The current thermoplastic material extrusion 3D printing method is limited to printing in planar layers. This work includes a description of the development of a system for printing on surfaces, specifically a theoretical description of point cloud approximation using B-splines, development of a scanning system and the process of adapting existing G-code to an arbitrary surface. A laser line scanner was used for the scanning process, which was mounted on a 3D printer controlled via Duet and Raspberry Pi. A custom Python package was developed to approximate the point cloud with B-splines and project the existing G-code on the scanned surface. The entire system was successfully tested.
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