Sacrifice, for science!
What do I mean by “in principle”? That seems like a strange little qualifier.
Let me explain. Because this was a prototype, we were interested to see the best practices for embedding electronic objects within a structure. In an ideal world, we would have had a robotic arm install the components into the heated print chamber to totally demonstrate the combined print and assembly process.
But we didn’t have a robotic arm handy at the time, and besides, we didn’t know if it would work…so we used the next best thing: My hands.
When embedding any hardware inside a 3D printed object, you basically have to pause the printer at a pre-defined layer, open the heated chamber door and drop the components into the cavities which were designed into the CAD model. Remember that differential cooling I mentioned? Well when you open a 160°C print chamber, that cooling becomes a lot more severe.
In practice, we had about five to ten minutes to install the hardware into the drone on the print bed before the whole thing started to cool to the point of warpage. And let me tell you, shoving your hands into a 160°C oven is no fun. And because of the fine motor skills involved, heatproof gloves were not an option.
But we sometimes suffer for our art, and after a few attempts we managed to optimize the whole process and everyone involved was very happy with the project results.
