous printing on a single machine. What did you use, and how long did it take?
Hi James,
I think I used Cura – but the times work out probably about the same. The small 4th order Menger sponges, which are 6cm on a side, took 17.3 hours each to print out, so as there are 20 of them in the 5th order Menger sponge, that gives a total print time of 346 hours, or 14 and a half days, or 2 weeks.
The longest continuous print I did was for a Mandelbulb (3D fractal) 14cm high. From memory that was something like 10 days of continuous printing, and fortunately there was just enough filament on the 1kg reel to complete the job.
Back in the early 1980s I had a 32kB Commodore PET Computer using a 6502 microprocessor running interpreted BASIC at 1 MHz. I modified the operating system to include a driver for an ex military pen plotter with just 8 instructions (4 orthogonal steps of 0.1 mm and 4 diagonal steps of 0.141421 mm).
My fourteen year old son then proceeded to write software to draw a Mandelbrot set filling the width of the plotter’s 15″ paper roll. It took about a week.