3D printing

In September 2019 we bought a Prusa i3 MK3S 3D printer. Over several weekends, my 10-year-old son assembled most of it himself, with with my supervision. In November 2019 we got the MMU2S multi-material upgrade but didn't get around to assembling that until February 2020, again over a few weekends.

Due to space constraints on the desk where the printer sits, we did not build the filament buffer but instead built auto-rewinders dryboxes as can be seen in the picture above. The designs are on Thingiverse, also listed below.

I started out designing things in Sketchup back when the desktop application was free, then moved to Tinkercad (which my son still uses), and worked with FreeCAD for a while. I still use Tinkercad on occasion, but now I design almost everything using OpenSCAD.

OpenSCAD seems daunting at first because you design things via a programming language and a GUI viewer instead of a full GUI experience, but now I find it easier to create things in OpenSCAD than any other 3D design software. All of my Thingiverse designs come with the OpenSCAD source code for anyone to modify (except for my drill bit and King Kamehameha spear head, which come with Tinkercad models).

Articles

Thingiverse

My username on Thingiverse is Amatulic. Here are my designs that I have published:

Print-in-place folding phone/tablet stand with 2 positions

LockSpool (one part printed twice)

Odin's spear Gungnir

Deliberately unfair (and fair) d20 dice

Procedural weathered fractal terrain in OpenSCAD

Universal flashlight mount - tripod / camera hot shoe

Camera hot shoe adapter base / cover

Customizable gyro toy wrapped with engraved text

Hummingbird feeder flower replacement

Geodesic hemisphere with regular polygon equator

Perfect-fit plate stand / bowl stand

Retractable double-edge razor blade scraper

Platonic solid coin traps in OpenSCAD

Nuts&Bolt baby dexterity toy

King Kamehameha I spear head

Rubber-band powered paddle boat with Lego seat

Multi-color monogrammed Secret Butterfly Box, OpenSCAD customizable

Parametric strandbeest in OpenSCAD

Auto-rewinder stand for Rubbermaid 16 cup container

Auto-rewinder stand for Rubbermaid 21 cup container

Customizable sliding word-switcher

Buffed n Braced Einsy Door remixed for M5 T-nuts and screws

OpenSCAD Rubbermaid 21-cup container rim profile

Prusa i3 MK3S vibration absorbing Sorbothane feet

3D nozzle deburring / polishing bit

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Syncing Office 365 Outlook to Google calendar using Power Automate

Image
When my employer switched over from the Google office suite to Microsoft's Office 365, it caused unexpected disruption in my family. I had been sharing my work calendar with my wife (sharing no details, just busy times). It became an integral part of her calendar, to help her coordinate (between her job and my job) who picks up and drops off my son from school, and to let her know when I was free to take a phone call during my work day. Since the switchover to O365, my ability to share a calendar externally was eliminated. Based on documentation I could find, it should be possible, but the option doesn't appear in my employer's implementation of Outlook. I can view my personal Google calendar in my work Outlook calendar, but I can't share it the other way. Microsoft's Power Automate provides a way to solve this problem. It lets you create flows of data, triggered manually or automatically by events, to move data around, not only among the Microsoft products but
Read more

The water rocket: Thrust from water

Image
Launch tube thrust Thrust from air Once the rocket has left the launch tube, the water thrust phase of the flight begins. But before we begin those calculations, we need to have equations for ballistic flight, which is the last step described in the introduction . Why? Because during ballistic flight (coasting through the air), the only forces acting on the rocket are gravity and wind drag — but these are acting on the rocket during the thrust phase too. Ballistic flight is exactly the same, just without the thrust. Ballistic flight We need to know how gravity and drag affect acceleration, velocity, and ultimately altitude during all thrust phases as well as the ballistic trajectory afterward, so we'll start with the ballistic flight equations. Air resistance First we need to get the ambient air density. Denser air results in higher drag, and dry air is more dense than moist air. To get the density, we first need to know the partial pressure of water vapor in the air. T
Read more

New approach to screw threads in OpenSCAD

Image
This is an intellectual exercise with a practical end-result. There are better approaches to this problem, but the approach I describe here is interesting. A screw thread from a stack of discs Imagine a stack of 50 coins, stacked so that each coin is slightly offset from the one below it, with the offset moving around in a circle with each new coin. Here is what it looks like for fifty coins 20 mm in diameter and 0.5 mm thick, offset by 2 mm from a center of rotation, and stacked with a rotation offset of 30 degrees per coin ( click to enlarge any image in this article ): Obviously, this is a spiral stack of coins. But it also approximates screw threads. The thread profile looks like a sinewave rather than the trapezoidal profile of machine screw threads. Indeed, others have observed this, and used the freeware parametric CAD program OpenSCAD to make screw threads by extruding an offset circle while twisting it, as in this model on Thingiverse , for example. From a distan
Read more