So for those of you who produce 3D Printer documentation: How do you manage to remember to take pictures. It’s so hard to interrupt what I’m doing/figuring out and stop to take a picture. Hurts that all I have is a smart phone camera, but still – does anyone just, strap a gopro to their head and then run through the video and pull pictures from that? What do I need to do in order to start remembering this? I want to document a bunch of different things, but I find that it’s super difficult to get the pictures I want.
The only time I’ve done a good job of this, I was assembling a machine with the specific intent of taking a picture of every step. Every time I picked up a piece, I took a picture before and one after doing whatever I was going to do with it, as well as one posed during the process, with the tool in place (if possible). Took forever to assemble that machine, and most of the pictures didn’t get used, but at least I had all the ones I needed.
I did this with one machine that was purely for taking pictures. I didn’t even attempt to write down the steps. There was a second machine assembled for that, by someone who was using my sequence of pictures, but had no other experience assembling that machine. As difficult as it was, I didn’t touch anything and only answered questions during that assembly. Unfortunately, one person can only perform that function a few times before you need another newbie who you can rely on to ask all of the newbie questions.
Watching this one. Going to need to document the Fusebox…
I would suggest the following, from experience on computer hardware and software training manuals. Before you even pick anything up you should have a fairly good idea of the order of the steps involved, write them down and if you are using paper leave a lot of space between steps, as you do each step try to note in additional information before performing that step, during or immediately after performing the step note any changes or additional information. For pictures ideally use two cameras from different angles, but one is fine just use good lighting, and capture what it was you needed to see, at the beginning of each step in the documentation have a picture of the parts needed, and ideally a picture of the finished assembly from an angle that shows the most detail, then for each sub step capture a before and after, and pictures of anything the least bit confusing or tricky. Then put it all together and make it look pretty, picture cropping and placement make a huge difference as duo arrows and boxes to highlight what the text is talking about.
For an absolute noob document briefly describe the overall assembly, as in the order of steps, then for each step describe the assembly as an overview including any notes about tricky items, then describe the items needed for the step, and follow that with a numbered list of what to do, i.e. take the 3mm x 40mm cap head screw and screw it into the end of the 240mm long extrusion, leave 5mm of thread showing.
It will take a long time to do but if you can get in the mind space of a complete novice and focus on each of the steps and capture all the information you will have a great manual.
Sorry sent from my phone so I didn’t realise the size.
We use dozuki. Every step has a giant spot for a picture. There’s no way you could move on to the next step without adding one
I use a partner. I explain what I’m doing to them and any time they want to see what I’m talking about, they take a picture of what I’m holding.
Good planning.